Social Media is a vehicle for mass misinformation and mayhem around the world. It's not unlike guns. Of course guns don't kill people, people kill people...but when you give those people access to advanced weaponry and ammunition, they can kill a whole lot of people very quickly. Therefore, we need to regulate guns to lessen the danger to society. Hence why you can't walk into a gun shop and buy a howitzer, or an RPG. Similarly social media weaponizes rumors, and provides a platform for deceit, lies, and hatred to flourish. I know my friends in tech never intended any of this...but like Alfred Nobel, their grand invention is not saving humanity...it's harming humanity. It past time for all of us to pull the plug, and I don't agree that it's impossible to just walk away and put that proverbial cat back into the bag.
2
"Let’s be clear, the hateful killer is to blame, but it is hard to deny that his crime was facilitated by tech."
By "tech" the writer means what? The means of the 21st century printing press or its unabridged content--beyond the stomping of government control? Or simply the magazine rack in the library?
And her "Namely", i.e., "social media has blown the lids off controls that have kept society in check" seems to be a longing for more of New York City's Sovietized American mass-media control, but over the citizens of nations and their freedom to access information as they choose.
Perhaps the writer might be happier in China. Seems so.
2
We were in New Zealand during the shootings, in Christchurch next day. The live video remained on FaceBook, despite frantic calls from individuals, until New Zealand police demanded removal after an hour. Algorithms were activated to detect and delete the video, but endless copies were altered so Facebook’s AI could not recognize the continued worldwide circulation. NZ press reported 80% were removed in 24 hours; that meant copies were still being resent and cheered by a few hundred hate-mongers around the world. Within a week New Zealand outlawed possession of the murderous videos.
Either Facebook is incompetent to remove, duplicitous to maintain, or overwhelmed by uncontrollable technology; Facebook never answered. Kevin Chen, writer for NYT, quit FaceBook months ago. He describe Facebook as not only the “post office” to deliver, but the “publisher” which lays out and sustains all postings. He uses other apps to communicate with friends. (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/technology/personaltech/facebook-deleted.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share)
A panel discussion on Radio New Zealand one week later mentioned the concept of “dump Facebook for Christchurch.”
Haven’t we all felt torn over our Facebook subscription, e.g. privacy, business model, etc? Yet how do I follow old acquaintances? If you are a friend, you know how to reach me via email.
Now is the time to tell Facebook their model allows hate for profit. I will delete my account.
#DumpFacebookforChristchurch
2
Ban FB! Read the NYT. Ban The National Enquirer! Ban talk radio! Read the NYT!
2
So the author wants the terrorists to win?
What did you expect from something tHought up by sophmores in their dorm rooms. For them it was “ look mom, no hands” without any thought of what the consequences might be. Add to that the enormous sums of money made in a blink of an eye, and why would they care. They have their gated communities and guards and we are left to pick up the pieces.
2
One question Ms. Swisher.
When were you calling for the shut down of social media after it was exposed that Russians Intel ops influenced the 2016 elections?
2
I think the solution is to get rid of anonymity. Make people responsible for their posts. Everybody's email address must be verifiable and transparent tied to an actual human. People say and do terrible things if they think they can get away with it.
5
Dare I say—if someone else hasn’t already—that social media is merely the lens that has brought into focus the real, longstanding problems: religious intolerance and extreme perspectives.
3
"In short: Stop the Facebook/YouTube/Twitter world — we want to get off.
Obviously, that is an impossible request. . ."
Actually Ms Swisher, no it is not an impossible request. It is actually a very reasonable personal choice. You are only imprisoned because you choose to be, the door has always been there. You are like the people in Socrates Cave, watching shadows on the wall. The real world is out there - stand up, turn around, walk out.
I have never signed up for Facebook and I never will. It's a mirror of humanity, and the reflection is hideous.
3
Much as I hate to say it, I believe that getting rid of the anonymity of the web is the major solution.
2
I guess my comment will display the height of ignorance, but I don't understand how these "platforms" work. Why can't we just pass laws to ban social media sites all together?
OK, yeah, yeah - "freedom of speech!" they cry. These same people can still express themselves, but in traditional ways.
What's wrong with email? The telephone? Actual physical letters? (Do you realize kids in school don't know how to write script, they can only print?)
As to the news, what's wrong with watching or reading the news put out by legitimate sources? There's plenty of them, and it's easy enough to find one that leans in your direction.
Anyone who gets their "news" from a person who screams out conspiracy theories and lies is a fool. It shouldn't be happening at all.
1
The most telling comment I read about social media is that, for the first time in human history, a crowd can form with no purpose.
Most importantly, we must remind ourselves that history is not over.
1
We can stop this. A good step would be to use the power of the marketplace to promote good behavior by holding social media companies financially and criminally liable for the mass murder, or any murder, they facilitate. They're currently shielded from that by law -- thanks, Congress! -- while getting to keep all the profits generated by the hatred they so helpfully spread. And in the case of Facebook, the lion's share of that income goes to a single individual person who owns most of the stock. He may very well be a nice person to have a beer with, but we need to tell him no, for a change.
2
I remember being told that the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech did not mean you could cry "fire" in a crowded movie theater. Facebook, YouTube, etc. have only existed a short time. Free speech and access to family, etc. did pretty well before. Remember the telephone and letters? Restricting these new communication tools so that that they can't be used to shout far worse than "fire" in a crowded theater is only following First Amendment limits. These tools were developed by private individuals and sprung on us. We shouldn't be mindlesly accepting them around the world.
2
We've already set controls in this country on the internet by amending the Decency In Communications Act, which, previously, allowed no criminal prosecution or civil action against internet companies posting third-party content. Thanks to the 2018 amendment, sex workers can't advertise online anymore because we've made an exception to an unfettered internet, and only when sex is involved.
Banning online prostitution ads on specious grounds is bad enough, but what's coming next--a broad crackdown on free speech--will be worse. If you don't like what's on Facebook or Twitter or whatever, then don't look at it. But don't violate my right to look at and read whatever I want because the government needs to protect me.
It's a scary thing when technology controls us instead of the other way around, and it's not technology's fault. The internet exposes cracks in society that society can fix. Don't blame the messenger.
2
It is important to remember that the printing press is one of the most deadly inventions ever, because it allowed the rapid creation of books and pamphlets for different religious groups. As a result, people stopped all reading the same core literature. It is thought that this led to the religious wars in Germany that killed 1/3 of the entire population.
The internet is just a faster, more micro-targeted version of the printing press. We learned to handle books, we will learn to handle this. Unfortunately, if history is a guide, many millions will pay for that education with their lives.
8
We could probably follow a similar path for books too - maybe burn them in a public square when they start to upset our commonly-held elite-defined sensibilities.
There is no such thing as 'good' censorship and social media does not plant bombs nor does it slaughter a million people in Rwanda - miraculously absent any social media
2
It's a truth that the power of the Word can manifest as good or evil and appears to even trump nuclear power in possibility. Once again (like nuclear power) just because something can be created and monetized it doesn't mean humanity has the ethical and moral maturity to handle it. It only takes a handful of bad actors to prove this. We're an evolving species and the technology (and its uses) we've created far exceeds our ability to use it constructively.
Like nuclear power we can't put the genie back into the bottle. If we don't evolve morally and ethically to handle it, it may well destroy us. We have a choice individually to change our course; let's take it.
@james33: We are all addicted to positive feedback.
Allowing Trump to use his private cell phone and twitter account as President of the United States has contributed greatly to havoc currently being wrought on the United States and the world. The instant DJT took the oath of office he became a public servant and yet he's been allowed to continue to operate on social media as if he is a private citizen -- a private citizen who revels in using social media for malevolent ends. Why didn't our security agencies impose sensible restrictions that would be appropriate for anyone ascending to the most powerful position on the planet, starting on January 20, 2017?
4
Why not charge people for the privilege of posting on popular social media sites? Or if the social media companies won't impose such an entry fee, why not a government tax? It's amazing how a very small amount of money (literally cents) causes a lot of people to forego doing something (I think this goes back to Apple introducing iTunes music and iPhone apps at prices that were much lower than what people previously expected to pay for such things - as an app developer, I'm amazed at how big an obstacle it is for people to pay even just $1.99 or $0.99 for an app - if the app is free, hundreds of times more people will download it.) A small fee would keep a lot (but admittedly not all) of the riffraff and trolls off the sites. The internet should be free, they say. But nothing in life is free. There's always a cost. And right now all of us are paying that cost in a very negative way.
5
The only social media I participate in at all is infrequently commenting and reading comments here on NYT. And I read the web versions of standard newspapers instead of using the paper to have printed versions. From what I read here, and people I talk with face to face, generally social media has made the quality of their lives worse, not better. What I can't understand is why they subject themselves to it. We'd be a lot better off if we just restricted our social media use to an hour a week to catch up with loved ones, and shut it down the rest of the time.
4
@mouseone: Unlike speech, a medium like this gives readers time to reflect on what others have written before responding to it. I think this is under-appreciated by critics of the medium.
The matter is very serious but uncontrollable from a regulation stance - we have to admit that. The web is such that, *absent almost total censorship and banning of the platforms*, which would be the only effective regulation, and another platform will rise, and clever spelling will dodge the centers. I don't really get holding the tech world at fault, though I get that their greed in the face of this is sickening. They can't control it, and I don't think they were reckless --
and anyone who thought about it could foresee this happening. We have plenty of examples of human nature. It alarms me that pro-censorship people seem to have no idea where to draw lines here or, worse, think they are easily drawn.
Politics has been weaponized? Really? Things are more visible, and to some extent more random, but we have seen *way* worse in terms of violence, or at the very least equal. Look up the 1863 Draft Riots (newspapers/telegraph driven). The thrall of social media pathology of our society that seems to need to work itself out--the next generation may well get sick /bored of the current form--I left a while ago. The MSMs coverage of this stuff makes them just as at fault--they choose it. Terrorism in part courts media coverage, but that was true before the internet. There is a problem, no doubt, maybe even one calling for desperate measures, but throwing free speech out so confidently is *very* alarming. There is nothing effective that wouldn't eviscerate our rights.
1
Ms. Swisher, my first thought was also "good." Social media has become a cancer that invades privacy, traffics in people's lives, and allows those who understand its dynamics to influence elections. Trump uses Twitter to communicate with his supporters, fire staff and make policy pronouncements. That alone is an indictment.
4
Viewing the TED talk by the Guardian writer, Carole Cadwalladr, and of course, all the other media reporting, there is no doubt in my mind that social media are responsible for 2 of the great calamaities of the 21st century, Brexit (a calamity for Europe), Trump (a calamity for the entire planet).
Note, both calamities and the backlash against Facebook, in particular, could have been somewhat neutralized if FB had identified the people involved, the source of their funding, the amount of money involved. Even after 3 years of vigorous reporting, investigations in London, in DC, by the EU...we're still largely in the dark. We're making modest progress with Dark Energy but Dark Money very little. WH: release the Trump tax returns!
Another intervention not requiring any censorship: no relevant political postings 1 month prior to elections, referendums! In many well established democracies there is a ban on polls for some days before an election, there is an embargo on exit polls. A time embargo would give Social Media time to correct algorithms which they often use a pretect for failure to block toxic material.
6
@Branagh See, I do not see Trump as such a calamity. So there you have it. You go on this site blaming social media for whatever does not go your way. You act as if your opinion is the only one that matters. You are so certain that you are right. You are exactly the problem that you decry. Is it possible to have an opinion without casting broad netted aspersions on others? Trump is flawed for sure, but there is much he has done that I agree with. Obama was flawed but there was much he did that I agreed with as well... and this goes all the way back. So please do not blame social media for your own presumptuous opinions.
2
You're ignoring the fact that blocking social media was part of a larger response by the Sri Lankan government to the terrorist attacks: that of declaring an emergency and suspending all rights. That is not "good".
As a former GOP operative asked recently, "Is social media the worst thing that has happened in the 21st Century or the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity in all of history?"
Good question. Time to debate this and regulate.
225
@lapis Ex
Substituting "the modern Republican Party" for "social media" in that sentence also makes for an interesting question.
33
@lapis Ex A perfect example of how social media has debased discourse in this country (and the world, I guess) is twitter. I cannot understand why anyone would want to blurt out unformed thoughts about serious things "in the moment." What happened to reflection and thoughtful writing - not to mention good grammar and spelling? How has it become possible that principle method of communication between our government and us, the taxpayers, is a tweet?
19
It is time to close Facebook and YouTube and let people communicate with the original killer app: email. People can form groups of their friends and relatives and communicate privately with photos and videos attached.
128
While not on any social media, i still like YouTube for its how-to/MacGyver type videos, which often are creative and low budget, which is usually what i need.
7
"People can form groups of their friends and relatives and communicate privately with photos and videos attached" is EXACTLY how WhatsApp works, which has been linked to the spread of misinformation and hate in India. E-mail is not going to be the magical savior of our dilemma.
5
No you cant shut it off. If it was not for the pictures of beheadings ISIS performed on the web I would not have been able to generate my absolute revulsion into a sustained hatred enabling their demise.
1
I’d gladly trade my right to comment here for no comments and no social media. The world was better without the online hatred, false conspiracies, ignorance, poor spelling and grammar that we got in return for doctored videos and digital narcissism.
158
I want to agree but I pause. I've seen the dirty side of social media, been victimized by it, victimized a few myself most likely. Then CHOSE to leave it and reclaim my life and health. But learned much from the experience. I think it'll take time but we'll sort it out. In the meantime, when humanity engages with new ideas and different things, bad things happen. Giving away my right to comment here in a moderated environment to be rid of social media is a non-starter for me. And I suppose switching everything off because it's growing pains seem overly exaggerated isn't really what we need at this point either. Nor is it realistic.
6
@Mike S. I agree that the poor spelling and grammar is a huge problem. The current generation is not going to be able to communicate without emojis. Tragic. And that is not sarcasm.
4
Social media are where mobs form and incitement is facilitated.
3
Thank you for important reading about a real problem... believe me I know... I have personal experience with an otherwise fairly normal and reasonably intelligent person who now firmly believes the world is flat, the Holocaust never happened, 9/11 and the moon landing were elaborate hoaxes, and Sandy Hook, Boston Marathon bombing, the Pulse carnage, and the recent California fires, among many other recent horrific tragedies, were elaborate fictions, created by crisis actors... all of it coming out of the cesspool of internet craziness and misinformation. This is a truly real and very serious problem, and I don't have a clue how to begin, even remotely, to solve it.
1
Uh, speaking of disinformation... How come on the pictures from Sri-Lanka bombing aftermath there isn't any smoke, charred debris visible? Everything is uniformly disassembled... Just saying. I am talking of official coverage here.
And television is the grand-daddy of them all. Politics should be banned from television...because what you get is a porn star president and the dumbing down of citizens...into emotional crazies rather than thoughtful voters. all the campaign money raised goes to television networks...and all they do is repeat the lies and distortion...they gave us this unholy mess we're in right now by focusing on outrageousness rather than on what is true and good. social media is a child of television...where often the lowest common denominator prevails...and it is making us all sick.
4
"humanity can be deeply inhumane." Who knew! Now...where's the off switch for religion?
2
Hubristic Techy “You can’t shut it off, it’s too late.”
But Sri Lanka and China just did, Thailand and others can.
2
Please, liberals; stop sharing your deepest desires to censor out stupidity and evil from the civic body. You don't get to define it, and censorship doesn't work as stupid will always find a way.
1
It is not too late to control or if that fails shut down Facebook, Reddit, Youtube, etc. First they need to be redefined as content creators, not mere conduits. Then the fines for publishing fake news, hate speech, etc. needs to be high enough to make them curate their content. $1,000,000,000 per offense might do the trick. This is not a violation of the First Amendment. I refer to Justice Holmes statement regarding crying fire in a crowded theater not being protected speech. Social media is today's theater.
3
rampant hatred and lies on social media platforms have become yet another example of deregulation, small ineffective government and all the supposed joys they were supposed to deliver. That is total bunk brought to us by Republicans, reactionary billionaires and their stooges. Inaction by the Federal government, the inability of congress to compromise on the most common-sense solutions will continue to create odious irruptions of unintended consequences on a global scale.
2
I like the idea of a delay....radio (remember that) always had a seven-second delay before what was spouted in the studio was broadcast throughout the land. Build in the delay, and when there is an emergency, unlock it. Not magic, not Pandora’s box, it’s all just computers for heaven’s sake! What is opened can be closed....look how many times the whole thing fails as it is.
3
The key thing about the hate online is the anonymity factor. Let's face it, it's easier to throw up onto your keyboard than to face a person and espouse the same vitriol. Another facet is the inability to actually face people at all. I spoke with the owner of an air bnb recently and she said this - when people rent the room in her house, they briefly acknowledge her and immediately ask for the password to the WiFi. That's it. The online existence is the only one that seems to matter.
1
When I use the internet to do my banking, the bank determines that I am, identifiably, the client and the individual I claim to be, or my instructions are followed. Dumb questions here, perhaps, from a non-techie but why can't social media platforms do the same prior to publishing? Is anonymity truly crucial to communication? Is it really necessary, technically, to conjoin them?
My first thought was ‘good,’ as well. My second thought was: what if the bad guy is an authoritarian government? Do we want social media that can be shut down in the event of a crack down? And yes, the me of four years ago views my comment as being paranoid.
1
"This is the ugly conundrum of the digital age: When you traffic in outrage, you get death."
"Good, because it could save lives. Good, because the companies that run these platforms seem incapable of controlling the powerful global tools they have built. Good, because the toxic digital waste of misinformation that floods these platforms has overwhelmed what was once so very good about them
I'd like to know Ms. Collin's thought on President Trump's
tweeting a "toxic digital waste of misinformation " , and
his having trafficked in outrage having resulted in death,
such as in the case of the slayings of innocent Synagogue worshippers ,by a Trump devotee.
Is there another human being whose social media use poses
as grave danger to the world as does that of Donald Trump?!
In the United States, we get really picky about our freedom of speech.
I think that one day no American will ever legally be banned by a social media company from their system because the Bill of Rights comes before ANYthing else.
We already have the President forbidden from blocking Americans. The Congress will surely follow, and the Facebooks, etc. will have to just give up on policing anything said by an American.
The solution to bad speech is ALWAYS more speech.
You say Americans are too stupid to know when they are lied to? That they can be talked into doing bad things? We have a legal system to deal with that.
We ONCE had schools that would have all but stopped that kind of thing.
1
@The Observer: Americans still don't get that the Constitution as amended delimits the universe of government and restricts the exercises of powers delegated to it by the people, but does not delimit or describe any power reserved by or newly invented by the people.
"Social media" long ago became as epic an oxymoron as "military intelligence."
1
Seems our Sovietized web crew missed this. Once again:
"Let’s be clear, the hateful killer is to blame, but it is hard to deny that his crime was facilitated by tech."
By "tech" the writer means what? The means of the 21st century printing press or its unabridged content--beyond the stomping of government control? Or simply the magazine rack in the library?
And her "Namely", i.e., "social media has blown the lids off controls that have kept society in check" seems to be a longing for more of New York City's Sovietized American mass-media control, but over the citizens of nations and their freedom to access information as they choose.
Perhaps the writer might be happier in China. Seems so.
@Alice's Restaurant: Tech made it possible for the whole world to be present at the crime scene.
"Stop the Facebook/YouTube/Twitter world — we want to get off."
It's amazing. You talk as if it is tough, actually a hard thing to do - Get off that is.
Ridiculous. Better yet -don't even begin. "We can't stop it" "This is how people connect with their loved ones". Once again -ridiculous. How did people do it for a century before ? Easily.
We created a monster we don't know how to control.
"Social Media" as it is so erroneously named has become the biggest, best way to destroy, not just democracy, but civilization. It allows every coward born to scream his or her vile thoughts with absolutely no personal effect.
When humans had to face each other to share a thought, she/he also faced being labeled a liar, presented immediately with facts, seen as crazy and maybe even shunned. The risked of being totally ostracized from society was the rein on the extreme.
Face to face communication and cooperation MADE US HUMAN.
1
I think this is an extreme move. You should just try not using 4 letter words against 17 year old boys. Maybe if you could control yourself, you wouldn't suggest radical cures for "us".
The government better get involved, and fast, hah, because the election is coming up again, and very soon!
Kara Swisher is right. I wish she weren’t. We’ve long recognized that complete freedom in real life equals anarchy. The same holds true on the internet.
1
Requiring proof of identification might be one way. Free anonymity certainly contributes to the problem. If every message could be traced to the real, live individual sending it — the alternative in its absence being denial of service — that would have to tamp down a major portion of the toxicity. By forcing individuals to take responsibility for what they send, the yield would be more responsible use of these platforms. Sure, it doesn’t solve every problem and has the capacity to reduce the free exchange of ideas where such ideas challenge the powerful and their status-quo. But policies always require a balancing of interests. There are less ubiquitous and less efficient platforms that would still be open to anonymous use — print, for one. Bit it’s not hard to argue that the Internet isn’t a uniquely powerful and dangerous medium that needs to have some effective measure of personal responsibility attached to it.
2
Social media is not necessary. Were it to be shut down, the hole left behind would be filled within days. Newspapers (including their websites) and phones still work, thank goodness. Therefore, the net score of social media is negative. But, since its existence is real, how to tweak it to reduce the negative and accentuate the positive? Well, one thought, probably not realistic, but perhaps effective, would be to implement a delay. Put a 24-hour delay to any posts. All the time, not just during crises. Our freedom of expression is not curtailed, only our ability to broadcast our every thought instantaneously to the entire world. Which, if one thinks about it, was probably never a good idea in the first place.
3
Does anyone see the parallels with the movie The Forbidden Planet? The Krell civilization was destroyed by a computer system which magnified a person’s ID and evil thoughts were enhanced. Twitter and Facebook have built a similar magnifier of evil which is also out of control.
1
I was already working in tech when the Internet started to grow into the force that it is today. I could only see the upsides of living in a world where we would all be free to share and grow via this magic new medium.
Of course that is not how it is turning out and I would be in favor of a severely restricted Internet and the elimination of most "social" media. If we don't do that I believe that civilization as we know it is doomed.
5
It is time to regulate public accounts. To have a public account, you must meet certain governments requirements, get a license, and have certain liabilities also. Public accounts are media outlets, and there are regulations for media outlets. Public accounts are worse than a newspaper. In the old days, with the once a day newspaper, people had time to assimilate the news, discuss them face to face with other human beings with a different perspective, reason, and then act. Internet speed can elevate the passions very quickly in a echo chamber and make some people react before thinking. The Russians know all about it and have exploited this. There are rules about foreign ownership of media outlets for a reason. On the other hand, private accounts are not so bad and hey are useful to keep family and friends in touch.
1
Social media has not become weaponized by sloppy design, it has become weaponized by deliberate intent. Social media should be limited to people you actually know and organizations that are well identified and accountable. However, that doesn't play into the social media profit plan. Without stringent regulation, we'll just get whatever the Zuckerbergs of this world can make a buck off.
2
First thought: this is terrible. Censorship!
Second thought: anyone with access to social media can probably make phone calls, send text messages or email. Not too bad.
We need social media users to be more skeptical about what they read. We aren’t there yet.
3
It's been clear for a few millennia of war, violence, abuse, and general carnage that the human experiment has failed. The unprecedented expansion of communication through the Internet is only a dramatic example revealing a range of human folly we're no longer able to ignore.
2
I agree. Social media inflame, and are subject to manipulation. And they have no bottom line other than enrichment of their stockholders.
5
People stand atop boxes and other makeshift stages to peddle hate. Such PEOPLE need to be dealt with. What's the sense in burning down the box or stage? They'll find another platform to scream off of.
Might be better if saner voices co-opt the same stage for the purpose of good.
The crusades happened before social media - inflammatory religious discourse. Witch trials happened before social media - fake news. Obviously the medium is not the problem, the message is.
It has now been years since I deleted my FB and Twitter accounts. I don't use Instagram. I have a wide range of friends, all of whom I message, email and phone. I'm especially fond of video chat. Imagine the real social skills you might develop looking at and talking to someone!
The social media outlets are an icon of the past for me. I feel lucky.
There is so much more to life than living it online.
7
This is pure anarchy - how social media has irresponsibly helped spread hate around the globe ; and given a clear voice to some of the worst elements of humanity - the extremists and the nihilists who wish to destroy the fabric of decent society.
They have been succeeding as the rest of us quietly kept looking.
Much more stricter control and much more rigorous guidelines are what we desperately need.
4
@Matt
Do you realize how short a distance it is from racists calling for people to murder to the Washington Post or this news outlet publishing over five thousand articles over two years containing what the paper knew were lies about the President?
Your system would forbid that, too - right?
Why not shut it down permanently and see what happens? If Sri Lanka begins and continues to contrast the violence—and the propaganda that inspires it—now plaguing other countries (all countries actually, if it can happen in New Zealand), the contrast will not be ignored, despite the vast greed of Silicon Valley. Maybe Sheryl Sandberg will even reëmerge from the shadows to claim her Nobel prize.
3
People have always spread foolish misinformation, gleefully embroidered on scandal, and engaged in whispered hate-mongering. In the past this was called “gossip”; it was mostly transmitted from one person to another via conversation, letter, or phone calls. Now gossip has been unchained, given global reach, and renamed “social media.” Why should we then be surprised by the results?
4
Here's a radical idea: Require a 24-hour delay before anything posted becomes available for viewing. That would give individuals a chance to cool off and maybe change their minds about what they said, and it would give FB etc. enough time to squish the worst of them before people have the chance to repost them.
3
Cold comfort indeed, to hear that it is too late. Whether one uses the platforms or not, there is no protection from the lunatic actions of those spurred on by what amounts to millions of anonymous voices yelling, “Fire”, at once. Who needs a Nuremberg rally now that the megaphone has been handed to any hate filled sociopath with an axe to grind.
3
The employees at these companies are ill equipped to police their weapons of mass destruction. They live in a bubble, and have no sense if the real world. Just visit San Francisco and you’ll see just how clueless big tech is, in even handling major issues in their own cities. These people live cut off from the rest of the world. They order Postmates, take Ubers, and congregate on the weekends only hanging out with each other which just further perpetuates the problem.
5
Did the unnamed tech exec’s quote continue, I wonder, with. “You can’t shut it off. It’s too late...and I’m making entirely too much money off it.”?
6
The running assumption among most commenters is that Facebook, Twitter is the source of all the harms in the world. I am not sure and I have not seen the evidence. Sure, these platforms get a lot of visibility, but it also is 'fake news' to attribute to them all we dislike in the world. Right now these platforms are blamed for Trump, the attacks on Moslems in New Zealand, and the attacks by Moslems in Sri Lanka. The attackers all used the telephone and cars, should they be held responsible?
2
Social media sickens and terrifies me; I want nothing to do with it. If everyone got off all of these platforms the world would be safer and saner and Trump would be talking to himself-I pray for the day.
3
Governments must regulate corporations or they cease to be governments. In every area of our lives accountable government was put in place to protect us from unbounded capitalism, crime, and corruption. If not government who? This half century experiment in dismantling, privatizing (= corruption), and abandoning what government is for is a disaster.
4
"humanity can be deeply inhumane"
Correction: Bullies can be deeply inhumane.
We live in a culture where bullying behavior is normalized by enablers. If we didn't have enablers, we wouldn't have bullies. Many females, in particular, are complicit in normalizing male bullies. Remember Greg Gianforte? Who joked about assaulting journalists, then assaulted a journalist and then lied about it to police and was elected to Congress the next day? I remember during a press conference in which he--finally--apologized, a woman in the audience yelled out "We forgive you!" Yes, compassion is a virtue. But you can have compassion for bullies and still have boundaries--like not electing them to political office.
As a person who works in the technology sector, I had the exact same thought: good!
Sir Lanka ought to freeze social media apps until the government institutes laws to govern what is acceptable, forcing companies to adapt to laws rather then society pay a price and have the same tired public relations speech from Facebook, et al : “we bring families together.”
Tech companies have perpetrated a fraud, something which a lot of folks working in technology are aware of.
105
@They
Someone is wrong on the internet! Let's ban his speech. This column is a dictator's dream. I wonder how the Times would react to calls for its regulation by the federal government as a utility. "Oh no, not us!" they would squeal. "We're protected by the First Amendment! It's those OTHER guys who must be regulated!"
What is it about the words, "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech" that Swisher and the other statist censors don't understand?
4
@Ed It is not the freedom of speech that needs to be abridged but a system that allows speech to be distorted, falsified, and used in ways that in the end endanger the very freedom that free speech was intended to protect. As with the 2nd amendment, we must recognize that we no longer live in the 18th century.
17
@Regulareater
So you would only prohibit those words that offend you personally. Satire "distorts" speech. We had better censor it. Some people say "false" things intentionally or accidentally. We had better silence them. Some people are "endangered" by words, so we must give the government the power to censor or jail them, on a whim, because this is the 21st century, not the 18th.
We humans have the same rights now as we did when we finally came down from the trees and starting walking upright. We haven't lost our right to speak just because we ride in cars and airplanes instead of on horses, or speak on Facebook instead of tapping a telegraph key.
Face it: you're offended by people who disagree with you and your opinions, and you want the power of the government to squash your ideological enemies. And, of course, you're using that old standby -- "the public good" -- to abrogate individual rights.
2
People have been using telephones to make death threats, spread false information and extort money for a hundred years. Every day I get three or four robo calls attempting to scam me. Does that mean we should shut down the telephone system? . . . It seems to me the horror and panic expressed by print journalists at the new social media environment is not so much at the content--which is the usual mayhem of human conflict & disasters the press has always covered--but the fact that they have lost their monopoly of control over information. They are no longer the gatekeepers. No wonder they oppose the democratization of the media. It's openness has destroyed their power.
1
The basic problem with social media companies is that they have mostly failed or refused to accept responsibility for their content, although they gladly accept the advertising revenue that comes from the audience they attract with that content. Their practice of trying to police content mostly after it is published is a bizarre inversion of traditional media practice, which vets content before it can enter public discourse and cause damage. Further, those producing most content in traditional media are trained professionals, dedicated to truth. The fact that a significant amount of social media content is provided by amateurs and/or those with malevolent motives creates an even greater need for vetting and editing prior to publication.
5
In America the trained professional journalists are dedicated not to the truth, but to giving the pro corporate, pro imperialist views that echo those of the powerful super wealthy individuals like Murdoch and Company who employ them . . . . It is the amateurs who, far from being malevolent, are are our only hope, against the crushing global media monopoly where just six giant companies control access to information for most of the world's inhabitants. What they really fear is that social media is making Socialism possible again.
2
I don't think platforms like Whatsapp, Line, Viber, or Skype etc which are primarily for point to point communication between actual people can be put in the same category as broadcast applications like youtube, twitter or social networks like facebook. I could do without the latter in my life, and in fact I don't ever use Facebook, but I would find life a lot harder without the former, since I use them extensively for daily communications with my family and friends.
1
The reason companies like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc. so often fail to remove, moderate or block offensive material is that they simply have not invested the resources necessary, ie, hired and trained enough people, to get the job done. Why not? Because, the single biggest reason they are so profitable and/or highly valued money-wise is they automated way more of what they do than the public have realized, as that has been way cheaper than paying actual people to point their eyeballs and analytical judgment at the platforms' content in the way these companies pretend happens That approach was all fine and dandy, especially for the founders and investors, until smooth sailing turned into rough waters and they found they had designed an unsteerable ship. It's not just a question of tech, but a question of irresponsible greed in the pursuit of money. All that PR spin about Utopian network connection worldwide is just a mask that is now falling away fast and hard.
6
This was a failure in policing and applying intelligence.
Intelligence that the Sri Lankans already had.
Intelligence that was probably in part gathered because of social media monitoring.
I think social media has done amazing things for the planet....and it has brought to the surface our worst instincts.
GOOD (or could have been)
I, for one, do not believe the Iraq war would have happened if there was social media. While it was not brought up in America before the invasion, people around me outside the US were saying: "How come the Americans can't see Saddam is more afraid of Iran than them. That is why, even if he doesn't have WMD's, he is not going to say it." Turned out to be the case. Yet the American MSM ...WOULD NOT HEAR IT.
GOOD
Arab Spring
BAD
Sectarian violence - based on religious or race or whatever
Yes, the murderers in Sri Lanka probably used it to organise.
But, they could have done that beforehand anyway.
There was terrorism before Facebook.
America just has to take responsibility for the wars it has started with no merit. And the consequences of that.
2
I’m off Facebook, and sold my FB shares. Neither move is going to impact the company, but I feel better for acting.
We would not allow newspapers and magazines to print some of the schlock now online. We would not allow television to broadcast it, either. So why do we allow it online?
Online platforms need to be regulated. Even techies know it, though they will keep raking in the profits as long as they can.
I believe in free speech as a bedrock of democracy. But one is not allowed to yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater solely in exercising speech. It must be done responsibly.
11
Neither Facebook or guns kill people and both are too late to be controlled. So, if the government thinks they are the same, they will face the same fate, meaning (at least) mandatory official registrations and background checks to get Facebook accounts.
2
I wrote a comment here earlier saying I'd left Facebook following the Cambridge Analytica scandal but returned after I retired in order to stay in contact with people. However, there are times I feel that some people have crossed the fine line between reality and non-reality, and I find myself reacting negatively--hey, that on-line game is only a game, not the real world! But I can't be the sanity police, so it's better for me to back off and chill out.
3
I've just sold my shares in FOX/News Corp FAKE NEWS network which I'd held for over 20 years.
So I'd followed some history of Rupert Murdoch's rise from avid follower of his famous father's reporting of breaking (if slightly faking) news from Gallipoli in WWI - and later use of fake news to attract readers to his Adelaide newspapers.
Rupert learned well that 'if it bleeds it leads' - as we are hard-wired to respond instantly to threat - amygdala/adrenalin response (but you don't want the long term cortisol toxic stress damage).
So the moneymakers of the internet feed and lead us to every latest SHOCK ! HORROR ! event around the world - and their advertisers.
Multinational corporations continue to show that money overwhelms ethics.
'Money-makers are tiresome company, as they have no standard but cash value.' - Plato, The Republic, around 380BC
I'm in agreeance with those now calling for regulation. Private companies' profit-first conflict of interest prevents them from taking effective action to stop bad things from happening. Then the public asks governments to step in. Time for that to happen.
3
My heartfelt sympathies to the families of those, who lost their lives in the terrorist attacks. Misinformation leads to mob lynching. Sri Lankan Government was correct in blocking the social networks. It was careful in immediately not naming the terrorist organisation even. If it were to jump, communal riots would have certainly taken place and more lives would have been lost. The government should be applauded in this regard.
4
If this kind of incendiary and violent content were to be posted on billboards along the highway, that company will be out of business and in courts in no time. Unless the internet hosting companies are made accountable for the content hosted on their platform, this insidious problem is only going to get worse.
10
A clear distinction can and should be made among various social media platforms. All of them offer different levels of privacy, access, and dissemination. To conflate them is to do yourself, and all of us, a disservice. This is how we end up electing lawmakers who can't tell the simple difference between what FB does vs. what Google search results generate (e.g. Steve King). The gap between the average age of an active social media user and the average age of a federal policymaker is stunning. As a result, we are so behind on establishing *smart,* not reactive, regulations on these platforms.
Social media is not the root cause of many issues. These platforms do/did not cause the hatred and anger –often ignited by different past administrations and governments – that are now reverberating worldwide. The platforms may amplify, but they can also help during times of crisis. Examples: FB provides users a tool to notify connected parties that they are safe during a natural or manmade disaster. Twitter can give real-time details for those who tune in, rather than what is cranked through sensation-for-dollar outlets like CNN.
Blame is easy to spread among those who don't know how to harness, much less use, the platforms. This binary worldview shuts down the potential of fundamentally neutral tools. It can render us ignorant and unready when real challenges come up (i.e. Russian tampering of our election), create an environment open to authoritarianism, or all of the above.
2
I have been a long time reader (in print , paid in cash - yes truly, we do still live), and on line for years. I resisted cell phones for years, fearing the human disconnection of real contacts. I did give in for safety and family contact reasons.
Facebook, Twitter, and any other social media outlets I have eschewed, and feel no less outside nor out of date. I am connected to those I love and to significant events, without spreading terrific, inflammatory information.
I pain for those in pain.
4
Kara Swisher, you seem to be suggesting that in practice if not motives Facebook is different but no better than your generic totalitarian regime. I agree!
I wish your good piece would not have ended with the tech exec. I think FB and others who put out "news" should be understood in law and publishers with all the responsibility and liability that implies.
I think FB, which in my book is evil, and Google, in my book yjr good gals and guys. do not belong in the news business in any way shape or form.
What can a person do without social media? SMS and email work for me. Attack my community and messages go out to the real news publishers like my local paper, the NYTimes, WSJ and others.
Here in the US I enjoy free speech that that does not mean I should be accorded mass access without a gate keeper.
2
I agree with this column wholeheartedly.
I spend only a little time on social media to post pictures and keep up with family and friends. But whenever I post an article from the NYT or by a progressive outlet, I see 10 x more of these sorts of articles in my news feed - usually before I see anything else. So, I guess that people who say follow Fox News or Rush Limbaugh are only seeing that type of information in their Facebook feed. The quality of information from these sources is questionable and could lead to places with even worse standards.
I can only surmise what happens when people join groups that traffic in hatred or conspiracy theories - they would join the cesspool of humanity. And this sort of content gets amplified because of the prurient nature of human beings and the assumed anonymity.
I have debated deleting my Facebook account. If I leave (or a million like me) it won't make one whit of difference in the grand scheme of things.
I think what is actually needed are very strict regulations like they are imposing in Europe, much tougher privacy laws across all social media platforms, and very, VERY large fines when there are lapses. We need accountability with a stick at this point.
5
You’re right. The government wanted to avoid violence and save lives. They did the right thing. If only our lawmakers had the guts to do the same.
7
Past time to hold these vehicles of hate responsible. But since that won't happen, let's hope some sanity can be reintroduced to humanity by those who aren't fixated on their FB feed.
1
The media controls everything. That is the danger
1
I have a better idea. Hold the readers responsible for exercising reason and their own actions rather than attempting to impose your biased standards of "extremism" on posters. One person's extremist may be another person's truth teller.
3
Say what? Something is either true or false, it is not open to interpretation. There is no such thing as alternative facts .
2
@Patrick
One person's Obama might be another person's bin Laden. C'est la vie.
When the US still had its act together:
"In 1969 the doctrine survived a challenge in the Supreme Court case Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. Federal Communications Commission, in which the court found that the FCC had acted within its jurisdiction in ruling that a Pennsylvania radio station had violated the fairness doctrine by denying response time to a writer who had been characterized in a broadcast as a communist sympathizer." (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Fairness-Doctrine)
In 1987 the Fairness Doctrine was repealed.
In 2000 The remaining editorial and personal-attack provisions were also repealed.
Nobody is advocating censorship here.
But spreading deliberate lies, inventing facts or events that have no base in reality, accusing someone on social media of something that did not happen, racism and hate speech, ... These things have real world consequences and cannot be tolerated as free speech.
It wouldn't be a bad thing either if we put countries like Russia on notice, the ones that are sanctuaries for malware creators, illegal software servers, content manipulators, ...
Get your act together or no longer have access to the US Internet.
6
@Anne
Fat chance with the Trump family's business interests in Russia. Get rid of Trump and a lot of this under the radar stuff will go away.
Contrary to what you state, the gatekeepers are not gone; rather, they have purses open to accept cash or info that can be monetized, irregardless of the losses to society or the terrible consequences. They created the gate and any info that passes through is tollworthy...and that is all that really matters to them.
They will argue, relentlessly, that they should be praised or, in the least, allowed always to keep the gates open.
4
Shut down Trump's Twitter account. There is enough proof of him inciting hatred on Twitter which probably influenced the murderer of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville.
7
To borrow a trope from the NRA, social median doesn't kill people, religion does.
2
Thank you for the article. Our family lives without social media and we have time to read a good book and talk to our friends . Everyone is different so social media maybe a great asset to other people which is there choice.
I was happy for the citizens of Sri Lanka when they shut the platforms down . The initial reports were horrific and till the police were able to get control of a volatile murderous scenario why knowingly incite more hate . The murderers could of been uploading videos of the specific bombing of those buildings as the murderer did in New Zealand last month
We know that Facebook the other platforms don’t police their own platforms they shrug there shoulders and muderous videos are posted for all to see till the technology companies are notified. The usual answer is we pledge to do better till the next time and nothing changes
The platforms are not the problem it is the hate and inhumanity that define who these murderers are . The platform provides them the outlet for their cause and misguided fame.
3
I would go further than blaming just social media for our recent intolerance. I cut the cord about a decade ago, and one of the things I didn't miss was the constant barrage of outrage fed to me by 24-hr cable "news" channels.
Now I get my news via the written word online. I get to choose what I read, not have to listen to whatever commentary the cable channel wants to shove down my throat. I consider myself much saner now and definitely a lot less angry.
8
Too late indeed.
I myself have stopped using social media. I left Twitter four years ago because it was so filled with toxic voices with no redeeming value. Then i stopped using Facebook about a year ago. My life is much better now.
Unfortunately the rest of the world is still using it and it affects everyone, including those of us that dropped it long ago. I may not directly experience social media, but i still can't escape it's impact. Even in my personal relationships, i can see how the use of social media has changed my friends. Many of them are no longer capable of having meaningful conversations. Instead they think every interaction is a social media comment thread in which the goal is to scrutinize what the other person said and try to find something to be offended by, or otherwise pick it apart to find fault with it.
Not good.
7
And along the same social media lines, a recent TED talk that Ms. Swisher is undoubtedly familiar with:
"In an unmissable talk, journalist Carole Cadwalladr digs into one of the most perplexing events in recent times: the UK's super-close 2016 vote to leave the European Union. Tracking the result to a barrage of misleading Facebook ads targeted at vulnerable Brexit swing voters -- and linking the same players and tactics to the 2016 US presidential election -- Cadwalladr calls out the "gods of Silicon Valley" for being on the wrong side of history and asks: Are free and fair elections a thing of the past?
https://www.ted.com/talks/carole_cadwalladr_facebook_s_role_in_brexit_and_the_threat_to_democracy
6
Just get off social media. You won't miss it or regret it.
15
Sorry, Kara, but if you think censorship is the answer to anything, you're not a journalist. And don't think they can't silence you as well.
7
First off all my condolences for all the people killed in name of religion not only in Sri Lanka but every where else too.
Technology is going to stay whether we like or dislike, whether it is used for killing people or uprising of the people. I believe our education system is not keeping up with pace of change of technology. I believe that there should be teaching and classes about the social media from very early on so that at least next generation does not take what is disseminated on Face book, Google U tube etc etc as word of god.
2
I see your point, shutting down unhinged and malevolent News Media outlets from spreading fear and hate, and dividing us by spreading distinct echoes to incite violence. It ought to give us pause that, had we been able to control Fake News, our current brutus ignoramus, an 'expert' liar and demagogue, would not be president today. 'Too late baby' may be our response for the current chaos, but worth considering in the next election...until the citizenry is willing to educate themselves in the truth, and the facts, before elevating a charlatan to the highest office in the land.
2
Ms Swisher, quite frankly, this is fascist talk. But the fact that it is a view being pushed by the opinion pages of the NYTimes and supported by so many Americans is noteworthy.
The mere dissemination of ideas (regardless of how loony or wrong you think hey are) does not cause violence and civil unrest. This simplistic and totalitarian notion has never been supported by empirical evidence. If anything, it's the free exercise of speech and ideas that enables us as a society talk things out and avoid unnecessary violence.
There is no doubt that society's addiction to social media, mobile devices, and the internet is eating away at our mental health. Yet somehow, this is not as troubling as your impulsive inclination to allow governments to unilaterally "turn off" mediums of communication, based on the unsupported notion that this would save lives.
7
@PeoplePower
Yep. It's no coincidence that the first thing totalitarian regimes do is take over the communications outlets (newspapers, radio, internet). The second thing they do is confiscate the firearms, lest the people rebel against their oppressors. We've gotten to the point in America that it's no longer shocking that so many readers of a "progressive" newspaper are calling for censorship. "Defend to the death their right to free speech"? Nope, not with the "progressives."
A thoughtful article. I don’t think it’s quite correct to say media gatekeepers are gone - rather they’ve been replaced on social media with algorithms. It is algorithms that promote the hateful posts and videos and bring them to ever wider attention. These algorithms in turn are designed by humans - humans whose motivation is to maximise “engagement”, no matter with what.
8
people whose thoughts are rooted in more than just rooting for a technology upheaval have been saying this for years - "Unfettered access to free media is bad". It is because free media does not mean the same thing as fair media or robust media or responsible media or any of those things. It just means that more riff raffs are now allowed to access to peddle their views to an audience the vast majority of whom do not really have the means to distinguish truth from fakery and devilishness from goodness.
3
'. . . still debating whether it is a problem or not.' There is no 'problem' as long as you follow the sacred rules of unfettered capitalism: thou shalt not interfere with the manic pursuit of revenue, profit, and Wall St. share value. These are sacrosanct at the altar of greed. If sacrifices have to be made, it's just collateral damage. Now, go forth and prosper!
1
Swisher is right to compare the tech giants to arms dealers and gun makers. We would all do well to go back and read Marshall Mcluhan's notion that "the medium is the message." The nature of a medium is more important then the meaning or content of the message. The NRA says guns don't kill people, people kill people , while the tech giants say the technology doesn't cause these problems, it's just human nature. No, guns do kill people and Technology is behind this violence.
8
What new power or technology have humans found that we have not misused? We've advanced to the point now that the world itself is sick, imperiled, the foundations of life imperiled. Our wisdom has not been great enough, nor our goodness, to stop our mischief as a species. We see it here, too. Wish there was a happier way to see it...
2
Facebook is a thread to Democracies around the world. It should be shut down as soon as possible.
4
If you'd taken the time to get a sense of the Sri Lankan government's history of empowering Buddhist Sinhalese chauvinists to drum up ethnic and religious conflict through misinformation and paranoiac rhetoric among its own citizenry, you'd have thought twice before writing this.
4
I maybe the rare of rarities...
I have NEVER been on a social media platform, Facebook/Twitter/Snapchat/YouTube poster— NONE!
Not even a fake account.
I have had no TV in my home since 2007.
I know!
I’m a private person. I guard who has access to me. I choose which news portal I read, what podcasts I listen to.
I’m a voracious reader and do read news sites from around all the world, BBC, NYT, WSJ, AlJazeera, etc. I mostly use Skype, on phone to family & friends all over the world.
But, even then somehow propaganda can find its way to my iPhone!
I also have seen firsthand propaganda, lies spreading on FB, leading people to march within an hour. A crowd protesting turns into a violent lynching mob— it takes seconds, not minutes! One person is needed to break ranks. Many with personal grievances start an agenda, use social media to bombard with daily imagery of violence done against a specific religion or race... they feed a simmering volcano! Look at Syria!
I’ve also unfortunately seen bombing in South Asia, the aftermath, be it Muslims, or Hindus or Sikhs and later on Buddhists(I’ll never get over the shock of Buddhist extremists). The desolation, the aftermath, the stunned expression, the blood, the hacked up limbs, the ERa full of chaos and noise, and pain and pain and pain... wailing, especially wailing of mothers!
So, next time you see hate or violence depicted on social media ... think of its repercussions!
4
Shutting it off is easy- just pull the plug.
2
The ironic thing about all the Facebook criticism these days is that many of us are actually Facebook investors through index funds, mutual funds, and retirement plans. We're all earning dirty money from this company. We're all hypocrites.
4
In Bali, they have a new years event called Nyepi, for silent contemplation. For 24 hours, nobody is allowed out on the street, no partying, and NO INTERNET.
If only ...
4
The "first thought" was right on. No reason to back off from it at all.
Without thinking twice, let alone raising a skeptical doubt, we empty buildings, shut down airports, close train stations, cordon off whole city centers at the mere suggestion of an attack. Yet social media is somehow supposed to remain eternally free to make money anyway it feels like, including as a megaphone and recruitment platform for international terrorism?
Democracies regulate all sorts of dangerous, corruptingly massive, monopolistically abuse and recklessly destructive industries, and have done so for centuries. Social media wrecks social cohesion, shreds attention spans, rots brains, disrupts education, deliberately addicts teens, aids criminals, systematically plunders personal privacy, and helps install gangster leaders in thrall to foreign despots and thugs.
Why should it get a free pass?
We do not celebrate "unicorn" narcotics peddlers, make celebreties out of nuclear weapons proliferators, or praise the virtues of unbridled entrepreneurialism
in germ warfare.
From its outset, social media has been engineered to be a deceptive and exploitative scam. It has much to do with bonafide journalism as the Koch family's investment portfolio is a pillar of free speech.
It is long past time for real regulation. It is time to truly reclaim the public digital communication network from the unscrupulous robber barons and big brother spy machines of Silicon Valley.
6
I didn't get to finish my last post before I accidentally posted. The same hatred is spewed by the left as the right. The New Zealand shooter had more in common with the radical left then the radical right, Trump if you saw parts of his Manifesto. Trump was only mentioned once in the manifesto.
1
It finally dawned on me this year, after working in tech for 2 decades, that it’s all just a great big experiment. It’s as if we’re trying to live our lives in a massive petri dish. Nobody has a clue where this experiment is going.
4
I am old enough to remember when the internet was an ARPA project to which only government and academic institutions had access. Email was amazing, and then came the first primitive search engines. We truly were entering a new era. When the WWW was opened to the public at large, I recall the lofty expectations about bringing the world together and tearing down barriers to communication While the barriers came down bigly, it turned out that much of what the world had to communicate was better left unsaid. In a way that few expected, the internet provides license for the darkest impulses of people to emerge without the social constraints that regulate real human interaction. Before the internet, the most marginal, disaffected members of any society would have found themselves isolated and consequently restrained in local communities. The internet, and social media in particular, however, has provided a forum for these would-be-outcasts to join voices and blare their hatred around the world, often with violent consequences as seen in New Zealand. I wish we could pull the plug on the entire internet and take a few years to engineer Internet 2.0, built from the ground up with standards of acceptable behavior, gatekeepers to enforce those standards, and consequences for anti-social activities.
5
if you add the cyber criminality of our main adversaries, Russia, N. Korea and China, into the mix then it is clear that not only social media but the entire internet needs to be shut down. there is simply no way to prevent hackers from stealing billions of dollars and the country's most important secrets. networks that carry financial and security information (yes even the unclassified stuff) must be put on dedicated networks that are not connected to the internet. all defense contractors must be required to use dedicated networks for storage of all defense related information. once these dedicated networks that can not be accessed from a computer not on the network are in place maybe the internet can be restarted, but only maybe.
2
In your article you said “A Facebook spokesman stressed to me that “people rely on our services to communicate with their loved ones.” He told me the company is working with Sri Lankan law enforcement and trying to remove content that violates its standards.”
Two things which Facebook said are false. The truth is that people don’t always rely on Facebook to communicate with loved ones. Maybe they use FB for certain posts and messages using the highly buggy hackable Messenger but, many people still use the phone and texting via sms.
I have disabled FB months ago from my mobile devices and am going to delete my account. I don’t miss it at all.
And standards? What standards? There are no standards. Facebook and Twitter are monsters - out of control. YouTube, while it was novel once and can be helpful, is fraught with difficult material - and a medium easily used for malevolent persons in bad acts.
Freedom of expression has all sorts of caveats. This is especially true when it equates to “freedom to harm” in people who have no ethical or moral filters.
How supposedly pious people become evil is an age old debate. Zuckerburg and Co likely were naive to not consider the implications of how his machine would work - after all he was just a kid when he created it. No adult supervision or perspective was applied at the time.
So here we are in the years. Dealing with the results of his work product - good bad ugly. Emphasis on the bad and ugly.
1
I have found an effective strategy on facebook is to unfriend liberally and post food pictures. Lower scope and expectation. With Youtube I have specific uses as well, such as viewing live concerts and curating a playlist of original music that online publishing serves to timestamp (fabric - summon these days). Less mass views the better, until a curated system that compensates emerges for all types of artistic endeavor, inculding writing which is my metier. Dont put any effort into online text. Dont give whats in my head for free. Dont mind spelling or apostrophes. Slowly learning.
As another commenter wrote: "What you say about Facebook being a great “destabilizer” could be said, without blushing, of Fox News and the Trump White House. Shall we regulate the heck out of them, too?"
There have always been people with demented or hateful things to say. The solution is not to try and shut down speech. The difficulty there is, who decides what speech to permit and what speech to prohibit? We either have a free society where open discussion is allowed, or we do not.
Last I checked, the United States had guarantees of free speech in our constitution. On balance, those guarantees have been a major strength of our society. Do we shut down free speech because of some incidents of violence? Or do we do speak out against the violence and preserve our rights?
As to the influence of Facebook and YouTube, it should be noted that they are private companies. Because they are private, profit seeking entities, they are all too susceptible to pressure to censor their content--and this article looks like a call to do just that.
2
The comments are so familiar! We've heard it all before: guns don't kill people, people kill people. True, but a lousy excuse for doing nothing to reduce the incitement to violence on social media. Facebook and Twitter, etc. can't get their own platforms under control because they are AD driven for profits. They amplify passions for profit and unify groups that share outrage, hate, anger. Disapproved minority ideas are more binding than widely shared constructive ideas. So turning off the Social Media helps reduce violence.
Societies with fewer desperate humans are less violent. Less competition, less winner-take-all, and less economic inequality reduces violence. Social Media could promote these things in preference to stirring the pot but the commitment to selling ads prevents that. The Social Media are corrupt.
People aren't good or bad, we are both. The capacity to fight to the death as individuals and as groups saved civilizations and destroyed civilizations. In the last century technology ramped up our capacity for destruction to the point where we are in the middle of the Sixth Extinction and things as good as transportation and keeping warm in winter are factors in Climate Change.
Religions try to limit human behavior to what they consider good but turn to violence for enforcement. Religious wars are the most vicious wars.
Back when people had flip phones, they just called to convey news. In the least, shutting down social media will stop floating conspiracy theories.
2
60 million people will die in the world this year. Of the top ten causes of death, only one - road injury - is not an illness.
The tenth leading cause of death, tuberculous, kills 800,000 people. 15,000 die at the hands of terrorists.
50 million people living in poor countries die each year. That's terrible, but when we consider that for every 3,300 deaths, one is caused by terrorists, we get some perspective.
Which is an antidote to Ms. Swisher's hysterical claim that "social media has blown the lids off controls that have kept society in check."
The words "kept [society] in check" are especially curious. She seems to be equating terrorists with the masses that constitute "society", and fears that it is those masses that can no longer be kept "in check" because of social media.
Western tech elites today are disillusioned because social media have created large platforms of expression that they cannot control (keep "in check"), not only in Sri Lanka (which they hardly think about), but in Western countries (which they are obsessed with). Until the election of Trump and the hysteria over Russian Facebook ads brain-washing lower-order Americans into voting For Putin, tech-savvy liberals equated digitial platforms with Obama and progress in an open, networked world. No more. Get ready for more censorship.
7
I totally agree with you. I have been trying, from time to time, to communicate with extreme conservatives by going onto conservative websites and voicing my progressive opinions on news events in what I hoped was a civil manner. Bad idea. The hate mail I got was quick to arrive in my inbox and boy was there a lot of it. Many of the responses were threatening, ranting, way off topic (a lot of wishing that Hillary Clinton had a noose around her neck. I had not mentioned anything about Hillary in my posts.) I think a lot of this vitriol comes from the fact that you can respond immediately to news stories, you can be anonymous, and you don't have to come face to face with the people you are denigrating. Everything just needs to get smaller; social media, corporations, the 24 hour news cycle. Why can't we communicate on a local basis, and make it face-to-face communication? Sit in a room with people we think we hate and see how the conversation changes. Why does it all have to be about technology which is certainly not a warm and fuzzy entity; it's distant, cold and off-putting, and it's self-promoting. The endless stream of "information" is mind numbing. Let's start again.
2
I have never been on Facebook, Instagram or the other addictions of the millennial generation. And I have absolutely no problem keeping in touch with friends, relatives and loved ones. Where does this delusion come from that one needs Facebook to keep in contact with loved ones. There are telephones, face-to-face meetings, fax machines, email,the US Postal Service, all sorts of ways to communicate and stay in contact.
Who would believe the crazy notion that the social media things cannot be shut down, or that one cannot live a full life without Facebook? Humanity lived for 100,000 generations without digital social media. It is unnecessary and appears to be an evil. Research shows that since 2000, young people have steadily lost the ability to empathize with others. More and more people are losing the ability to read human emotions from facial expressions. And more and more young die from texting while driving, taking selfies in dangerous locations. Maybe people just do not like other humans and social media allows them to distance themselves from humanity, as it makes people more mechanistic and less human.
7
Watch Carole Cadwalladr’s Ted talk on the issue of social media’s influence. She is making the same points from a different approach. The tech giants are money making behemoths and therefore you get Kara’s end sentence - they just don’t want to turn off the wealth fire hose and don’t care about the cost to lives or democracy.
2
"But it has become clear to me with every incident that the greatest experiment in human interaction in the history of the world continues to fail in ever more dangerous ways."
The invention of the printing press, by far, outstrips social media in terms of human interaction. FB and the like don't encourage folks to interact, at least, in the way we've always defined "interact." It was cute at the beginning--"Hey, look, I can show the world what I'm eating for breakfast" -- but it's become clear that social media actually drives people apart more than it encourages them to truly interact.
Social media is neither.
3
An article today in NYT or WAPO discussed how machine learning algorithms can now identify those prone to depression. So there is no question that current technology available (and developed by) social media can filter out all the hate and evil.
And what if they filter out a bit too much to be sure? **No actual loss is incurred at all**
Regulation can and must force this filtering, starting now.
1
Here it is folks... a "journalist" suggesting we should be censored. Take note. This is what the establishment media wants in order to control the world narrative.
9
Please print this. The solution is very very simple. Reputable news outlets should refuse to have their news distributed through these media.
Only on their own websites. Edited.
Its like academic referencing. Should not happen without proper referencing and quotations.
Once this happens if you read it on Facebook you know its trash. And if you read it on NYTimes you know its real.
That undermines their validity.
8
I am honestly of several minds about all this.
But I have noticed that at times, it’s possible to stop a fight by getting between two idiots so they can’t see each other, and talking loudly enough that they can’t easily hear one another.
You are entitled to say pretty much whatever, far as I am concerned.
But I don’t believe you’re entitled to an IMAX screen and the world’s biggest bullhorn to say it. Similarly, I noticed that the Paris cops shut down certain subway stops this winter, early in the morning of scheduled protests. Seems pretty much the same thing to me: if you lookmlike you wanna start trouble, fine.
Walk to where you wanna start trouble. Bring your own soapbox.
Facebook has been proven to be a detriment to democracy. It accepted Russian money and ran Russian ads and when got caught, Zuckerberg lied through his teeth and Sandberg leaned into her bank account, launching an anti-Semite misinformation campaign instead of owning the problem and facing it. Facebooks’s malignant fingerprints can be found in Brexit and The Philippines, considered ground zero by Cambridge Analytica who helped elect Duterte with huge contribution from Facebook whose effort is nothing short of managing the dictator’s social media campaign.
Freedom-loving nations and its citizens better stay off facebook.
I’m into my 13th year of being Facebook-free. Got sober cold turkey the day I quit my ad agency job and never looked back.
Nowadays, my industry friends call Social Media marketing its real name — Surveillance marketing. Imagine that.
As for YouTube, I browse it once a week. To look at highlights from La Liga and Serie A. I don’t log in and I don’t comment and I don’t follow any YouTube “influencer.”
3
"These platforms give voice to everyone" Therein lies the rub. The MSM resents the fact that they are no longer the gatekeepers of information. Trump has Illustrated this beautifully by bypassing the MSM and going straight to Twitter regardless of what you think of him.
I am sympathetic to the author's arguments and perhaps in extreme National Emergency some of this should shut down temporarily. However shutting down social media is very Orwellian isn't it?
Shutting down American companies won't solve the problem. Because there are numerous other digital channels.
2
Can't be done? How does China do it? The techniques exist. We just have to decide the price we are willing to pay.
3
@gnowxela Are you advocating that the US government act like the Chinese government? No dissent no free speech and everybody monitored 24 by 7. Of course that's already happening to some extent in the USA
4
Incidentally, Sri Lanka's reaction is common in that part of the world. India alone had 154 internet shutdowns between Jan 2016 and May 2018. Some happened in Kashmir (you can guess why) and some to prevent riots in other parts of India. The easiest way to stop a fire from spreading is to turn off the fuel.
Is that a good thing? Is it consistent with civil liberties? Probably not, but if you're a local administrator facing a rumor that's spreading fast, the easiest thing to do (and within your control) is to pull the plug.
5
Despite being a "tech journalist," Swisher's never shown much knowledge about technology, and once again with this editorial explains how little she knows about the issues involved and the solutions that actual technologists have put forth. It's somewhat shocking that she offers nothing at all in the way ofuseful observations or solutions here other than "Social Media BAD!"
For a more informed view of how to handle online commenting and content-sharing, look up Content Moderation at Scale (or "COMO").
4
Ms. Swisher,
As a responsible journalist I wish you came to this realization sooner.
companies such as Facebook and twitter and YouTube have no moral responsibility to our world and have created a toxic environment in this world. All they care about is to sell advertisements and they don’t care what happens to our children and our society
1
Once upon a time, people were herded into churches every Sunday to hear God’s truth being preached from a physical platform. It was a truth that rang false for more than a few.
These days, the internet gives everyone a platform. Much that was once hidden by outward piety is now on full display.
Blaming “technology” for terror bombing is like blaming pulpits for lynching. It conflates the physical means with the human and emotional ends. Censorship will not address these. Pretending that it can is foolish and irresponsible.
3
If you think having an off switch to internet services is a good idea ask yourself how comfortable you would be if Donald Trump was the person who could flip that switch.
People eager to introduce authoritarian solutions to problems rarely seem to consider the fact that they won't be wearing the boot, they'll be the person under the boot. Always consider who you're handing the reins of power to before you get all giddy imagining who you're going to throw in the gulag first, it might be you in the gulag.
9
@Joel Well, right. Basically, Ms. Swisher is advocating censorship of Google, Facebook, YouTube, and all "tech." Well, first, you can't just censor a few companies. The laws have to be written to apply to categories of actors and actions. Not your short list of companies that you don't like. So, basically, this censorship would apply to millions of websites. Including Slate, Salon, HuffPost--and the NY Times. Is that really what you want? The law would apply to both Facebook and the NYT. Second, please recall that Don Trump is currently President of the USA. Do you want his administration writing the censorship laws? I don't want anyone writing the censorship laws. In your next column, please consult a lawyer and then write on exactly how your censorship would work and whether it would violate the First Amendment. Which it of course would.
Facebook and YouTube are pretty relentlessly savvy when I buy grooming products, but they struggle with elaborate, repetitive messages to kill, hate and destroy. Might this not be a resource allocation issue on their part?
Yes, social media is vapid, narcissistic, and, like any means of communication, can spread false and harmful ideas but this exaggerated demonization of social media as the source of political and religious violence is pure fantasy -
Does anyone have any sense of history? Violent extremism and intolerance have been been perpetrated by people for millennia -not decades, not centuries but millennia -
I despise facebook, but find it laughable that one can blame it for all of the same evils and hatreds that have been rumbling along within so many societies for generation after generation -
As if pogroms, lynchings, race riots, and warfare were something new (or even increased in number compared with a century ago)
9
So free speech and religion have been "weaponized", too.. You think also banning them will help solve the problem?
4
"You can't shut if off, its too late".
Perhaps we need a modern version of the Emergency Broadcast System, where the major social network platforms can be interrupted when a tragedy or other emergency event occurs. A non-partisan management agency would be prepared to shut down all normal traffic and broadcast necessary information and prevent incendiary postings at the same time.
Yes, there are legimate issues with this mainly revolving around the question of who gets to manage the dialog. I don't that is insurmountable. Such a channel could run continously in the background allowing users to see its content. It would be activated as the sole channel only an emergency was declared by proper authority. Duration of this "takeover" could be limited to 24 hours except in cases of extreme danger.
1
Thank you for opening up what so many internet Libertarians believe is Pandora's Box. It ain't. It's reality. Your ideas are timely and important. Today's internet is not the one that existed in 2000 or even 2010. It has been weaponized. It needs regulation. Look to Europe if China seems over the top. But we need to get off of the mantra that no one should touch anything about it.
5
I got off FB 2 years ago, as I saw what was coming. I had de-friended half my family, and even one daughter. I still speak to them (especially my daughter), but found that having "access" to everyone's unfiltered thoughts (including my own) is NOT a good thing. Multiply a few person's unfiltered views by millions and you get the seething contempt for each other that we are seeing now. Social media may have started out with good intentions, but the result is starting to become catastrophic.
13
So you want to censor hate speech? Well, I hate police brutality. I hated the US in Iraq. I hate the rich of Wall Street who leave billions in misery. I hate anti-immigration racists. I could go on but I believe the point is clear. If that power is given to government or private companies, have no doubt who they will really censor. Does anyone really believe that the racist warmongers who run this country and sit in its boardrooms are interested in censorship to make a nicer world?
6
Perhaps if I saw more by way of signs that certain people on the Leftish had the slightest interest in any of those things themselves.
1
Please don't follow in the footsteps of Sri Lanka.
3
I once wrote a NYT columnist who groused about the internet that this was sour grapes from an industry challenged by free internet news content. Have largely reversed that belief. Thank God for responsible journalists at sources like the NY Times. Even FOX (Full of Xhit) News is somewhat more balanced than the nonsense promulgated on social media by some.
3
“They have weaponized civic discourse,” and they have monetized our private behaviors. I was a techie, but have never had a Facebook account, and abandoned Twitter after the first couple of years. But it's not just "social media" that's the problem, we need to restructure and rein in Google as well. I have been reading "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" which is deeply depressing, although hardly surprising. We are losing our privacy and will lose our democracy as well (what is left of it).
5
We most certainly *can* shut it off. Make Facebook and the others face the same responsibilities as publishers - which they are in all but name. Yes, this would impose substantial burdens on these firms, and they would probably have to cease certain activities. All for the good. Let's get on with it.
3
I would hope that the cure for social media problems would be that people would catch on to the fact that a lot of what they read is false and if they act on it they can harm themselves and others. Apparently this isn't working.
Maybe it would help if public education made it a priority to teach students that it should be a priority in their lives to double and triple check information that is important to them and teach them how to go about it. This might be called "critical thinking." It should be more important than math, science and history. Unfortunately I see little indication that anybody is doing a good job of this.
1
Just like a country with no rules, an internet powered by social media is anarchy.
The mechanisms are identical and the result was entirely predictable.
That’s why I never signed up to Facebook and Twitter.
5
You say the root of the problem is "sloppy design", but that is not really a complete or meaningful analysis. For social media companies the grail is total raw user engagement. Total raw user engagement is the operating proxy measure for success. Statistically speaking, catching the viewer/reader with emotionally compulsive hooks is the optimal way to lock in user engagement. The most effective compulsive hooks are almost always about politics, group identity, and anger.
This phenomena is not limited to social media companies. What different about social media is the ability to show individualized content to each user. That in itself is not a necessarily a bad thing - in fact it's a great thing when it guides people to information about harmless hobbies and interests.
However, combined with compulsive hooks, the personalized curation takes on an evil nature. A traditional media company shows the same face (content and comments) to all. This provides a natural feedback mechanism where readers or viewers will simply stop using the portal if the content gets too outrageous. That feedback is lacking (or relatively weak) due to the individualized curation in social media.
2
With Facebook and others (but primarily Facebook), it's like with Trump and violence. Trump's racist exhortations to violence can't literally and specifically be blamed for the Pittsburgh shootings, or the New Zealand massacre, but certainly they encourage that sort of thing generally. So, too, may Facebook in Sri Lanka and elsewhere permit people to "connect with their loved ones," but it also not only permits but fosters ethnic and religious hatreds that lead to violence. I leave it to Ms. Swisher and others to propose remedies.
Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda managed both the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks and bombing the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania without any social media. They also attacked the U.S.S. Cole without social media.
The Taliban beat the Soviet Union and America in Afghanistan without social media.
Having an ethnic sectarian motivation trumps the power of social media.
4
I have read very good commentary (on Twitter) from journalists in SL, who decry the blitheness of the tone of this piece and similar from the West. When the government suppresses all traditional media, social media is indeed a boon for disseminating informaiton- particularly since so much of the traditional media is censored/cherrypicked. It's a dangerous place for journalists. To that end, FB is still an important tool for citizens- we shouldn't necessarily be applauding a crackdown by the government under the guise of "safety".
3
The medium is the message.
I liked the phrase in the late 1960s. "Understanding Media" by McLuhan was
insightful.
Kara makes sense, my conservative instinct
is to not disagree that the political (social)
medium is at fault in these hellacious
murders.
Technology feels like a dirty word, and
our terrific internet is seemingly having
perverse consequences, besides enlightening
civilizing effects hoped by progressive
idealists.
Changes happen, and not necessarily for
the good.
The "Levellers" are pessimists, and I shall not
defend progress, because social media are
ideally humane, but in the ugly real world
they are reactionary and nasty too much
manifestly.
Great article, but it proves the old saying that you can't put the genie back into the bottle once it's out. Social media will prove to be the bane of our technological society. It truly made us all public authors, for both good and bad. I’m afraid the bad will win out and we will have no way of staunching the torrent of terrorism it spews out.
2
I don't get why this is surprising. People have always used information tools to spread malice. Be it the snake oil/ pyramid schemes of the past or even the yellow journalism the US engaged in prior to the Mexican and Spanish-American war. If this anything, it's that not much has changed, merely the platforms.
4
I had the same thoughts, Kara... The greatest irony of this "Information Age" is that the communications technologies it provides predominately serve to disseminate 'disinformation'...
Or, as K. Williamson put it, social media is dragging all of civilization down “the Road to Smurfdom" -- to the place in Mother's basement where the deracinated demos of the Twitter age find themselves alone, working on computer tans, feeling small and blue...'
2
Second thought...Why? What is it the authority want to hide? The ten days prior warning the Government had and, apparently, did nothing to ensure as many were out of harms way as possible.
4
The Internet and World Wide Web began with the promise that they would facilitate research and education. They would make the world a smaller place in which knowledge could be shared and our lives enhanced and improved.
Then, the inevitable happened: People.
Anybody wondering what a true democracy looks like need only look at the Web and social media to see what happens when people are allowed to go unchecked. They quickly regress to their basest inclinations and the anonymity provided by the online platforms only serve to exacerbate this tendency.
In the 90s and early 2000s, we were told the Web was like the Wild West, but that like - the frontier - those days would be numbered. The online world would become civilized as it matured. Well, take a look -- That hasn't happened yet and that civilized world doesn't appear to be anywhere on the horizon.
The Web is a giant shopping mall and social media is a cesspit of anger, hate, vitriol, and every other negative tendency of the human race that can be imagined.
The promise of online communication is dead. All we can do now is try to rein in what's left and control the negative impact on society.
The dude from Facebook said it's too late to bring it under control. Well, Sri Lanka just did, China has been doing it for years, Australia is taking control, and England isn't far behind.
I'm not suggesting we want to engage in the kind of overt social control that China does. I am saying there's a line. We just need to find it.
5
@Elfego
It’s easy to recognize when someone screams “fire” in a crowded theatre, and we all agree that crosses a line. This is harder. Finding that line on social media may be impossible.
@lkatz
Nothing is impossible unless we decide it's impossible.
1
Consider the story detailing funding efforts to rebuild what is billed a "white" Notre Dave vs. burned "black" American churches. That intentional division wasn't spawned on social media: It came from inside a few newsrooms, brought to life by anonymous editors. Then local stations, by default, ran it as "news." Social media isn't really a mainstream news organization though it can be used to spawn enmity; a bigger threat to civility is a tiny network of gate-keepers who operate anonymously to "spin" the news in what they believe incorporates a contemporary ethic of diversity, equity and inclusion. Not content, anymore, to report news, they fashion it out of whole-cloth; spawn violence and mayhem, and report the resulting disasters in ways that further their own closely-held agendas. What's more, social media often picks-up and runs their propaganda as official news.
3
We can debate the pros and cons of regulation, scaling down, and implementing guardrails on the internet. But to say it's "too late" to shut it down sounds exactly like what a tech executive would say, and predictably narcissistic.
Believe it or not, there was a time, just a couple of mere decades ago, when social media wasn't prevalent and people weren't glued to their screens 24/7. I don't want to turn back the clock, but I think we could get the pendulum to swing back into the middle somewhere.
3
Nope, the clock needs to be turned back.
The middle would be worse and equate to eventual government control of all reporting.
We're still not thinking clearly about this. We don't have runaway problems with plumbing, electricity, medical malpractice, it's a long list, because we make the practitioners take more responsibility for their practices. Social media is a practice now and we need to regulate through certification. Making the people who use it demonstrate they can use it responsibly. You can still have a level of do it yourself use but it's not reasonable that any hack could infect the world without demonstrating a modicum of competency and adherence to rule of law. We operate social media the way we deal with guns with similar results.
4
Commenters who throw up their hands over the spread of malevolence on social networks sound very much like those who take a similar attitude toward the drug war, climate change and gun violence. "It's too late," they cry, forgetting that it wasn't so long ago in this country when drug addiction was not an epidemic; catastrophic storms did not occur with regularity; mass shootings were a rarity. And people communicated with their friends and loved ones just fine through the U.S. Post Office and Ma Bell. We unleashed these problems on ourselves. And only we can confront and control them.
5
I cancelled my facebook account after watching the double episode of PBS Frontline about the company. Said farewell to my "friends" and now reach them the old fashioned way. Hey - I'm doing my part. It's the only check we citizens have on the behavior of a company that pursues $ at the expense of the blood of innocents. Yeah the possibilities were fun to fantasize about, but reality is another thing. If enough of us cancel our accounts FB will simply lose its novelty and disappear. Certainly nothing Facebook is doing and nothing our government is doing is likely to get them to change.
6
The internet is our Skynet. The second it got turned on, it could never be turned off, and it is one of the greatest follies that we ever thought we could control it.
1
I do not think it is too late to exert some control over social media platforms, I think the tech executives don’t really want to shoulder any of the blame or exert themselves to find a solution. If they could be sued by the victims’ families they would probably find a solution fairly quickly.
They need to collect more data on users, maybe charge higher fees for use, and figure out a way to punish those who misuse the platforms. There should be some sort of identity/physical address validation of users. Having valid credit cards on file that could be charged fines might also help.
They are privately owned so freedom of speech does not really apply, they are free to set rules and vet users they just don’t.
4
@Alexandra Hamilton
Agree. FB is a commercial enterprise, as is Google. The EU has no problem regulating them. Perhaps suffering through two global wars gave them a community wisdom we escaped. We fought "over there"; we didn't suffer mass bombings, concentration camps and murder on an industrial scale. The Japanese here did suffer internment, for which we should feel shame, and say "never again". That now includes the social media voices shouting hate and exhorting faceless crazies to commit mass murder.
1
@Linda Miilu I don't feel shame because I interred no one. Why should we feel shame?
"When you traffic in outrage, you get death." For myself this quote is the definition of fascism. Fascism is a fanatical trafficking in death for power. The question is how do we break this traffic pattern? What tools can we use? How do we traffic in peace especially in this season of Easter?
As Ms. Swisher, mentioned this is a people problem. We have many channels of anger, hatred and outrage that people watch. But where are the channels for peace? Who speaks for peace? And are theses channels and speakers powerful enough to overcome the noise of our collective death wish? For me there is a total lack of powerful channels and speakers for peace. They just doesn't exist.
As a thought experiment, imagine if Pope Francis has his own You Tube Channel where he spoke with world and religious leaders about peace in our age and how to achieve it. A powerful channel and speaker for peace at this level would be a game changer and bring back a quieter and saner dialog to our social media world. This would be an example of a good start for a new direction for the positive uses of social media.
1
I have a suggestion for any number of sites that have a button for "like", "thumbs up", or "recommended"; add another button for "dislike", "thumbs down", and or "not recommended". That same metric can be tracked and commentary more closely monitored by the provider.
2
“You can’t shut it off,” the executive said flatly. “It’s too late.”
Oh, really?
This neatly encapsulates the aura of technological inevitability with which the industry has always protected its absolute freedom of movement, but this is just arm-waving. There is nothing inevitable about the design choices these companies have made.
Once you dismiss that line of reasoning, here is what is left:
"We figured out how to do it, which gave us the right to do it."
"We could have designed it a different way but would not have grown as much or made as much money."
"It would be too expensive to change it now."
"We don't know how to change it now."
"If we turn it off we lose our jobs and our investments."
"We don't want to."
"You can't make us."
As you can see, the arguments eventually boil down to this: who's to be master? We are at a juncture where we either assert the public interest in managing the consequences of these systems, or just hand this enormous power over to corporations which have so far exhibited no sense of responsibility for the unintended consequences of what they have made.
2
@Bill Levine
Thank you! You have said what needs to be said in State legislatures and in Congress. Zuckerberg and his cohort are what Teddy Roosevelt called "malefactors of great wealth". I can manage to wish friends and family Happy Birthday with old school cards, or I can send messages from Yahoo e-mail. I don't need to share on FB. FB is now like having a mob in your front yard asking for a glass of water, or to use the bathroom
1
I'd miss Facebook if it goes out of existence. There's more to it than a lot of people realize. I belong to groups that discuss history, ancient Greece, opera, gardening, birds, Renaissance art, etc etc. They're all very interesting and I learn a lot from people all over the world. Perhaps there's some way to prevent this kind of conspiracy to harm without complete abolishing social media.
3
I agree that I would miss it also. It keeps me in touch with very far flung friends, parents whose children are adopted from the same area and have similar concerns, etc.
@J.Sutton:
Use e-mail. Use what you used before FB.
Why stop at social media? Eventually if the government shuts down posts or tweets it doesn't like people will go back to analog---books, newsletters, magazines, pamphlets. Should the government have the right to shut down publishers as well? Should people trying to read or write the wrong ideas be arrested and charged with crimes?
Amazing that so many people appear eager to hand over their right to free speech, dissent and independence of thought to the federal government.
What has happened to civics in this country?
6
@Lilo
What happened to privacy? What happened to enough modesty to not think your birthday or newest child needed to be shared with strangers?
1
If unlimited freedom of speech leads to mass suicide bombings then yes, there need to be some restrictions. Just as there should be some reasonable restrictions on gun ownership. The whole “slippery slope” argument for not having sensible safeguards is crazy. You are not allowed to yell “fire” in a crowd. You should not be allowed to spew hate or instigate violence either. It is quite possible to have legal civil discourse about differences of faith and opinion while still holding speakers to some account.
1
@Linda Miilu
You are assuming (wrongly) that I share any of that information with strangers.
I would be surprised at those who do. But that doesn't mean I want the government to decide what is good speech and what is not and turn off social media because reasons...
Wholeheartedly agree. Civility and politeness has been pushed aside by outrage and intolerance, boorishness at best.
4
I have come to the same conclusion. In my opinion, whatever was good about free (?) information flow and connecting people has crossed into net negative territory a long time ago. And it keeps deteriorating, every day. I don't see any way but pull the plug and try again. I don't think the genie can be put put back in the bottle, but among all the self-decreed geniuses in Tech, there should be solutions possible that can be controlled and allow productive flow of information. What's stopping this is that peddling in hate and destruction drives traffic so Social Media doesn't really have much incentive to change. Despite the lame attempts and proclamations.
4
We could shut it down. We could destroy the platform. But another would pop up. What we as a world society must do is this: stop blaming the big people. Stop having the government regulate our lives into an oblivion. Sure we’d all like to blame the oil company for global warming, but we as individuals must also act. We need to start pressuring people to do the right thing on their own, as individuals. We cannot continue this endless cycle of useless regulation that takes the pressure off the individual to act. Everyone should have a responsibility to act correctly.
2
You are correct that individuals must take social responsibility, but incorrect thinking the big players do not also need to step up. The haters often come from their own insular social enclaves and are not necessarily reachable by the larger population. Also, individuals trying to exercise social mores sometimes turn into Lynch mobs and an overarching force like law, order and governance must take a hand to ensure the mob of like minded individuals does not rampage over anyone who seems different. I would also point out that the big players are made up of individuals who should be steering their companies or political parties in socially beneficial ways.
Here's what I find most ironic:
I well remember the days of the early open anonymous "no-gatekeepers" internet. And sure, it had plenty of hate speech, trolls, and flame wars; though, that all seems so quaint and civil by today's standards.
Facebook and social media were supposed to fix all of that. By having a "moderated" platform requiring users to use their real life personae, everyone would be more civil due to lack of anonymity. How's that working out for y'all?
So why did Facebook et al actually make things worse? They are various hypotheses but I think the most obvious one is that social media platforms are based on monetizing your interactions with it; to keep you 'engaged' for longer times and extract as much personal information about you as possible. all so they can target advertising at you. And in order to keep people engaged, they stoke the content that plays on two of humanity's most powerful motivators: fear and hate. (OK, maybe some cute cat videos as well.)
All that said, I'm pro free speech and anti censorship and I'm not at all comfortable "shutting it all down" or moving to China-type regulations as some are suggesting. If there is to be regulation, the main focus should be on these platforms' business models more than anything else.
5
@Tom
The EU has regulated FB and Google; the EU is not unfree or uncivilized. The EU just does not want hate speech under the umbrella of free speech. Perhaps two world wars taught them something about hate speech.
1
I think that anonymity is still the main enabler. It is too easy to create fake accounts.
1
Agree completely with Kara's analysis and conclusion. It's just not clear to me how one can get the proverbial toothpaste back in the tube. It is increasingly obvious that these platforms like FB, Twitter, YouTube, etc must be regulated as utilities (not unlike TV and radio) if they continue to exist.
5
I think most people would agree that human life is more desirable than corporate profit. These companies must change their products so that they cannot be used to spread misinformation and violence. If they can't, they should be shut down. If government intervention is needed (i.e. regulation), so be it. I'm sure they'll find a way.
3
I quit Facebook a few years ago after my account was hacked. I’d never been hacked until then. I say restrict them all and if they can’t or won’t comply, shut them down. Especially Trump’s favorite, Twitter.
4
You can't and shouldn't shoot the messenger. Facebook et al. may be the current conduits, but that should surprise no one. Why shouldn't terrorists use the internet to advance their ideas? The democracy of the internet is just as messy as democracy is in reality, and it hates having to deal with the crazy outliers that confound democracy constantly. Shutting down the internet will not help anyone; it is a band-aid on a huge problem. Democracy needs to come up with a concerted plan to deal with terrorists. 18 years after 9/11, it still has not come up with that plan.
4
Shut them all. Completely and permanently. Yes humanity’s penchant for inhumanity is the core problem. That’s always been true. The difference is we have corporations— no, let’s be less circumspect. We have Little Zuckie and his peers who enthusiastically cheer the mobs on and work to increase the anger and violence, all in the name of profit.
4
Agree wholeheartedly. Facebook, Twitter, and Instragram, among others, are perfectly able to automatically screen out posts with videos containing copyrighted materials, because they know their advertisers would otherwise raise holy hell.
But when a video clip of the recently New Zealand mass shooting was shared - a single video, mind you - Facebook for one was caught flat-footed and allowed it to be shared nearly 2 million times. I suspect that's because there was no economic driver for them to act quickly.
The terrible events in Sri Lanka have been adequately reported by news organizations. No need to let the social media sites skate by once again.
5
So Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk are richer than any of us mere mortals can imagine, and his invention enables death and destruction. Nice.
11
Increadably The Paper of Record here in the land of free speech continues to demand censorship almost every day now in the editorial section.
So cut to the chase. Who should control what we see and think? The times editorial board? The DNC, UN?
It's clear you don't believe we can handle it ourselves. China runs quite nicely, why not make a case for a system similar to theirs? If you get in on the ground floor image the power you'll have in a few short years as an official government organ.
3
If you shut off the various functions you don't like, what do you do after the next great atrocity that happens without them? Despite assertion in the column, the NZ massacre was not instigated on the internet, and the bombings in Sri Lanka were not either. Complaints about FB etc came after Christchurch, and the shutdown in Sri Lanka was done pre-emptively.
There was diversion here, from the obvious failure to prevent the bombings and the less obvious failure to identify and intercept the Christchurch shooter.
From 1914 to 1991, the world was in far deadlier shape and still more full of hate. No FB, no twitter, no YouTube, just books, newspapers, magazines, movies, radio and TV. How thoughtful and peaceful.
4
@Bruce Williams
The NZ massacre was indeed part of a FB crazy's life. He was angry, and hoped that his mass murder would be covered on social media. It was. The murderers in Sri Lanka communicated via FB; finally Sri Lanka shut it down. Imagine if Hitler, Mussolini et al had access to FB, Twitter or Google. We would not have been fighting "over there".
@Bruce Williams
Yep, we killed each other just fine before the internet. But just like comic books in the '50's, Rock and Roll in the '60's, Devil Worship in the '70's, Heavy Metal in the '80's, Iraq in the '90's, Saturated Fats and Gluten in the '00's, TPTB need a boogeyman to distract from looting your wallet, destabilizing other countries, and endless war.
SQUIRREL!
3
The thinking in this NYT opinion column is to be expected: Line up in service of fascism when it appears significant power is shifting to a more fascistic mode of operation. So-called intellectuals have done this throughout history, as they have just as long provided the "intellectual" cover for power—and its abuses. After all, power must assert its power in order for it not only to sustain itself, but to grow—and this power most reliably grows through the abuse of this very same power. And to help ensure its growth, power employs only the sharpest intellectuals that it can buy, of course (as "intellectual fertilizer," if you will).
Consider this thinking:
"I called social media giants 'digital arms dealers of the modern age,' who had, by sloppy design, weaponized pretty much everything that could be weaponized."
From her view here, the we can see that for her, the guy who makes a shovel (for example, which is then used by someone to kill another) is going to be an accomplice to the murder because the designer "had, by sloppy design, weaponized pretty much everything that could be weaponized."
"In short: Stop the Facebook/YouTube/Twitter world—we want to get off."
No one is currently forced to inhabit this "world." Her view here tells us she wants to be among those deciding what's going to be allowed as permissible speech. She's the 'responsible' "intellectual" who knows the appropriate boundaries (as set by the powerful who employ her).
Brace yourself for more~
4
@Tom Wilde
When social media is used for hate speech, unrestrained and uncensored, we are all potential victims wherever we might gather. Innocent people are no longer safe in churches or synagogues; children are no longer safe in schools. Shoppers are no longer safe in malls. In answer to your question, yes we all have to inhabit the world we were born into. That world used to be safe from random, now frequent mass murders. There are not enough police officers or sheriffs or school safety guards to keep innocent people safe from insane people who frequent social media sites. There were no mass murderers lurking in those places when I grew up; they weren't at large when my daughter grew up. What we are witnessing now is insanity weaponized via social media. A mentally disturbed individual can now hope to escape isolation by purchasing a weapon and murdering strangers. There are no responsible adults in charge of FB, Twitter or Google. Those in control of those commercial enterprises now have a lot of blood on their hands. I hope they eventually wander around trying to wash the blood off, as did Lady Macbeth.
Hello, @Linda Miilu ~
Thank you for your reply.
I don't expect everyone to understand what I'm saying here, as understanding anything as important as our freedom of speech is extremely difficult when we're extremely frightened. And extremely frightened people are much more easily manipulated and controlled—through certain speech, just as it is found in this column here. And if we lose sight of this fact, we're all goners.
In fact, just as you said it here, frightened people around the world are saying, "Those in control of those commercial enterprises now have a lot of blood on their hands."
But your saying this is absolutely no different from saying that I, the shovel manufacturer, have blood on my hands because someone used my shovel to kill another, and therefore, this shows that "there are no responsible adults in charge of" my shovel company.
Again, we've just gotta think this stuff through collectively, or brace yourself for more of the thinking in this column—and a world in which we'll all be "satisfied" with the speech that is prescribed to us by the powerful, and the "intellectuals" who are paid (by the powerful) to articulate this "right" way of thinking here.
2
Want to curtail future Islamist suicide attacks?
Then apply Sun Tzu's recommendation:
"Know your enemy, think like he does, learn his language".
A good start?
Read "Jihad" by Robert Spencer. Won't miss anything, the opposite: you will gain the necessary knowledge and experience which eventually save your life, a life that was taken from all those innocent individuals that died for nothing.
1
I avoid social media because I think the negatives outweigh the positives but it is here and it is all about sharing information. In the US during recent years there has been an increase in terrorist acts by white supremacists. It has been reported that radicalization on the internet played a role. The US cannot eliminate social media but some obvious steps to reduce this violence could be taken such as passing gun control legislation, particularly since most of the acts of terrorism by white supremacists in the US have involved shootings.
1
100 years from now, if human society still exists, historians will look back at the internet and conclude that it was a very bad idea. Humanity's eager submission to smartphone screens is bad enough, but the empowerment of society's fringe voices, and the anonymity given to those fringe voices, is a toxic combination.
4
I really don't understand how it is that people rely on something like Facebook for their news, and also is their primary communication devise with friends/family.
Can't they just read a normal newspaper? Can't they just pick up the phone and call their family/friend?
This is both the fault of the social media companies and the lazy people who use them for purposes they are not suited for.
12
@Treetop
In some countries FB subsidizes the cost of the smartphone and its internet access to maximize its reach into the lives of people who are in no way prepared to self curate its content. Myanmar is the classic example. I don’t how Mark Zuckerbeg sleeps at night.
Roads exist, and except for where the road turns, a car could drive as fast as possible, risking the lives of others.
Industry-wide, there are limits in the manufacture to keep some cars from exceeding, say, 100 mph.
Community-wide, there are speed limits to prohibit driving above 65 mph on open roads, and 35 mph on neighborhood roads. There are also enforcers employed to help ensure that all but the most reckless drivers adhere to the rules that govern the safety of all, and that those reckless drivers are punished, or possibly banned, from endangering everyone else.
No other system of open access should be possible without industry and community management to govern the safety of all.
Digital access is the open road. It is well past the time when the establishment of rules, and the enforcement of those rules, must be in place.
Without those actions, we are all as doomed as pedestrians walking among drivers on an unmanaged open road.
11
It's too late now. As Marshall Mcluhan and Neil Postman pointed out decades ago, electronic media, in its total, all-enveloping immediacy, short-circuits the logical, rational sequential mode of thinking that is the product of print media.
In short, electronic media by its very nature changes the way we think, act and socialize. It is subversive of liberal democracy, whose deliberative institutions are the product of the Enlightenment era of print and the written word.
Now that the social media genie is out of the bottle, it is difficult to see how we put it back in. About all we are left with is the idea of being constantly aware of how social media, and the people and companies who profit from it, are trying to manipulate and financially exploit us. Sadly all we can do at this late stage of the game is to play defense.
2
"Shutting social media down in times of crisis isn’t going to work. I raised that idea with a top executive at a big tech company I visited last week, during a discussion of what had happened in New Zealand.
“'You can’t shut it off,' the executive said flatly. 'It’s too late.'"
Cautionary Note: This is what cigarette company executives said, long ago. There could come a time when someone like Zuckerberg is charged for being an "unregistered foreign agent."
3
Indeed, giving up social media now would be kind of like having asked Gutenberg to give up his printing press, but I argue that it's not impossible to enact safer measures relatively easily. In fact, I'd say -- and I'm a twenty-year vet of the internet and tech scene -- we could make only two relatively simple changes in the way our social media companies do business.
First, these companies should require that real names be used for all accounts. Real names verified by a government issued ID. This alone would make a major difference in preventing minors from accessing it and provide for a more civil discourse. Trolls (and terrorists) are always emboldened by anonymity.
Second, social media companies should enact two-tier security measures for users to access the account, just like a bank. For example, one effective method is to send a temporary pass-code to the user's mobile phone when signing in. Not only would this improve law enforcement's ability to trace bad guys, but it would also discourage hacking from forces, such as the Russian Intelligence Agencies who used millions of fake or stolen accounts and bots to influence our elections.
It would probably require a law because companies such as Twitter will push back on these measures (since their valuation is probably tied to gross account numbers), but in the long run, it would equal better information for them and a much safer world for all of us. It is definitely something we can do. And we can do it now.
3
@Brannon Perkison
Whistleblowers, dissidents, rape and torture victims, and revolutionaries are also emboldened by anonymity. And I want to encourage them.
Why on God's earth would you want to make it easier for law enforcement and intelligence agencies, both foreign and domestic, to track the online activity of millions of law abiding Americans?
Orwell's "1984" was dystopian fiction, not a how-to manual.
1
@Lilo
FB, Google and Twitter have not prevented murder or rape. Murderers and rapists were caught before social media. Orwell lived when the Spanish civil war was going on. We are light years past the time when wars were somewhat confined to regional physical spaces. The village idiot or rapist or murderer could be hunted down. He or she was not emboldened by anonymous haters urging more violence. I would welcome that old world back in a New York minte.
Close to a year ago, I made the decision to leave Facebook because of the constant political arguments and rancor and the demonization of the "other". And that was just among my friends! (For the most part, the people I was "friends" with on Facebook were people I was friends with in real life). But let's be honest. Social media is here to stay, like it or not. And the fact that I decided it wasn't for me doesn't mean I'm better than those who are still using the medium. And the vast majority will continue using it, more and more. It's impossible to go back. What's needed is a global push to change the way social media is used, to provide platforms that are designed to appeal to rational discussion and respect for others, to provide algorithms where fact rises to the top, not rumor and innuendo. This is a tall order. Perhaps as true AI emerges over the coming decades, it can be leveraged into assisting the human race to curb our worst impulses online.
2
Freedom of speech is only possible and useful, when it is a right of citizenship, in a particular locale, in which all have the expectation of it and the knowledge of the responsibility that goes hand in hand with the right.
2
The same mindset that has resulted in environmental polution is at work at Facebook/Twitter/Google. When the only thing that matters is the economic interests of the bottom line, investment in polution prevention is not considered a sound investment. And just as we have seen efforts such as the Superfund cleanup fail to keep up with the ever growing volume of polution, we now see the same phenomenon with the internet sludge. Maybe someday society might think ahead and try to prevent polution before it starts, but that is probably just wishful thinking. And as long as the internet poluters continue to be more concerned about the appearance of doing something about it rather the the reality, we won't be seeing a change anytime soon.
4
Facebook and Twitter must be regulated. And much better than guns currently are. This may mean regulating by age and identification and background checks. Ms Swisher understands it's much too late to put the horse back in the barn.
It shouldn't be easy for anyone to pick up an AK47, or send poisonous, incendiary and dangerous information out on social media - no one, not even Donald Trump.
2
@Jim Forst You want people to undergo a background check before they take the dangerous step of sharing their opinion.
This country is lost.
@Lilo
Hysteria is not useful in your defense of what is unfettered hate speech on social media. Somehow the world was not coming apart before FB, Twitter and Google. Print media is an individual choice to read or not; and, it is regulated. Social media is no better than trash flyers tacked onto telephone poles. If that is how you get your news, that is unfortunate for you.
@Linda Miilu
"Hate speech" is not a meaningful term under the US First Amendment. Your ad hominems aside you will notice that there today is no background check to send out information on social media, nor is there the legal ability to shut down social media.
We don't DO THAT in the US. People do that in China or Sri Lanka or other places where there's no First Amendment and no history of dissent.
Print media is not regulated for content the way this column and this particular commenter would prefer. You can go purchase and read "Mein Kampf" right this minute without government permission. That's as it should be in a free nation.
Swisher's commentary is wholly dishonest. Political and religious leaders, right up to the Presidents of the U.S., along with mainstream journalists, media - radio, TV, newspapers, etc., have been spreading paranoia and false information before, during and after crises of various kinds for a very very long time. Anyone read most any newspaper recently? Social media has just added another vehicle for doing so for a world that lives more atomized, even at a local level. Better to blame companies for creating the electronic instruments to communicate with.
Likewise, the world didn't need contemporary social media to experience regular mass slaughters, organized and egged on by those same forces as described before, and often celebrated or given justification by religious publications, starting with the Hebrew bible, right up to the current day.
3
"In the early days of the internet, there was a lot of talk of how this was a good thing, getting rid of those gatekeepers."
That was before gatekeepers like Zuckerberg came along. I suspect that many in the developing world don't know that the internet exists without Facebook, and that's exactly what he wanted them to think all along. Imagine living in a poor country with few trustworthy or reliable news outlets. Naturally Facebook is going to fill the void, and that's even worse.
1
Where has this hatred, bigotry, and racism been hiding?
We are all complicit in allowing hate...and blaming Zuck and other tech moguls as being responsible for this attack against fellow global citizens! What a travesty.
And no, Trump and Stephen Miller didn’t cause hate to happen.
I was an MD in a medical battalion in Vietnam. The “atrocities” of war! A switch wasn’t turned on overnight that compelled US soldiers to burn down village after village of rice farmers. We felt so smug that somehow we were better than these “chinks.”
Were the Japanese more craven? After all look at the Bataan Death March...the fact that one out of four POWs died in Asian camps. Then LOOK AT GITMO and ABU GHRAIB! That is us! Oh we used lawyers to tell us that torture was necessary after 9/11...but every honest study shows that torture does NOT work!
Yet Trump declares that waterboarding was the least he would do INCLUDING finding the families of unindicted terrorists and killing them too.
North Korea continues its own genocide in its horrific gulags. Children born in these camps grow up to rat out their parents for listening to a forbidden radio, then stand and watch them be slaughtered by the camp guards.
There were seven times as many Google searches for Notre Dame’s fire as there were for the nearly 300 Sri Lankans actually killed in churches.
We are Bad Code. Evolution brought us here. It’s “survival of the fit” NOT fittest.
Perhaps our human species needs to be wiped out.
3
I do not participate in any online social media software. The reasons are simple, I enjoy my privacy, I'm not a narcissist, I'm not a voyeur, and I don't have time to listen to or read dribble, especially from illiterates like Trump. The internet is a great place to learn, providing I can trust the sites I visit to be truthful. Soon, nothing you see and hear in the social media or news world can be trusted to be truthful. Sorry to say this but people are using the internet to erode the concept of free speech and we need to remove them from the digital domain. Allowing people with malicious intent to easily find each other is as dangerous to society as allowing a cancer to go untreated in your body. Let them go back to soap boxes in parks and street corners to rant.
1
The easiest way to stop hate speech on the platforms is to no longer allow anonymity on it. Your correct name should be attached to what you say.
5
Those protesting that social media is in and of itself a neutral entity sound quite a bit like the "guns don't kill people, people kill people crowd". Either we collectively believe that people by and large can be trusted to behave themselves and need little regulation or we don't. When it comes to human nature, I'm largely pessimistic. I see it all around me - when rules are lax, people will go for the kill.
5
“You can’t shut it off,” the executive said flatly. “It’s too late.”
Translation: You can't shut it off. I'm making a terrific living at this now.
5
It is too late. All kinds of online communication is getting out and around in the Sri Lankan universe in spite of the shutdown.
meh. in short, can't tame the media so why try.
Well, yes, we could shut down social media and return to our dependency on the old, “trusted” sources . . . but then, how would we have known that these were actually Christian churches that were targeted?
A great piece...until the last bit. Of course it's not too late, that's a complete cop-out. Social media may never disappear, but it would be easy to shrink it to the point where most people once again rely on professionally curated news outlets (and, unfortunately, Fox News, but even Fox still stays just this side of the river of sewage that flows through social media). Just force social media companies to charge subscription fees. Almost any amount will do. The people who swallow this stuff hook, line and sinker are as cheap as they are ignorant. If they have to pay for it, they'll find other ways to communicate.
5
I once saw a cartoon with two people attending the wake of a 'friend'. One person at the wake said to the other, the deceased said he had 2,000 friends on face book, where are they?
I am very pleased with myself that I ignored many of my 'friends' wanting me to join them on face book and other social medias.
1
It is true: regulating speech, thoughts and ideas works really well for suppressing violence. Just look at the crime rates in China. Or Orwell's Oceania.
When providers knowingly host illegal content, they should be held accountable. Sort of how a newspaper should be held accountable if they print, say, an ad calling for a riot or a contract killing. If the add is buried in the personals written in code, on the other hand....
Ending social media entirely is a fantasy. At the end of the day, social media sites are little more than a platform - yes, one that has been monetized to tremendous profit, but a platform nonetheless. You can kill the revenue generated, but you can't kill the human desire to communicate. Long before Facebook, Google, et al, became the behemoths they are today, people were using the internet to spread their ideas, both wonderful and utterly abhorrent.
Ending social media is - for better, for worse - impossible outside the realms of totalitarianism. Take Facebook offline today, Facebook 2 will be here to replace it tomorrow, whether we like it or not.
1
Shut down social media? I don't think so. First off, as so many have already pointed out, the cat is out of that bag. Second, is social media actually blameworthy- or is it the base side of human nature?
I liken social media to inventions through the ages that have helped and hindered society, much like:
1. Electricity
2. Gun powder
3. The automobile
4. Antibiotics
5. Fill in the blank______________
Should we get rid of these too?
7
Read some history, folks.
1
I wish we could shut down twitter!
Permanently!
5
@Richard Marcley I agreee. Shut down Twitter down if for no other reason than to shut Trump up.
We should have listened to Douglass Adams when we had the chance when he wrote in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy about a remarkable little fish that you could stick in your ear and would instantly translate anything you heard into your own language:
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communications between cultures and races, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
5
One of the problems with the idea of shutting off social media is that we've yet to determine who gets to do the shutting off and when. Suppose our "fearless leader" decides that the public shouldn't have access to impeachment proceedings in the event of an impeachment.
All news of such an event cut off from the public so nobody gets to know if it's happening or not.. The only news that would get out then would be positive spin in his favor and anything negative instantly censored for "the good of the nation".. We'd then have nothing but how wonderful he is with absolutely no news of his criminal ways, just that Mount Rushmore has been altered forever with Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and Roosevelt all removed in favor of one big bag of cheetos..
That's certainly no way to run a railroad nor a nation.
2
You do all realize that these comments are a form of social media? Your post is seen by everyone visiting this article instead of your Facebook friends or Twitter followers, but is that a critical difference? You have the right to express yourself online but others do not because they use a platform you don't like?
9
There is a huge difference. This comment board is heavily monitored. One could even say it is censored, at least in terms of hate speech. Most social media is not. Perhaps it should be.
4
@Susan That is not an argument for the government to force every online blog or site that allows comments to moderate as the NYT does.
Another company is free to have a different policy.
1
Social media is creating exactly the behaviors it was designed to create. Every classical media outlet has long known that violence and prurient material is good for the bottom line. If it bleeds it leads has long been their motto. Facebook, Twitter and their ilk maximize user participation in exactly the same way, with algorithmic hate amplifiers. Retuning the algorithms to post only good news and good feelings stories would ruin their business plans so it will never happen. Zuckerberg and Sandberg are sociopaths who don't care about the consequences of their business plans so don't look for anything beyond stonewalling from them. What we are witnessing is western capitalism at work, extracting profits whatever the social cost, hence global warming and attendant dislocations, hence virtual mob triggered violence and the unwinding of societies across the globe,
4
I really don’t Z and S intended to create a world of sectarian bloodshed. I think do think they slid down the proverbial slippery slope. They turned a blind eye to the trouble that was brewing and once they realized they actually had a problem their response has been anemic, overwhelmingly designed to protect their revenue stream. But, honestly, if it wasn’t Facebook it would have been something else and we would have just had villains with different faces.
1
I fail to see how turning off the tv or changing the channel or unplugging the router or turning the radio dial or using the NyT to line a litter box has any relevance to curbing or amplifying one’s behavior. If it bleeds it leads (a common practice at most newspapers and one the NyT follows). The only difference is the platform and the ability for individuals or groups to connect to the world. Sounds like the exact same thing the Times does, yet we are not running after the NyT with torches.
1
Social media is just a vehicle to sell advertising, steal personal data, and allow humans to indulge themselves in narcissism and relatively anonymous bad behavior. Immediacy negates reflection and reason. Time to step back and shut it down.
2
“You can’t shut it off,” the executive said flatly. “It’s too late.”
Spoken like a true capitalist. America, the land where any defective product can reach the market, and once marketed, it takes heroic effort to remove.
Round-up? Guns? Predatory lending? It’s too late.
2
Obviously we have no chance against social media - it brought us Trump, and it brought us the spasms of unhinged opposition in his wake. Social media sorts us into camps and feeds us relentless PR about how bad our enemies are and how good our side is, makes us feel good about ourselves, keeps us coming back for more.
Democracy and free speech were the best possible solution for 100s of years, but my guess is that social media is a watershed technology that will require new solutions, new defenses. Ironically its possible China's top-down, censor-anything model might be better suited for humanity, produce better results, until we get some sort of hold on the ills of social media. Right now there are just too many shameless people who will abuse it to manipulate us, and we have little way of defending ourselves.
1
Budding libertarians, take note. This is what total de-regulation gets you in a world where tribalism has not managed to evolve out of our brains. The next time you hear the leader of the free world commit to destroying regulations, think Sri Lanka and pause to connect the dots.
5
It's appalling how a "journalist" applauds a regime cutting off
social media. This shows how mainstream media regard the Internet as a threat to their autonomy. We learn much of what we know from web sources, including social media, since the mainstream media often fail to inform us or misinform us. Yes, this is plenty of chaff and worse, but that is the price we pay for free exchange of information. You can't be a true journalist and want to shut down the public's right to know. Ms. Swisher admits she is "ashamed," as she should be.
4
Human beings, it turns out, are terrible people. If there is something that can be violated, misused, ill-treated, or put to evil use, some human beings will do so. Without remorse, regret, or shame.
As people we survived millennia without on-line social media where social constructs helped maintain a somewhat civil discourse. And I believe we could do so again.
Free speech as experienced by our fore-bearers carried a degree of responsibility if you were speaking publicly. Also there was an expectation on the listeners' part to listen critically.
3
This "Journalist" is under the impression that censoring peoples opinions, and blocking their freedoms is a good thing.
She is oblivious to the fact that, before the internet, people killed each other for stupid reasons in even greater numbers.
The truth is, no matter how hysterical the news ramps it up, we are living in the most peaceful time in human history.
The real reason news outlets, and Journalists are excited to see social media banned is because they have no control over it. Like the church in the old days only making bibles in Latin, and not teaching the public Latin. It's about control, and this "Journalist" is thrilled to see some fascist authoritarian controls put into place and our freedoms blocked.
3
It is not too late. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Technology will always be used for good and ill, but the ill is insupportable. I say shut it down--the whole thing, forever. People checking on their loved ones can pick up the phone.
1
Social media sites aren’t like the brooms in the sorcerer’s apprentice- growing out of control with no way to stop.
Quite the opposite is true, actually. It takes huge amounts of effort to keep them up and running.
Indeed it would be very easy to shut them down- just need a directive to go so.
4
I understand the concerns expressed here about the suppression of free speech, but to me that is a secondary concern in the face of the numerous tragedies that have been facilitated on unregulated social media platforms. There are other platforms for free speech that do a better job of policing their content and people can keep in touch with their loved ones by email or phone. People can send all the videos and pictures they want that way as well.
If it is possible for the social media platforms to develop effective controls then allow them to continue operating after they implement them. Otherwise, the negative effect they have had on the world far outweighs any benefit they provide for helping people with good intentions to communicate.
3
@Don
If you're arguing that the government, any government, should be able to shut down methods of communication to keep people safe, it's really difficult for me to understand how and when you draw the line as to which mode of communication CAN'T be shut down by the government, for our own good of course.
19th and 20th century lynchings were advertised by newspaper and telephone.
The Rwandan genocide saw radio being used to devastating effect. Earlier organized violence had communication based in letters and telegraph.
And so on.
2
If people would learn to think critically, and not buy into the most destructive and outrageous things they see on these platforms, we wouldn't much less problem than we have today. I often see neighbors who forward around the most ridiculous things that are easily fact checked. We have to recognize that they buy into these ideas and forward them because they legitimize their world view. I rarely watch YouTube, and not for any kind of news (great for learning how to repair something). I have never used or been on Twitter, Instagram, Whatsap, etc. I do use Facebook sparingly, but NEVER post commentary, "like" politically oriented content, etc. I don't ready their news feed. It's merely a way to share some information about family and that's IT. I also think the people who developed these applications really had no idea what they were initially doing, found it was a money machine for selling personal data, and did not focus in the least on the possible destructive aspects. Now it's too late and the genie is out of the bottle. It's especially true because the applications are "free" - I say that in the sense we don't have to pay a monthly subscription -but in the long run they cost us dearly in more ways than one.
1
For the people saying, social media doesn't spread hatred, people spread hatred, I have one simple hypothetical for you:
How will you feel when the violence comes for you?
There's a certain segment of the American population that, for whatever reason, looks at escalating discord of all sorts and says: "regrettably, there is nothing to be done. We are what we are."
Perhaps it's time to replace "Rest in Peace" with "Regrettably, there was nothing to be done."
2
@Anonymous
Over the course of 250,000 years or longer, human brains were fine-tuned to maintain social order in clans of a couple dozen hunter-gatherers who knew each other intimately.
Only in the last 12,000 years, we've been trying to utilize those basic instincts to intuit hazards and benefits in increasingly vast, anonymous groups. And in the last 100 years, we've developed technologies that show us rare events from halfway across a country or on the other side of the planet. Our African savannah brains are unable to emotionally process such trauma proportionately.
As your response demonstrates.
1
The sun sets each evening on a portion of the world. Let social media sunset, too, for 8-10 hours each evening. Tech/telecos could probably flip off texting, FB, Instagram, etc., maybe add an "emergency" text channel that runs through a regulated channel to be sure it's a genuine emergency.
Commerce could continue and probably some other functions, but we need a cooldown every day.
If people wanted to capture thoughts, events, images, etc, at night they can - they can even go through the process of sending/posting them. But those functions would cue up and not be acted on until the social media sun rose again in the morning.
That's probably not the total solution, but it would be interesting to see what happens under such a system.
2
It should be as hard to get my phone number, or any of my personal characteristics, as it is to get a FISA warrant.
My email and phone number should be mine and only mine to share with specific persons I designate.
My social media account should be available only to those whom I designate.
If advertisers were forced to go with only the most general kind of aggregate data, and to identify themselves clearly, it would go a long way toward eliminating the kind of deeply personal manipulation that has handed malevolent actors such a powerful weapon.
De-personalizing data to advertisers does not interfere with anyone’s right to free speech.
5
And the qualitative difference between government shutdown of social media and China’s “Great Wall” is? Increasingly little.
3
You're right. Social media is a modern plague. It's the tool of choice for liars, knaves, narcissists, sociopaths, terrorists, dictators, oligarchs and trump.
7
To the anonymous social media executive: The Sri Lankan government has shown that social media can be shut off. The question is whether we have the political will to do so.
Building off that point, I don't think Australia and New Zealand have the equivalent of Citizens United, meaning it is harder to buy off their legislators.
If the government were to try to shut down social media, undoubtedly there would be court suits and requests for injunctions. It would be interesting to see the arguments used. We already have "fire in a crowded theater" limitations on free speech. It would be interesting to see that argument playing out in court.
Comparing this situation to Trump's Muslim ban might be instructive. I find it hard to imagine people picketing in front of Facebook's offices as they did at major airports when the Muslim ban was announced. Social media has lost that battle already.
Perhaps this is an example of having too much freedom in the hands of people who don’t or won’t exercise it responsibly.
3
@John
I agree. People have too much freedom. So what we should do is have everyone hand over their freedom to me. I'll decide who is responsible enough to have freedom.
Now what makes me the best choice you ask? Well the very fact that someone would even ask that question is pretty good evidence that they're not the kind of person to be trusted with too much freedom...
1
Its pretty clear that social media is a "Gateway Drug" to unbridled fearmongering and outlandish hatefulness. The virulence seen in most "comment" sections is divisive and tear at the social fabric carefully cultivated by prior generations and coded in the word "Manners".
There are no manners on social media and the cathartic effect of voicing hostility has addicted many. I see the only answer being to totally avoid social media just like many refuse to read the graffiti on bathroom stalls.
3
"The companies that run these platforms seem incapable of controlling the powerful global tools they have built." Check.
"Malevolent actors continue to game [these] platforms [which is] why there's still no real solution in sight anytime soon, because they were built to work exactly this way." Check.
"One insider at YouTube described the experience to me as a 'nightmare version of Whack-a-mole.'" Check.
"Social media has blown the lid off controls that have kept society in check." Check and double-check.
"You can't shut it off ... it's too late." Check check check.
Boy, are we in trouble.
3
I recently deactivated my Facebook account. Enough said.
3
@Bill
Good. I have never had one and never will, but I'm still scared.
1
Anonymity, it must be understood, doesn’t need to observer all those niceties which people idealistically inform us are good. No precaution or hesitance is necessary for mercy, belief, humanity, truth, religion, etc. For the anonymous, to stick to what is good is a sucker’s game, compelled by some outmoded idealistic philosophy. To the anonymous, deception is the central element of their skill. Masking their true intentions. They eliminate competition, keeping their followers and flock weak and divided. They are cruel and kind, forcing those that follow them that, “The ends justify the means!” that–“The result renders the verdict.” There’s no high authority. No appeal to justice or order. Or rather, they are it. Anonymity then; is that which is base and most foul. Ruthless. Lacking remorse. The anonymous internet as it is; is dispiriting, gloomy and disappointing. This is a regrettable fact. An unavoidable structural byproduct of an anarchistic, lawless system that compels each of us who wish, like the participants in a perpetual “state of war” or “come to blows”, to look after their own interests. And what of the anonymous? Well, that’s the devil in all of us first and foremost at the head of the pack.
1
I think the "manipulation" of the masses has began much before, since the techno invention of the radio and Tv. Regrettably, there were terrorists and massacres taking place before the digital era; the difference is that the access of the digital era are at the hands of everybody. But I don't think "censure" will help to stop any massacre because how do you decide whom to "censure." We have to find another solution. And, a last comment, you write: "Imagine if you mashed up newspapers, cable, radio and the internet into one outlet in the United States..." Well, there is no need, thanks to the techno progress. Linebarger, a creator of "black" and "gray" propaganda in the U.S., wrote in 1948, in his book "Psychological Warfare" that in the U.S. there is no need to "manipulate" people because “the US is lucky in possessing a people well agreed on most fundamentals.” And, he asserts that this was achieved thanks to "The commercial press, radio, magazines, and book publishing facilities of the country [which] for the most part expressed a national point of view without being prodded."
2
It is hard to see how Mark Zuckerberg and the Google founders could have seen this coming back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The optimism required to found companies in your dorm room, and elite American dorm life more generally, do not naturally lead to the contemplation of evil.
The ethos of entrepreneurial capitalism and what-are-you-doing Friday night dorm life is built on the assumption that everyone just wants to know about the latest cool or fun idea or development or way to get a hot date. It doesn’t contemplate anything more irrational than getting drunk or high and doing something that might get you suspended.
But blowing up a church? Shooting up a mosque or a synagogue? That ‘s as far away from launching a start-up or figuring out how to get lucky with person X as one can imagine.
The social networks have outgrown their founders, and more importantly, they have outgrown the cultures that made them possible, They have gotten mixed up in conflicts that only good governments can solve. And nowadays, the go-to governments are run by people who are not that far removed in their habits of thought from those who commit senseless violence.
Sure those running the go-to governments would never bomb a church, etc. (unless they do so by proxy through an allied government like the one in Saudi Arabia) But they deliberately anger and divide populations for fun and profit, and help making some of the violence possible.
3
"As a tech journalist," you should know that it is the anonymity of the digital world that has largely allowed for and created the plethora of lunatics spewing hatred -- mostly without accountability. That alone is the biggest personal change in the digital world, and that alone has afforded cowards the anonymity to foster and incite hatred worldwide. Cowards who would otherwise be very, very quiet and in fear of their own lives. But now, instead, they get to threaten ours -- perhaps even from the garage next door -- and we don't have any recourse to know exactly who they are, to perhaps pay them a polite visit.
2
Mao Zedong was interviewed by a European reporter in China shortly after the end of WWII and she asked him what kind of wars will happen in the future. Mao replied that religious war will be the next major conflict and will eventually followed by racial wars. Looks like Mao made a correct prediction. Now religious killings are wide spread throughout the world . A racial war will be unthinkable. Depressing.
2
How interesting that we are slowly realizing that not all kinds of speech online is appropriate and that some is an instrument to the perpetration of hateful violence, no matter what side of the religions schism one likes to find oneself on... Next time people feel like criticizing societies for their approach to quelling ethnic violence which happens to be perpetrated by a Muslim faction, that time, there, think again, and remember what happened here. Some situations call for some sort of action to remove the enabling factors. Yes, this was indeed a good move. You do nothing to prevent violence, that's what you get...
Looks like for the Times that while its highest priority is to bash Mr. Trump obsessively, its second highest priority is to bash tech companies, social media, Google, etc. On, and on, and on. This column, like all the others, greatly exaggerates the bad side of social media, etc. 99.9% of social media use is pretty benign. YouTube is great. Most people use Facebook to show pictures of themselves and their friends having a good time. But I guess the Times likes this tech bashing theme. Probably won't stop. Guess some readers eat it up. I hope you realize (but obviously you don't) that many of the Times columnists and these comments fall into the social media category. And with some of its faults. Like the tendency to exaggerate. And obsess.
6
If only more people would take the actual step of leaving Twitter/Facebook.etc behind. Swisher can write this column a thousand times but it is meaningless every time if she goes right back to her 'feed'.
1
The reality is Anti-social Media.
1
A digitally connected world exaggerates extreme ideologies.
Likewise, it exaggerates the PERCEIVED CONSEQUENCES of this accelerated exchange of ideas.
Hundreds of bombing deaths in churches is tragic. Dozens of shooting deaths in schools is horrific.
But it only matters to the cosmic order if we LET it matter. These numbers are tiny in the grand scheme of human affairs.
People perceive our society as unacceptably dangerous, when it is in fact the safest it has been in my entire middle-aged life (born 1971).
More children die of dog attacks in the US each year than adults (many white) who are killed without justification by police.
You would save more lives simply by banning dogs in homes with toddlers than by trying to develop convoluted and counterproductive modifications to police tactics.
In short, more than empowering rare ideologies, instant interactive information makes us jump at shadows.
2
I quit social media months ago because fighting with just about everyone I knew over the nature of reality, fact vs fantasy, was exhausting and was diminishing my quality of life. FB, is a festering cespool of intentional misinformation designed to manipulate an ignorant public, and the masses are merrily marching down their Newsfeeds to their demise. People may fear censorship but something needs to be done before something genuinely catastrophic happens.
475
@arusso "genuinely catastrophic" has already happened countless times. I agree with the sentiment that social media is a huge problem, yet I also agree that they have ingrained themselves into daily life & the economy to the point where they are next to impossible get rid of. With that said, I believe there are steps the social media companies can take to deal with these issues if they are bold enough. For example, they could immediately freeze a wide swath of keywords that could be associated with the crisis as well as upload/sharing of images/video for a set amount of time.
31
@arusso
I couldn't agree with you more. I grew up in a communist country where we scrupulously tried to keep our private lives hidden from the government's secret police and their big brother eavesdropping techniques. I joined FB for about a month, then realized what it was doing and quit immediately. I marvel at people's willingness to give everything about themselves away. I refer to FB, other social media and multi-nationals as corporate communism. Evermore power concentrated in the hands of the few to manipulate the masses. Whether it's ideological (like communism) or to make a buck is besides the point.
105
@arusso
I quit FB for a year but then went back on. I've unfriended anyone who nasty, mean, cruel, spreads falsities, start arguments, trolls, or does anything uncivil.
I, myself, confess that I was so angry after Bush was elected that I was not a decent person so you can imagine what I was like the first few month the current person affected my 'so-called attempt to improve' content. So I quit.
I decided to retaliate by reevaluating common social manners and civilities and adopting a great many. I make sure I do one gesture of kindess a day to some one I don't know. I also pick up stray pieces of trash when walking anywhere and disposing of them properly. I will soon start where gloves year around because I am now sitting at home on this second week of illness that led me to the doctors and some tests. Why? Because a very grateful homeless and ill man was so grateful for the small thing I gave him to help that he shook both of my hands and I got whatever he was sick with. I hope he is feeling better. I am but still not well. I doubt he is better though. After all, he is homeless.
I missed the photos of my grandchildren and children in the states. I went back to facebook and have accepted only certain person beyond my family into my circle.
I am now determined to make the world a better place through civil contact and common courtesy.
26
I my initial thought on hearing that they turned off social media was good too. Which is a really sad state of affairs. A crime occurs and then we are all impacted by a secondary non lethal attach of lies and hate and anger all sent out in hopes of more violence. And the lack of nasty tweets, etc about this horror was good. Hopefully once all is know about who did this and why and how this fits into the context of Sri Lanka recent history and mess, then the social media can be opened again. It is terrible that whenever something bad happens, we are hit again by bad actors and their opinions. I know it is freedom of speak, although I still don't understand how purposeful misinformation and lies is considered free speech. Besides the bad guys in the real world, we now had bad guys to stir things up in FB (that I do not use) and twitter etc.
2
"Shutting social media down in times of crisis isn’t going to work."
With AI(Artificial Intel) being used to facial recognize nearly all can't it also recognize 'death events' via user posts and impose auto 1-4 hour moratorium? Big Tech can either see this need or be regulated.
I was actually thinking shutting down media in times of crisis won't work for the opposite reason.
"Imagine if you mashed up newspapers, cable, radio and the internet into one outlet in the United States and you have the right idea."
Right. Imagine government shutting down newspapers, cable, radio and internet during a declared crisis or worse a fabricated one. We only need look to Trump's "national emergency" to see how this approach, even when technically possible, will backfire dramatically.
So no. Shutting down social media is not a solution. But what is? How do you turn a weapon back into an instrument of peace and productivity? Filtering social media is obviously both ineffective and morally compromised. So what's the alternative?
I'm oddly reminded of dynamite. The Nobel Peace Prize is named after Alfred Nobel, the chemist who invented dynamite. He was envisioning great efforts of energy and creation. His invention was obviously weaponized as well.
However, you don't hear much about the scourge of dynamite these days. Civilization managed to put that genie back in its bottle. We didn't accomplish that task by banning TNT. However, we should acknowledge the possibility that TNT only lost its appeal as a weapon when more destructive options came along.
Social media could become harmless again but we should be concerned when the unimagined alternatives come along.
2
It's a shame that this article conflates the spread of misinformation while a tragic event is happening with ongoing radicalization. It in essence turns this into a discussion of whether social media is good or not.
If the goal is to stop radicalization via tech, then the author is in essence proposing a shut-down of speech.
Should the determination of what is "prohibited" is left to the government. This would preclude things like Arab Spring or identification of governmental atrocities.
The editorial's support of censoring free speech is exceptionally concerning coming from a journalist -- especially one who works for a newspaper that famously released the Pentagon Papers, which the government claimed should have been stopped as it could lead to danger and violence.
We should note that during times of tragedy and crisis, social media helps us know if our loved-ones are okay. As many of us know, when tragedy strikes, phones lines are overwhelmed and often useless. Social media lets us tell our families that we are okay -- and helps first responders know who needs help.
We should avoid foisting all of societies problems onto tech and avoid suggesting censoring free speech is the solution.
1
When 30/40/50 year-olds are ultimately spending a lot of their free time in the same way as fourteen-year-olds (looping through meaningless feeds of narcissism and falsities on social media), there is a problem.
Just delete it. All of the tools for communicating are still there - most of them provided by Apple - a company with actual tech (not just a website that - admittedly - works well).
2
Just how precious is the freedom to abuse our freedoms? I don't use social media and am unaware of it's contributions to
a better society and world but I strongly suspect that the contribution of hate and nonsense is far greater. We aren't who we think we are. We are less than we once were. When what we create tears us apart more than it unites us, it is time for a radical course change. Enough is enough!
Evolution has gifted mammals (and many other closely related species) with compartmentalized body plans. These separations (called "fascia") are thought to be adaptations against infection. Variants that didn't have the barriers died off. Those with them lived on.
The internet, and social media, in particular, have punctured the sociological "fascia" accelerating infections throughout the world.
Evolution has told this story before -- and the result isn't pretty.
2
The promise of the internet was that decentralized networks would allow a million voices to bloom. To use a conservative term of art: it was supposed to be the marketplace of ideas, where the good and previously marginalized would rise to the top.
But now, despite this amazing technology, we find ourselves in a world where power, attention, and capital are all concentrated in the networks of a few billionaires in California. And since profit is driven by concentrating that 'engagement' in those networks, these networks do not allow the cream to rise to the top but instead push the absolute worst of humanity. That is what the capitalists and their algorithms know and won't admit: every time someone dies a bloody death and it's streamed on their platform, they make a buck. Sending your mom a message for that family recipe doesn't quite generate the profit that screaming matches with distant cousins over politics does. They have colonized our inner lives and emotions for profit.
Their algorithms ratchet up the outrage, the horror, the victimization, the paranoia and conspiracy theories in every corner of the web you visit. That's what drives engagement. They are desperate to keep you within the walled garden of their network, and they'll stop at nothing to keep you there.
Form follows function. The only way out of this mess is to deny them the source of their power: the centralized nature of their networks. The way forward for social media is federation.
4
@Randonneur I don't think Murdoch is in California
@Randonneur
Great post!
So, do we treat these networks as monopolies, and break them up like they used treat monopolies in the days before the "free market ideology" and cronyism made the government an appendage of corporations? Is it possible to go back to that world?
Or, is there some other way to 'federate' them?
1
@Bryan It's a structural problem with the technology. Facebook is the 2019 version of Web 1.0's AOL. It's a walled garden and they make a buck by keeping you there. The technology and the design of it has gotten more sophisticated, but it's the same thing.
The technology to power a decentralized, encrypted, federated web already exists. ActivityPub, Mastodon, Matrix/RiotIM, Nextcloud, etc.
I remember when Friendster and Myspace were turned into ghost towns over night. The same could happen to Facebook, if we all decided we were sick of it. The only question is what comes next.
Are we better off having social media? I realize there is no putting the genie back into the bottle now -- I'm just wondering out loud what real service all of the social media really provide. As we learned in 2016, social media can be easily faked with the intent to do harm -- such as impact election results. Should all social media corporations be treated the way AT&T (MA Bell) was when it was broken up? Isn't capitalism about competition? The huge social media/tech companies are monopolies. The mergers and acquisitions in the past 30 years have resulted in less competition, price of products is driven up, wages for workers have remained flat for decades and the huge corporations do not provide health care (medical/dental/vision/pregnancy/family leave). This works well for investors, for the bottom line profit of the corporations and for the top execs but it doesn't seem like capitalism and it certainly isn't fair. Time for change.
8
I never got the allure of putting information about myself and my family on the internet for all to see.
When I want to be connected to family and friends, I send an email or make a phone call.
I get my news from professional news media that are bound by a code of ethics and perform fact-checking before running with a news item.
I only use my cellphone for communication and sometimes looking up an address.
Social media is not necessary. I say shut it down until it can be re-engineered to do minimal harm.
And by the way, the problems with poorly regulated social media are miniscule next to what will happen when artificial intelligence really gets going. Stephen Hawking was prophetic when he warned that AI poses an existential threat to mankind.
8
@Steve W
I thought I was the only one who still operated like this!
Glad to know I'm not alone.
I basically have ZERO interest in social media, and I agree that its unnecessary, but shutting it down troubles me also.
Isn't some regulation of it possible?
1
Any new tool, weapon, or technology, given its potential uses, are evaluated based on who has access to them. At one end of the continuum would be nuclear weapons, so there is an effort to limit who may produce and keep them. Well, Social Media is out of the bottle, everyone has access. By itself, it SM is not evil. Used by zealots, it proves to be one tool of terror.
4
Previous generations of Americans weren’t idiots. They regulated media because they knew how easy minds can be manipulated.
We tend to forget how easily a society can slip into chaos, losing its civilization, culture, ... and turning raw and violent.
We need to regulate the Internet, there’s no way around it. Our societies are going south.
The Internet is full of manipulation.
Even something as simple as looking up reviews of products is becoming a problem. Amazon is full of fake reviews, and reliable sites like the Wire cutter are buried under dozens of fake review sites (“The ten best XYZ” etc.).
21
Who knew the Age of Aquarius was going to fizzle out so pathetically.
Too late?
A friend who is a scientist dug out an old issue of Popular Science to show me. The headline on top was "Global Warming: Are We Waking Up 15 Years Too Late?"
The date of the issue was August 1989.
I think it possible that societies, institutions, governments, and industries can all heal and do what they are really intended to do, primarily building a playing field upon which all who participate have a shot at success, if things like greed and envy and bigotry and hate are all shunned.
Now I will remind myself to get real.
We live in an age of unbelievable wealth and progress and innovation; yet the right wing tilt towards kleptocracy and oligarchy has convinced many of US that someone else is stealing our chances at the gold ring. And enough people are believing their lies that division is the only thing we can count on in the U.S.
5
@Bob Laughlin
When a few plutocrats own much of the wealth globally, why wouldn't ordinary people believe that their chances to move beyond a certain point are blocked from ever reaching that rarified world. The last time such wealth was seen was in the Guilded Age. That time saw child labor in mills, black lung disease in mines, sweatshops in the garment industry which produced the famous fire. Now we see sweatshops in Bangladesh where people died in a similar fire. Neither building provided exits for fire; doors were locked. Child labor exists in the world now, just as brutal as it always has been. Great wealth has been hoarded at the top, even here where tax laws have been changed to allow a few to acquire vast sums with no obligation towards the larger community which supports that wealth. Taxes pay for roads, airports, freight trains, tanker trains moving oil in an unregulated fashion through communities. Rural communities are now polluted by unrestrained toxic smokestacks. Perhaps Marx was correct when he claimed that capitalism carried its own death warrant. At some point even the very rich will not escape polluted air, polluted rivers and oceans. Those responsible will be dead before the earth reaches maximum pollution; their descendants will live with the same bad air and polluted water. There are places in China where children go outside on "good days"; farm land is polluted by toxic sewage and industrial waste. Is that where we are headed?
1
Totally agree.
My extended family keeps in contact via a mailing list. Weaponized social media is not a necessity.
2
I’ve never been one to be an early adopter of new technology, and I never signed up with Facebook or twitter. Guess what, you can live perfectly fine without it. I talk with my real friends and family regularly, and I’m not distracted by what other people are saying or doing. Quit using them, you will be happier.
1
@Murray Kenney, who suggests that anonymity not be allowed:
Anonymity allows people to post opinions without fear of repercussion from employers, the government, and sometimes from family and friends. For instance, governmental employees live in a quandary; they feel pressure to keep their opinions to themselves, yet they are American citizens and should not be forced to lose their freedom or rights to participate in political discussions. Anonymity allows such free expression. The NYT knows who we are, anyway, should it ever be necessary to provide such information.
1
The human race was fine before social media and I'm certain we will be fine without it. Facebook claims that "people rely on our services to communicate with their loved ones", but do we though? There are countless ways to do that. Hoarding data is the paramount concern of these companies. Everything else is just trivial.
1
There is nothing good about a government having the ability shut down social media, or any media.
3
The article didn’t make clear if the author has stopped using social media. I would assume that anyone calling to shut something off a malevolent force would already be avoiding it.
1
It is not impossible. I do it. I do not use Twitter, or Facebook, or any of the social media platforms. To say otherwise is lazy and inaccurate.
2
The real reason why the main stream media dislikes FB and social media so much and wants to regulate it is simple. People on social media are free to express themselves and share opinions that the people who want to regulate it disagree with.
Sure, everyone disagrees with extremist violence but this is not a valid reason to regulate free speech.
If you dislike social media so much just stop using it. And stop it with all the articles and editorials telling us we are bad people if we continue using it.
5
Let’s be clear. Facebook/YouTube/Twitter do not spin up violence; people, governments and companies spin up violence. Digital media is the conduit and amplifier for purely human failings. Indeed, the invention of moveable type also is accused of spinning up violence; the centuries of Protestant vs Catholic wars, Mao’s Little Red Book, Das Kapital and Mein Kampf. Equal blame must go to the message creators and message consumers, not just the messengers. The failings that are spread by the internet are purely failings of human spirit, ethics and hate.
Who gets to decide what to censor? Is it Facebook/YouTube/Twitter? Is it the regulatory government? How soon before we have lese majeste laws forbidding criticism of our political/corporate/religious leaders? Shall we decide with torches and pitchforks? If Facebook/YouTube/Twitter were to miraculously vanish today, would any of this change. The internet finds a way. Some other amorphous, highly fragmented, digital presences would instantly step in to fill the void, much as Tor and the Darknet have backfilled those things which are unacceptable on the open internet.
Ultimately the madness that we see on Facebook/YouTube/Twitter is created by people and is willingly consumed by people. Therein lies the real problem.
188
@Tone
We need to deeply intervene in the Internet, at the level of China.
What the minds of people get exposed to needs to be regulated i.e. protected from harm. We did this with the traditional media, because previous generations knew its importance.
We need to take that same “fair and balanced” approach, and crack down on fake news and manipulation. This will be a Herculean task.
Yes, all of this may sound dark and against current beliefs of anything goes, but it’s reality. We simply forgot how easily advanced societies can slip into war and chaos through propaganda and mass manipulation.
The only ones benefitting from our increasing chaos are the rich.
Yes there will always be ways to circumvent filters, but 99% won’t (know how or bother to) do that.
36
@Tone Underlying your comment lies the assumption that people are fundamentally rational and generally able to exert free will. That's the foundation of the philosophies of the Enlightenment and its derivatives, including the operating system of the the US, aka, its Constitution.
The problem is, however, that that assumption is demonstrably false. The behavioral economists (Twersky, Kahneman, Thaler, etc) and others have the empirical data on this. So does Facebook/YouTube/Twitter. And with that, have deployed the most intrusive and effective persuasion technologies ever created.
The issue isn't regulating free speech. It's regulating the business models that actually incent the destructive use of that speech.
68
@Tone
You say: "Ultimately the madness that we see on Facebook/YouTube/Twitter is created by people and is willingly consumed by people. Therein lies the real problem."
Yes, but. People need tools to achieve both the best and the worst of which they are capable. And they need numbers. Social media allows people to easily amplify their worst traits, one of which is to project and scapegoat an "enemy" (doesn't matter who) as being responsible for their ills. Social media allows the easy assembly of virtual "crowds" - much like the real crowds that demagogues like Hitler used to rile up - and the irrational directing of their primal negative energy onto some kind of target. This was way less easy when you needed to put a real crowd together to achieve the same end.
That's the downside of social media. Is the upside, whatever that is, really worth it?
36
Also - Good!
The focus of FB and the other social media platforms has always been money. How much do we get from advertisers on our site no matter whether or not the posted items are true, hateful, incite people to racist or violent actions, etc. etc. and so forth. And they have managed to keep from being subject to the same regulations to which other media outlets - newspapers, TV, magazines - are subject.
If the rules that control print and TV media were applied, then FB et. al. would be liable for the damage they are enabling. Those rules already exist and that regulatory umbrella should be now applied to all the social media sites. It might not immediately stop all the damage, but at least social media purveyors would have to police their platforms or suffer the legal consequences.
4
@MB
Everyone should be liable for the real damage that they themselves actually cause. The knife maker should never be held to blame for murder or torture performed using their knives. Please stop giving people a pass for their own actions, simply because enforcement is difficult.
Let's be clear...ok to disable these services, but too often governments disable the entire Internet, which is not the same thing. And let us not forget that many of these services have also allowed for people to come together and challenge authority.
1
@Ken Functionally what is different between a countrywide killswitch and having the power to freely shut off individual services at will? You're advocating for un-elected gov't agencies to have at-will power over your ability to access and publish information in either case.
2
I hope I am as committed to freedom of expression as I believe I am. And I confess that I was somewhat surprised to find myself telling my wife this morning I approved of the Sri Lankan move to shut off the social media spigot. That change of heart began when pictures of journalists being beheaded and pilots being burned in cages started appearing on social media. I know all the arguments about a slippery slope when we begin censorship of any kind with supposedly good intentions, but those arguments are unconvincing now. The great patriot who told us those who will give up some freedom for security deserve neither freedom nor security surely did not anticipate this day.
4
@Thomas Hardley
Freedom of speech is unconvincing, eh? Then who limits those who limit speech? We cannot rely on the electorate; that almost certainly will crush minority views, as history has repeatedly shown. Freedom of speech absolutely implies non-violence towards those depicting (but not acting upon nor inciting) violence. The proper response is more speech, about those with terrible views, so they cannot hide; with such an incentive to avoid the social consequences, they will refrain from continuing that speech, or maybe they will convince you of their views. You also don't have to watch/listen. But there will be transient periods like this one that has caused your support to weaken, and you need to assure yourself that all alternatives to freedom of speech are ultimately unreliable (kind of like Churchill's dictum that democracy is the worst form of government except all the alternatives).
1
@Immigrant
England shut down the German Bund meetings; the same thing happened here. Freedom of hate speech urging violence and murder is not okay. The Oathkeepers are not okay. Charles Manson and his "free speech" was not okay. It appears there are no adults in the room; that includes Zuckerberg and his pediatrician wife. Power corrupts, unlimited power corrupts absolutely; that is also true of unlimited wealth. Citizens United which granted personhood to corporations opened the door to a new Guilded Age. Now Congress is staffed by those who are anxious to get their share of all that money. Every Congressional District now has an empty military base, funded by taxes. Shelters for mentally ill homeless were de-funded under Reagan, as were mental hospitals, as were community health centers. An empty doorway is good enough for the homeless to keep out of the rain, bundled up in dirty blankets. Alleys and sidewalks provide all the toilets homeless people need. This is a Dickensian world as disgusting as it was when he wrote his novels. We need a Dickens voice now.
As you probably know you are not the only journalist who has recently spoken out about about Facebook/Twitter/etc.
Carole Cadwalladr, of The Guardian/ Observer, last week at the TED conference said that liberal democracy is broken and that the "lords of silicon valley" are responsible.
The Facebook crew was not pleased, the Google gang was shocked to be named, and the co-founder of Twitter made some comments that were as nonsensical as his wardrobe.
"Don't be evil", "Do the right thing", and "Don't do anything to upset the investors or the bottom line."
3
I understand the attraction of instant gratification, which all these platforms promote. I'm not a real social media user, so I might be barking up the wrong tree, but just like there is a moderator for this NYTimes comment section, can't these platforms introduce some kind of moderator system? This would require that instant gratification be postponed—would that be such a bad thing?
2
“Sri Lanka Shut Down Social Media. Good.“
Literally my thoughts yesterday when I first read of this Easter Sunday horror (horrible on any day, of course). Without even knowing who was responsible, whether ISIS, Buddhists, Tamils, or some other group, I am concerned that social media like Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, have an awful tendency to incite atrocities and terror attacks. I don’t know what the solution is, but there has to be a better answer than shrugging and saying “That’s the price of ‘progress’.”
226
@michael_yudis The solution is to get rid of all three. There is nothing wrong with FB, Twitter or WhatsApp. It's just that people can't handle them - we lack the intelligence to deal with what we put on these apps - Trump is the perfect example of misusing Twitter - he sets the example.
14
It’s interesting to compare the failings of the two primary paradigms of Internet regulation that the net has split into (and may be divided into increasingly if the trend continues): the Chinese model of over-regulation, outright censorship, invasive surveillance, abuse and suppression; and the American model of basically no regulation at all, resulting in the devaluation of fact-based discourse and reality itself. Which is more harmful, more corrosive, more unsustainable?
Personally, I’m drawn toward the third model I see, the European Union model of moderate regulation with attention paid to issues of personal privacy, substantial but not disproportionate fines and careful overwatch. But I see little to suggest this third model of sensible regulation will be adopted elsewhere and prevail.
3
@Unpresidented
Perhaps Europe having suffered two world wars started by sociopaths with unlimited power knows something we don't. They know what real oppression under a boot feels like. The first was started by men related to each other; they started a war which might be the most violent, brutal conflict of recent history. WWI lasted a long time and left graveyards all over the world. WWII was started by a sociopath whose country suffered under a vengeful peace; he had an audience of industrial people reduced to poverty by treaty. The Middle East is a tinder box, as are parts of Africa and Southeast Asia. We are no longer at a safe distance; we are open to hate speech in the WH and other venues. How long before another global war engulfs us?
As a species we didn’t evolve with the capability of an individual or small group of people able to instantaneously communicate with millions of people.
6
I can see why the old guard media would want social media shut down. In the old days, a few titans and people who worked for them, like Kara, had enormous power to inform, spin and destroy. No ordinary person could get their message out to the world without first receiving the permission of these gatekeepers.
So, no thanks, to handing back all the power of communication to a self-chosen few. To be sure, there are real issues to be solved in this brave new world, but in this dog whistle column I hear the undercurrent of a death rattle.
4
@limn
Well, journalists and opinion writers aren't really such a "self-chosen" few - they have contemporaries and other people to answer to, and on the whole, they tend to be open-minded and educated, respectable even when we disagree with them. I think we were better off when the microphone wasn't so easily commandeered by violent crazy people. The death rattle you hear might be something else entirely.
2
Those few had ethical standards and libel laws to keep them in check. I trust the NYT’s more than our corrupt government and certainly more than some stranger with a Twitter feed.
2
It would be much better to follow and eliminate the funding source. Money makes the world go around, and someone is paying for this.
Who is it?
1
This is spot on. Although I am very worried about the attacks against journalism and what is deemed as “fake news”...my first thought at the announcement of shutting down social media to prevent misinformation was the same as the author: “good”. It seems social media has grown increasingly insidious, doing more harm than good. I think we will have to accept the fact that we cannot allow for “absolute” freedoms in Times of crisis when it comes to social media.
2
Shutting down the major social media outlets may help some, but the rest of the web remains wide open to spread disinformation and encourage violence. They’ll simply migrate to a new site.
In a world crowded with fires, Facebook is shouting "theatre!"
to generate its profits.
2
The author is absolutely correct. Yes, bigotry , religion, and misogyny have always incited violence, but the amplification of hatred provided by unregulated websites is the equivalent of human activity accelerating global warming. We've put jet engines on the guillotine.
3
Kara, my first thought echoes yours! "Social media" has become a threat and danger to humanity for so many reasons. When young people aspire to nothing more than being "influencers" (is that really a career/occupation??) When "social media" can gin up mentally unstable people to buy into conspiracies, fulfill their hate by shooting innocent people, burning schools and places of worship, bullying peers, enabling people to take at face value what's propagated online, we really need to think long and hard about its purported VALUE. Making social media platforms conform to a publishing enterprises at least puts the brakes on some of the worst lies and distortions. We KNOW the views of news organizations, can choose to believe or not what they say. Since SM has NO filter, you have to be smart enough to see through the opinions expressed to filter it yourself. With Rupert, Alex Jones, Rush, Hannity et al you know where they stand - you can shut it off. SM - you may never know what crazy clown is threatening people with, worse doing the unconscionable. A good example is Trump - he governs by Twitter - and of course ALL media has to repeat/reprint his rants. I'll be very relieved when MSM stops printing/repeating his ersatz ramblings - this is NOT news, it's the inane ramblings of a lazy man; if it was anyone but the President, we'd dismiss his tweets as those of a foggy headed old man, and ditch them!!
7
@BabsWC
Why is social media not under the same restrictions print media is? If the Times and Wash. Post are not platforms for hate speech, why are FB and Twitter open to calls for violence and mass murder? 300 innocent people are dead, 500 wounded, why? Families in mourning. Does Zuckerberg wash his hands of all that blood and walk away? Have we normalized news stories of mass murder? Are we hardened to the deaths of innocent people here as they sit in churches and synagogues? Children sitting in classrooms? Has the world at large become an okay corral? We are horrified by the Holocaust. Why are we not horrified by these meaningless deaths? After all the soft targets are struck, sociopaths will have practiced their "skill sets"; they will be ready for the rest of us.
Actually, we could shut it down. We could decide as a society that the costs of social media outweigh their advantages. We don’t, after all, allow corporations to distribute enriched uranium.
23
@Deborah Agreed. Furthermore, we can each shut it down by deleting our accounts and walking away from the evolving dumpster fire.
I deleted my FB account 2.5 years ago and never miss it.
4
@Deborah
Yes, but enriched uranium is where the bar is set, and that's pretty high. For instance, no problem allowing corporations to sell Juul pods to teenagers. We, as a society, have decided that profits outweigh consequences in pretty much every circumstance except the sale of nuclear weapons.
1
@Deborah First, they damage my 2nd Amendment Rights by keeping me from getting enriched uranium. Now, they're trying to take away my 1st Amendment right to cry "theatre" in crowded fires.
1
It's not going to change in the US because on party in particular, the Republican Party, has benefited from the weaponization of the internet. The benefited from Russian intereferance not only in the Presidential election, but in down ballot races as well. They benefit when it's Tea Party base gets ginned up on the outrageous and the incidnary. Conservative alinged intrest groups use those tools to create astroturf grass roots organizations to push corporate interests. Zuckerberg and company are about making money. The only way any of this will get regulated is if it is regulated in such a way that it insures the monopolies that currently run the show (Google and Facebook) and the oligarchies that pay the players (Koch bothers, sponsors of ALEC, etc.)
3
The genius is out of the bottle. What a monster we have created.
2
Let's blame social media for suicide bombings, and not the ideology that causes it. The author dances around this problem very tactfully.
9
@Randeep Chauhan, in my hometown 168 people were murdered by a terrorist named Tim. McVeigh. The media and all didn't name him as a white vet or militia lover. Most mass killers here are young white guys. Christian, if anything. The ideology is the same always. No dancing at all. It says: I'm so right that l get to kill people I don't like. So there you go.
Social media is like money, or fire, or guns; it can be used for good or bad. So is rights and freedom, used for good or bad.
As the author put it so poignantly, humanity can be inhumane, because human beings are just not perfect. We have the tendency to cheat, lie, kill, etc., we definitely can abuse any good thing, including our freedom of speech and use the technology of social media spread it wide and far.
The real culprit is always our own internal flaws of anger, hatred, prejudices, etc. But not recognizing this, we demand absolute of all rights and reject any external control. The danger of any modern technology is that it increases our ability to cause harm. We have seen it in weaponry, now we see it in communication tech.
There can be no effective gatekeeper other than our own conscience. As always, our fate is in our own hands.
6
@Doodle
That's awfully fatalist. So you'd do away with all police, firefighters, electrical inspectors, food inspectors etc and leave all that they regulate and gatekeep to your own--and your neighbors' consciences?
I find regulation, when it goes against my whims, as irksome as anyone. But regulation allows for civilization. There's a Goldilocks level of gatekeeping, but, boy do we need it!
3
It's comical and pathetic how folks here are willing to take to this message board - a social media venue - to advocate government regulation or abolition of social media. What a joke.
6
These comments are moderated by nyt’s unlike fb or Twitter
3
@mpound
Yes. there is irony in this but what do you propose? Any actual suggestions? You yourself have come to this venue to express yourself.
Swisher says: "In short: Stop the Facebook/YouTube/Twitter world — we want to get off."
Translation: We (NYTimes, WaPo, Mainstream Media) are no longer the sole purveyors of disinformation and misinformation. We are losing control of the narrative and want to silence dissent. We are the righteous gatekeepers of what humanity can and can't see. Join me (us) in our agenda to silence you. It is for your own good.
5
I think shutting down social media in Sri Lanka was to protect the Islamic minority from retribution.
2
This tech reporter is plain wrong about the tech companies. They are absolutely capable as of today in being able to filter out anything (!) they choose to.
Machine learning can have a hard time with analyzing something really new, but for recognizing stuff that is at all similar to what it has been trained on, it is faster and better than humans. If any of the social media platforms limited posted (and particularly re-posted) material, text, video or audio, to what can pass a dynamically trained AI moderator, it would nearly end propagation of dangerous incitement. That "whack a mole" quote suggests that You Tube was trying to control the spread with people, not machines.
Of course, some will (disingenuously or earnestly) complain about AI's performing mindless censorship, but it is only because this comment board is censored that it remains worth reading. Also, if you really want the freedom to say or show what you want, great, set up a server and write an app. The porn industry shows you that you don't need access to Facebook, Instagram, etc., to find an audience.
3
Fortunately we all know that "Tech Journalists" are essentially bought-and-paid-for shills for the Tech Industry. So your opinion on 1st amendment issues are worthless.
Further, since your opinion dovetails nicely into the NYT's anti-competitive slant towards Google, Facebook, and Instagram we can completely discount your opinion on Social Media.
4
I note your tech correspondent appears to not fully understand how tech works. I also note, by her own admission that she became your tech correspondent twelve months ago with a hardly unbiased opinion. Let's just get this straight, if "gatekeepers" means a return to media info jealously guarded by rich, rightwing white folk happily promoting what we now call fake news, I'll stick with the current situation thank you
4
@Nick Firth exactly. And that is exactly who would be the gatekeepers - entitled, rich people shutting off access to the unwashed masses for "their own good". I will take the chaos any day over returning to the bad old days of others controlling communications capabilities.
1
"A Facebook spokesman stressed to me that 'people rely on our services to communicate with their loved ones'". "Social" media is nothing more than greed, narcissism, and exhibitionism, performed on a global scale. No one on social media is capable of loving anyone other than themselves.
Social media has exposed the ugly underbelly of humanity. It is not their fault that we have a very dark side to our selves so it makes no sense to constantly blame tech for what is a human problem. Censoring content is essentially putting our ugly hateful sides of ourselves back in the closet so we don't have to confront it head on. If we don't want to see videos of the New Zealand tragedy circulate on the Internet, fix the fundamental problem, which is us. To just not allow social media to post it does not make the problem go away.
These debates are akin to those that occurred when the printing press was invented; there was a great fear that dangerous heresies would be created and disseminated. And they were right, the world has changed for the better since the printing press was invented. Social media is a new aspect of freedom of expression and yes there are growing pains but suppressing it is not the right answer.
Sorry to quibble, but my friends in Sri Lanka posted on Facebook just after the bombings that all access to the Internet was shut down unless you had a VPN account, not just social media. But seeing as they were posting on social media from Sri Lanka just after the bombings...
Bottom line: You cannot blame the soapbox for the speech.
1
The issue is not in blaming the soapbox, but rather in holding the owner of the soapbox responsible for what happens on the soapbox.
1
The internet does not spread hate and bias, it only delivers the content we go looking for.......if hate and bias are what you seek, then it is there to find. But if you are not online looking for hate and bias, then removing it from your view is just a click away. It is easy for us to say that the internet forces opinions on us, but the reality is that that is false.........on the internet you get what you seek, and more often what reaffirms your beliefs about the world and others.
71
@Doug R
Yes, to some extent. However, it might have been much more difficult in the past to seek for voices of hate and bias in the past. There are not just an amazing number of obvious white nationalists where I live, for example. Without the internet you also have to interact with the person in a face-to-face manner. Perhaps you would notice things about them or their life that you didn't want to emulate and continue to look for another voice.
Now, when people are at a vulnerable moment in their lives, looking for relief, they can much more easily find these voices and get attached to them. The internet 100% makes access to these voices easier than in the past.
31
@Doug R "On the internet you get what you seek."
If you go seeking, that is. But that's not how many (most?) people consume Internet content in the past few years and that's exactly the problem.
The issue at hand is that when consuming the Internet passively -- i.e., through social media gateways, what you get is what an algorithm thinks you want to see. You get what these companies believe will keep you coming back for more and you don't see what they don't believe will accomplish that goal.
16
@Doug R
I agree that platforms such as Facebook use "confirmation bias" to let us curate our own little worlds. The critical problem with this is that the platform *wants* to share new information with us, and in this effort shares things that may be slightly outside our bubble, but leaning in the direction of those things we have liked in the past. If we were once center-conservative, we see ever more conservative posts and shares. If we espouse a certain faith tradition, we see more posts from that tradition, including those wherein that tradition appears to be persecuted by the world and needs to fight back.
Liking any of these items pulls us closer to that radical edge. Many people have been proven to be unable to determine where the speech they are consuming crosses the line into radicalism and if all they see in their echo chamber is confirmation, from multiple "sources", they go along for the ride, wondering how they were never aware of all that was going on (assuming that MSM was obviously inept or complicit in not reporting it) in this world and why their friends just cannot understand it the way they do.
We need to find a way for our "news" to come back to primary sources, and for truthfulness to be calculated (somehow?).
14
I still think that algorithms could be written that measure the current social media traffic of hatred, outrage, indignation and fear.
When too many words or phrases like "kill, hate, furious, they, them, should, something-must-be-done,", etc appear in a given locale, within a given timeframe, then social media is fomenting violence. ("They" and "them" and "should" might prove to be the most pernicious of all inciters.) The algorithm would be measuring a fever that might prove lethal.
At that point, social media would need to be instantly shut down for a given period--say, 24 hours? 48? Till it cools down.
Sane people would learn to moderate their speech, and thoughts follow speech. And the crazies? Well, we'll always have them, but generally they are in the minority. But we need to stop social media from handing them bullhorns.
72
@PNRN Clever idea.
3
@PNRN
If we could algorithm ourselves out of this we would have done so already.
2
@PNRN
I suppose anything is worth a try, but I believe the executive who got the last word from our author has it right.
Human beings are just another part of the natural world, and as such everything we create becomes a part of nature. Technology is self-amplifying, and nature is self-balancing. Points of diminishing returns as those two forces interact are becoming a sort of war; carbon vs. silicon.
Carbon combinations that make up our 'soft machine' form are killing us from overabundance in our atmosphere. Filling our bodies with computer parts is no longer a thing of the past.
If temporarily removing certain words from a particularly invasive mode of communication could rid the world of hateful acts, the effects would also be temporary. Attempts at a permanent solution would look something like the Magna Carta or the US Constitution.
One man's "malevolence" is another man's "free speech".
The Pogo Principle persists.
3
We should treat social media like any other open forum. If people are making death threats and inciting violence, they should be charged and prosecuted, especially if people act on those threats. Why is Facebook or Twitter any different?
I also believe that all accounts should be traceable to a human being. If you are making death threats and incite violence, don't be surprised when you are being brought in for questioning.
7
The underlying weapon has always been religion, the original "us vs them" conflict. We are good. "Those people" are bad. Fear and loathe them; they are the enemy of all that's right and holy.
Bah humbug!
Religion, race, nationality, region, tribe, gender, age, income levels, etc, have always been weaponized by practitioners of divide and conquer dynamics. Social media is just the newest delivery vehicle to spread the poison of hate. Near-zero cost, maximum penetration.
Religions are fiction. All of them. They've always been the means by which self-appointed masters controll the masses; do as we say and you'll live for all eternity yadda yadda yadda.
Different languages. Different continents. Same message. OBEY! Or else.
When Pandora's box opened, out flew religions. There has been no peace ever since.
Nothing will change until we consign all religions to the dustbin of history. Humanity must move on with reason, truth, fairness knowledge and brotherhood. Until then, violence will not end.
27
@Mike
Spot on...so very true!
Religion has been, and ever will be, the biggest impediment to human progress. It is nothing but a purveyor and vehicle of hate. It preaches love "within" the group, and hatred for all others.
2
@Mike
I was with you for the first two substantive paragraphs. Then we part company.
Yes, divides of all kinds are weaponized for advantage. Perhaps gender was the first -- assisted by sexual dimorphism (esp. that human males are bigger than females).
Faith helps people BRIDGE those divides -- and you omit the unifying element. People of genuine faith recognize that in others, of other faiths and denominations. (Pope Francis spoke for Catholics, yes -- but also to the persecuted of other faiths).
You also ignore -- as even some adherents do -- the core teachings of love, peace, etc. common across many faiths.
Facebook, other social media? In aggressively segmenting "advertising" -- news access and so much more -- have played and hugely magnified into the divisiveness we see around the world. Hate and violence follow.
2
So I take it you guys don’t think that there can be anyone of good will who is also religious?
1
Two thoughts. First, if you sell advertising, you're responsible for the content. Second, why does anyone, anywhere get to post anonymously, for anything? If you want to make a statement or a point, stand behind it with your name, address and telephone number. (Notice that many of the posters here allowed by the Times are anonymous. FunkyIrishman? JR?) No more hiding. You want anonymity, don't expect the platform of the Internet.
46
@Murray Kenney, as you can see from my handle, I post anonymously. I have good reasons for it, and I have kept the same identical handle on all fora that I could, for going on 15 years now, my handle is identifiable as me everywhere I comment on the internet. Furthermore, most places I comment have privacy constrained access to my real name and contact information, that should I commit some crime or other, authorities would get in a heartbeat by showing a warrant.
Throughout history people have written under pseudonyms whether they were writing something outside their discipline like Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) or writing political literature like Amatine Lucile Aurore Dupin (George Sand), or even worried about their company objecting to what they wrote like William Sealy Gosset (Student).
"You want anonymity, don't expect the platform of the Internet." Really? Who died and made you god?
6
@Murray Kenney
I really want to agree with Schopenhauer on this one: But, above all, anonymity, that shield of all literary rascality, would have to disappear. It was introduced under the pretext of protecting the honest critic, who warned the public, against the resentment of the author and his friends. But where there is one case of this sort, there will be a hundred where it merely serves to take all responsibility from the man who cannot stand by what he has said, or possibly to conceal the shame of one who has been cowardly and base enough to recommend a book to the public for the purpose of putting money into his own pocket. Often enough it is only a cloak for covering the obscurity, incompetence and insignificance of the critic. It is incredible what impudence these fellows will show, and what literary trickery they will venture to commit, as soon as they know they are safe under the shadow of anonymity."
But as far as I know, Schopenhauer didn't have to suffer death threats and doxxing from his most vociferous critics...
5
@Murray Kenney says: "If you want to make a statement or a point, stand behind it with your name, address and telephone number." "No more hiding."
Anonymity allows one to speak freely...without risk of losing your job. See below for one of many examples:
"As students protest, Smith and Mount Holyoke colleges put new joint chief of police on leave"
"Students recently drew attention to a few posts they say Hect previously had “liked” on Twitter, including one instructing President Donald Trump to “BUILD THAT WALL!” and another in which the National Rifle Association wishes people a Merry Christmas.""
https://www.gazettenet.com/Smith-College-students-protest-against-racism-new-police-chief-24764370
A choice between staying silent or losing your job is not a country I want to live in.
3
Social media is no more the cause of this kind of violence than TV, radio, or the the newspaper is. Intolerance and hate is the cause. But there are always people, who in the name of "Public Safety," want to limit or outlaw free speech. In this case, the Tamil Tigers terrorist gang has been committing these outrages since the only "social media" was a printed newspaper.
1
@Jeff not the Tamil Tigers in this case. I do think the media has been less forthcoming here.
1
@Jeff
If we are intolerant of intolerance and hate hatred, this is like making war on warmakers. If we tolerate intolerance and accept or even love hatred, this is like surrendering to warmakers. As we did in World War II, we must make war on warmakers and accept the danger of the paradox.
My husband, who works in tech, and I had a conversation this weekend about this topic. We agreed that the benefits of the internet in general, and social media in particular, have not outweighed the negatives, which seem to be increasing.
Unfortunately we can’t put the genie back in the bottle, as much as I wish we could. However let’s start with cleaning up social media and fall FB, Twitter et al what they are: publishers. As such they must be held accountable for the sewage — misinformation, lies, conspiracy theories and other nonsense —that spills forth from them daily.
Journalism is a trade, traditionally with a set of skills (writing, fact checking) and ethical standards that must be learned. The internet has allied any hack to hang up a shingle, call himself a “journalist” and find an audience. The difference between the social media platforms and online sources like Wikileaks and InfoWars is that they are NOT journalistic enterprises that weigh the societal benefits of what they’re publishing: they’re too often garbage dumps for society’s raging ID.
As I consider Russia’s disinformation campaigns here and abroad, Wikileaks, the rise of hate groups etc., I am more and more convinced that social media and rogue online platforms represent a clear and present danger to democracy.
62
It's not an established fact that social media companies are in fact publishers, or gatekeepers. One could also define them merely as distributors, or the people who built a "free speech" plaza with seating and some soapboxes (and surveillance and billboards). The technical people tend to take this position. Are Uber and Lyft ride hailing services, or merely glorified need-a-ride, can-give-a-ride bulletin boards?
The very best we can do, long term, is to educate everyone with beefed up critical thinking skills in social studies and history classes, from grade school up. Educated people see through the lies and make the active choice to turn off the spigot of sewage.
It seems as if there's no good solution. Allowing social media to continue as it is means allowing all this toxicity to continue warping minds and inflaming passions. But shutting down social media, or bringing it under strict regulation (by whom? the government?) means controlling speech and access to ideas, such as what you have right now in China (where, thanks to lack of access to the global internet, the younger generations have no idea what Tiananmen Square was). And even before social media existed, we blamed the media for whatever ailed society: remember when TV dumbed us all down, and violent rap CDs needed "parental advisory" stickers, and video games supposedly inspired high school shooters, and radio shock jocks coarsened the discourse, and tabloids made us gluttons for scandal, and yellow journalism fed prejudices, and comics corrupted the youth?
Social media just allows us to hear everybody, and it turns out a lot of us are terrible people. Maybe we should try to find a way to change not the software inside our phones but the software between our ears.
11
Funny, my first reaction was "good" as well. Then I felt a little guilty as my thoughts turned to the Chinese government.
This column made me feel better. Full disclosure: I don't twit or facebook. I get my news from publications like the NYT. Twit is for the self absorbed, like trump.
6
Humans need gatekeepers. They always have and always will. Anarchy doesn't work. It didn't work in the late 1960s when the "summer of love" degraded into Altamont and the streets of San Francisco full of homeless, cruelly abused kids. And it doesn't work on the Internet.
The questions are:
1. How can you have have gatekeepers with a reasonably light touch?
2. How do you keep gatekeepers accountable? (That's what democracy used to be for, before we set about destroying it.)
3. And if they do in fact behave reasonably, how do you convince most folks to accept them?
We live in an era where nobody wants to accept any constraints on themselves, nobody thinks anyone knows better than they do, and everybody's instincts are to hold all authorities and institutions in contempt, whatever they do and whether or not they've earned it.
No doubt many have earned that contempt. But the worst authorities get to hide behind our indiscriminate contempt for *all* authorities. If "they're all alike," why *not* a Trump? Why *not* an InfoWars? Why *not* a QAnon?
7
Hypocrite, thy name is Karen Swisher.
The author of this column, along with thousands of other journalists and politicians, lost no time and spared no tweet or post in the aftermath of the Christchurch shooting. What was their aim in waging a relentless social media influence campaign?
To remind us all that white supremacy is a threat, that it’s dangerous, that Trump is a sign of it, and that Islamophobia has deadly consequences.
Now that the shoe is on the other foot, out come the same ideologues to tell us to shut down social media, and to avoid viewing this attack as indicative of radical Islam.
No wonder media credibility has plummeted. The hypocrisy and constant defense of radical Islam is too stark to hide anymore.
8
@Cane
Kara, not Karen.
1
Kara would like someone else, rather than me, deciding what I read. Bad idea, Kara.
3
Your concern rings true. No one should be empowered to say what you can read. However, the ability to post/publish comes with responsibilities. If someone urges a mob to action and that mob follows through with violence, a court of law should weigh the contribution of the publisher to the commission of such violence. Prior restraint is heinous, but those who benefit from its absence - all of us - should insist on being held responsible for what we publish and the impact it has on others.
1
@Neil RAgreed...prior restraint is heinous. If some actual social cost is incurred via hate speech the speaker should face appropriate consequences, although determining 'social cost' may prove difficult.
I disagree with the idea that Facebook/Twitter/Etc were designed to weaponize opinion and politics. That's an overly facile argument and entirely removes responsibility from the people who are using these platforms. The technology that supports these platforms is inherently neutral however, what we, the collective consumers, of this technology is in no way neutral and it is up to us to change how we use it. This could manifest as demand to change the technology so that we don't have to police ourselves. This seems like a dodge to me. A way for us to say what is happening is bad but it is someone else's problem.
It isn't though. It's *our* problem and *our* inability to properly vet, source, review, and think about our actions in a larger community. Until we take our shares and likes and unthinking need for attention more seriously we will continue to see this regardless of the technology or platform.
1
I think this becomes a question of what people are most afraid of:
1. The power of an individual to connect with others like never before, even when these connections spread hatred.
2. The power of a handful of companies to enable billions of these connections with little oversight.
3. The power of a single head of state to turn that all off at their personal discretion.
In the age of Trump, I'm surprised that more readers aren't concerned with this third fear.
2
My first thought was also "good" and next I thought was "I wish we could do that."
1
Nothing actually stopping you. Just like to point that out..
2
Social media outlets are like a pipe tapped into a super-giant high-pressure pool of derangement: rational discourse discarded as the language of the 'haves', replaced by the vocabulary of resentment, anger and irrational fear. What we are seeing is the consequence of our acceptance of the deep legacy of gross inequality. Social media is the revenge of the all those people who hate their lives. Yes, by all means turn it all off, and let the 'have nots' disappear back into their traditional status as invisible and inconsequential.
2
... And just why I value the Internet. Others, quite apart from the overly entitled can have their voices heard
3
Facebook, YouTube and other social media platforms can no longer maintain the pretense that they are not publishers of information—full stop.
11
Evidently the Sri Lankan government associates social media with terrorism, and is not something to help people cope with a very chaotic situation.
1
Imagine if we had another 9/11-scale terror attack and our government shut down Twitter and Facebook. It would feel like state media control (because that's exactly what it would be).
But we shut down financial markets during emergencies, and have built in "pause" buttons during a free-fall. What if we did this with social media? There would still be online journalism, cable news and email. A 24-hour cooling off period? Long enough that the first narrative out there would not be a spin job from some fruitcake? (It would then be a spin job from government, so think about that.) Would it even help?
6
But wait - isn't this capitalism at its best? Fill the corporate troughs and let the public pay the consequences. Hard to believe but Social Media pollution is even more immediate in its damage to the world than climate change denial!
7
The social media platforms dominating our smart phones disconnect people from the present. Being self aware of the moment you are in is difficult if not impossible if your mobile device has you engaged elsewhere. The unregulated, unedited, immediate avalanche of content that is available in the moments following tragedies such as in Sri Lanka are far more than a distraction, they are poison.
4
There's nothing wrong with a tech reporter coming to the conclusion that social media is a net negative. It's actually super important that it's seen for what it is by those who are tasked with covering it.
37
The truly dangerous part is that corporations, billionaires and autocratic governments have the money to fully harness the potential of these media.
With the money to buy computing power, IT expertise and massive amounts of data, it's relatively easy to turn people into bots. This is why Trump was elected. This is why our response to global warming is to make it worse. People believe what they are told, if you target the right people and emotionally couch the message in the right way.
5
Facebook declined to respond to warnings from the government until after the government shut down services, at which point they vowed to hire more moderators. That sort of tells you everything you need to know.
26
The truly dangerous part is that corporations, billionaires and autocratic governments have the money to fully harness the potential of these media.
With the money to buy computing power, IT expertise and massive amounts of data, it's relatively easy to turn people into bots. This is why Trump was elected. This is why our response to global warming is to make it worse. People believe what they are told, if you target the right people and emotionally couch the message in the right way.
1
Free speech means just that. Each platform can decide for itself whether it wants to carry certain ideas or words. But no I don't want the government or representatives of establishment media deciding in the US that any speech (other than the obvious exceptions that already exist regardless of platform) should be censored, banned or outlawed.
And no I don't want a "global discussion". The US is different from both New Zealand and China in terms of protections for free speech, the ability to dissent, the ability to express unpopular or even hateful ideas.
And I want the US to remain different in that regard.
3
The real problem is that the internet has facilitated the spread of bias and hatred at a rate unseen heretofore, with no signs of slowing down.
And yes. This is how bad the situation has gotten.
There are enough examples of that happening here in the U.S. with a rise in white nationalist activity and so-called "fake news" that's going off the charts.
And even though some kind of regulation prohibiting this kind of bigotry would be well called for, it's also safe to assume that it will never happen here.
5
@N. Smith
Said same about telegraph and short-wave.
1
@Alice's Restaurant The sheer volume and speed with which fake news is being spread, has no precedent. News, even Fox, has a minimal amount of editorial oversight. Social media does not. This is a very different beast.
2
@Alice's Restaurant
Except that in its heyday, not everyone had access to the telegraph and short wave.
3
Excellent column. Long overdue.
“A Facebook spokesman stressed to me that “people rely on our services to communicate with their loved ones.” “
And I would add that many companies and service providers also expect and in some cases effectively require customers to communicate with them via social media.
That makes them essentially “public utilities” and should be regulated as such.
One more point. These attacks are not only, as you say, “facilitated” by social media but also “exacerbated” by them. And worse yet for private gain.
23
How about, "When you traffic in outrage, you get elected"? We have a president, a major political party and a major "news" network which thrive, and enrich themselves, with divisiveness, fear-mongering and fueling our tribal prejudices. It's short-sighted to blame just social media. Follow the money.
180
Exactly. All a bit like blaming telephones for fake calls to essential services
6
@rich To your list add the Religious Right which fuels the same divisiveness and fear-mongering at taxpayer expense. Franklin Graham wasted no time last week exonerating President Trump and urging us all to move on, and warning today that there will be more killings and attacks "at the hands of Islam" because they hate the followers of Jesus.
5
There’s always the way we used to communicate before [anti-]social media. We don’t need the emotionally dysfunctional FB, the adolescent IG, anxiety inducing Twitter, or the migration-enabling Whatsap.
We don’t need them.
They are not progress. They just look that way. We will turn them off when they start to look uncool. That might be sooner then we think.
2
Thanks for this column. Social media platforms are insidious and, at best, tasteless perpetrators of narcissism. I’ve never understood the defense that they “keep us connected.” They’ve only polarized and injected envy and hatred into the lives of participants. Humans are evidently incapable of editing themselves in these anonymous Roman coliseums of psychic cruelty and self-advertising. I reclaimed my life after going offline. I don’t want to squander time by “producing” my own reality show to play out for the profit and benefit of intellectual thieves like Mark Zuckerberg et al.
528
@Michael Gast (gastmichael), you say you've never understood the 'keep us connected'
defense, and say they (social media) only polarize, inject hatred, etc. While I share your concerns I should point out that it *is* being used by the majority of people to simply stay in touch - to share with family, friends, neighbors, to seek community, to ask for help, to give help. It's not as black and white as "It's evil, shut it off."
The haters and extremists get the spotlight, especially when something evil happens that's tied to them and their social media activity prior to the act. But they're not anywhere close to the majority.
Social media can be negative influence in ordinary people's lives in different ways however - too much time spent, small slights and arguments going too far, political spats, one-upmanship, etc, which can damage or end relationships. But it's not as much of a lost cause as you say.
13
It's always somebody else's fault. Maybe it's the people who use social media that are just deplorable. Personal responsibility isn't popular these days. Continue to blame everyone except the people abusing technology. We're all "victims" for voluntarily using technology right? Then stop using it! Oh, but you're "addicted";clearly that's somebody else's fault, too. I'm gunna get on Facebook now, so I can complain about Amazon--while expecting a package later today--I love--I mean hate--Prime.
8
@Michael Gast (gastmichael) - "I’ve never understood the defense that they 'keep us connected.' They’ve only polarized and injected envy and hatred into the lives of participants."
Social media is also a lifeline for many LGBTQ youth who have found community online even if they're desperately isolated in real life. It was the public's first source of information for the unrest and police violence in Ferguson. It gets vital information out during hurricanes and natural disasters and helps reunite survivors and families. It helps organize resistance movements. It allows refugees in Syria and elsewhere to share information, stay in touch with families, and make decisions about migration. And on and on.
Like all technology, it's a tool. Whether the tool is used for good or evil purposes is up to us.
25
Facebook is not just a source of misinformation. In developing countries, it's also the tool of choice to organize pogroms - whether in Myanmar, India, or Sri Lanka. And I would bet a large amount of money that the perpetrators of these horrendous attacks were radicalized on Facebook, and, if they travelled abroad for terrorist training, also found their way to Syria or Pakistan through Facebook.
Facebook's and Google's algorithms are guiding users to the most radical content available, instead of hiding it. And if Facebook and Google don't get serious about changing this, they should be banned indefinitely, not just in Sri Lanka. The easy solution is to treat social media companies as publishers that are responsible for their content. Then I'm sure, they would rapidly find ways to minimize the use of their services by extremists of all stripes.
23
Social media has brought the world closer together. The town square is now open to anyone who wants to broadcast. Most always for good. But, sometimes there are people who want to do evil. Government’s role is to protect the people from these sorts of threats. We cannot do it on our own.
It’s like we’re on a airplane together and the crackpots got hold of the loudspeaker. It’s time for the captain to wrestle it back.
2
@Bob Woodman No, Bob, that's not so. Google's and Facebook's algorithms not only make it easy to find extremist sites, they guide their users toward them. And it is the job of government to regulate this out of existence.
1
Kids spend their days on the phone/tablet/computer. Adults (even presidents) spew hatred to and about each other. Mis-information is pervasive. Dis-trust of government, traditional media and other sources of enlightened expertise information. Wild conspiracy theories about everything from mass shooting to vaccinations. As far as I can see, social media has brought basically zero benefit to mankind.
22
It will not be regulated here, it is driver of the economy and our rapacious capitalism. It allows the leader of the free world to spread misinformation. What's a few hundred lives? When millions are being made?
14
The Four Horseman of the Apocolypse, Google, FB, Instagram and Twitter are the enablers of Trump and Putin and are the instigators of stupidity, selfies, and the death of reading, music, newspapers, magazines, books, photography and just being alone and peaceful.
139
This is a fascist ploy. It is not the social media. Everyone can see what trump is projecting. When you have a fascist bigot running the most powerful country in the world, the world concludes that fascist bigotry is the way to go.
8
"In the early days of the internet, there was a lot of talk of how this was a good thing, getting rid of those gatekeepers."
Wanting no gatekeepers is brat thinking--the logic of 8 year olds, and those who failed to make the leap to adulthood.
There was an article here at the NYT years ago, how young male elephants in African herds were going rogue, and attacking other elephants as they pleased. The gamekeepers' solution was to bring in elderly bull elephants, who soon established peace and order, and provided role models to the young hoodlums.
We need to make regulation a good word, (and make the regulation good, too.) I think we need some way to take the temperature of local social media sites, and whenever it reaches fever pitch, it needs to be shut down till it cools. Tough to anyone who whines about the temporary loss of their communication.
We also need an alternative source of news that switches on, whenever social media goes down. A national station, with a Walter Cronkite figure, (bull elephant) to give the news until things cool down. One national voice of sanity for the short term.
Or am I just dreaming? This is what happens when a society fractures. Humpty Dumpty.
70
@PNRN Let me get this straight. You want the government to decide, presumably based on YOUR ideas of what is good, when social media sites should be shut down?
And you want ONE station (government approved) to have sole ability to transmit information until the elites decide otherwise?
You really would be at home in China or Stalin's Soviet Union. But the US as currently operating is not the country for you.
6
@PNRN "I think we need some way to take the temperature of local social media sites, and whenever it reaches fever pitch, it needs to be shut down till it cools."
Q: Pray tell, exactly who is this "we" you refer to who will decide when social media needs to shut down and what the criteria for shutting it down will be?
A: It won't be you or me. It will be the government, of course. And the criteria will be whenever the government determines that the peasants need to be kept in the dark and criticism needs to be silenced.
It's sad - pathetic really - that some people are more than willing to give up their right to free speech out of sheer terror. Think about what you are advocating. Really.
4
@PNRN The solution you're proposing to "take the temperature," and "shut down till it cools" gives your histrionic argument ("brat thinking" "hoodlums" tough to anyone who whines") rhetorical flourish; but is highly impractical from a technical perspective.
Same with the "alternative source of news" that seems to be mere nostalgia for a time that is no longer in existence.
3
It is a good thing. It shows governments are serious and the situation is dire. Will folks find a way around it? Of course, but it cannot go unnoticed at Facebook HQ that an entire country has decided they are a threat to public safety, No ad revenue, either. Like bump stocks, it's one small step for mankind.
39
''Free speech'' (it seems) can only work as closely to absolute as possible IF the infrastructure of law and order buttresses it accordingly.
Essentially the 1st world can handle all of the vitriol to a degree (putting aside foreign powers influencing elections) much more than the 3rd world can.
If a lie can travel across the world before the truth could ever catch up, then authorities (and those ''controlling'' social media) are far, far behind that.
The carnage will continue.
2
The people who created the social media companies that you're talking about may not have realized that they were creating a way to weaponize communication, but they should have. They deliberately built a way for human communication to be bought & sold as just another commodity, which is the same thing for other purposes. Creating ways for presumably "benign" corporations to manipulate people using their private communications was, by definition, creating ways for malicious extremists, governments, & others to manipulate people. And no, the answer is not better "gate keepers," or a more benign totalitarian control. The answer is the absolute privacy of communication.
6
How about holding Facebook and other social media groups criminally libel for hate speech they post? They are, after all, helping to spread garbage. Changes in the law that would hold them responsible and any other publishers of hate speech etc., would get their attention. Otherwise, my guess they will follow the bottom line.
33
@Edward Clark
There is no such thing as "hate speech" under US first amendment law. No such category exists. There is legally protected speech. You can not sue people or regulate them out of existence simply because they share or believe in ugly ideas. Not how our country works.
5
@Lilo Yes, you are right, and thank you. But there are hate crime laws, including conspiracy to commit a hate crime, when two or more parties are involved. So perhaps when a crime has been committed involving social media in specified ways, the social media group could be indicted as a 'co-conspirator'? What I am looking for is a way to hold the social media companies responsible for certain content. Suggestions?
5
Facebook and its tech cousins have proven to be the great social destabilizer, a great Velveeta cheese processor that takes facts, news, and information and transmogrifies into raw sewage posing as facts, news and information.
To an already poorly educated public that was just barely hanging onto objective reality, Facebook and its digital cousins have officially turned a fair number of human brains to absolute mush.
Look at the fake 2016 Pizzagate conspiracy in the US, the right-wing creation via Twitter, 4chan and Infowars.com that spread like a forest fire among the rabid right, culminating in a near-death experience.
On December 4, 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch, a 28-year-old man from Salisbury, North Carolina, fired three shots in the restaurant with an AR-15-style rifle at a Washington DC pizza parlor.
Welch later told police that he had planned to "self-investigate" the conspiracy theory.
Welch told police he had read online that the pizza restaurant was harboring child sex slaves and that he wanted to see for himself if they were there.
Welch later said that he regretted how he had handled the situation but did not dismiss the conspiracy theory, and rejected the description of it as "fake news".
Welch attempted to recruit friends three days before the attack by urging them to watch a YouTube video about the conspiracy.
These tech companies all generate billions in annual profits and can afford to weed out the garbage.
Regulate these unsafe companies to death.
380
@Socrates- I should have read your comment before commenting myself because as always you eloquently summed up my thinking.
For a parallel conversation, read about how school systems in MO eagerly signed on to Zuckerberg’s education application Summit and how many students and parents want out of it.
These companies are not just allowing the pollution of minds, they’ll settle for nothing less than to control them, starting with our children, so they can market to them from the time they’re old enough to click a mouse. The avarice wrapped in utopian and philanthropic garments is astonishing.
And we as parents have no way to opt out, short of home schooling or private schools, while our cash-strapped public schools sell our kids’ privacy to FB and Google.
49
What you say about Facebook being a great “destabilizer” could be said, without blushing, of Fox News and the Trump White House. Shall we regulate the heck out of them, too? We cannot have an American Democracy that espouses freedom of speech and thought that doesn’t skew now and then (yes, just how frequently do social media events like Pizzagate occur?) to the morbid and bizarre. We cannot have it both ways—freedom and non-freedom. There is no such thing as a perfectly safe and secure free speech. To think we can regulate Facebook for the speech that is sometimes found on it smells 1984ish.
Note: The Pizzagate fake-news story was brilliantly analyzed in Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/anatomy-of-a-fake-news-scandal-125877/
14
@Socrates We have had this conversation before. I do not buy your perspective. Knowledge is power. You are assuming, quite incorrectly, that the world was a better place before the emergence of social media. It was not.
Your argument is comparable to the argument that video games make the world more violent.
No matter what the metric, this world is safer than it has ever been in the history of man. Is this coincident or cause with the rise of the digital world. I say it is a cause. I say that the digital world has enabled humanity to once rise above ignorance.
Isn't this comment section considered social media? Perhaps also in this case that it is highly regulated.
I refuse to believe that humanity is incapable of following the first directive...do not destroy yourself. (Seeing that trumpism will be emergent for the next several decades, perhaps this is a bit hard to believe.)
6
"If I may... Um, I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now [bangs on the table]" - striking parallel from Ian Malcolm's (Jeff Goldblum) character in" Jurassic Park." and we all know what happens at the end...
14
Lovely insight, seeing unregulated social media as the equivalent of anachronistically revived packs of unleashed velociraptors - and worse. I can’t think of a more piercing metaphor.
1
The misinformation, bullying, and hate filled content fomented by Social Media/Facebook -- should come as no surprise whatsoever to anyone, once learning *how* "Facebook" got its start -- it originated at Harvard, developed by Mark Zuckerberg and his cronies *as* "Facemash" -- a medium specifically invented *for* the purpose of inciting and promoting social mockery.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook
As Facebook and all other Social Media of its ilk completely lack editorial oversight, it is for this reason that I refuse to use it, and I will never use it.
For all the rest of those so addicted -- as with any drug -- the only way to neutralize its insidious and deadly impact on themselves and on society, is to QUIT USING IT!
8
It is the responsibility of current users of these awful platforms to simply quit them. You have blood on your hands. Drive these companies out of business. Perhaps then only the terrorists and criminals will be left there spreading hate to other terrorists and criminals.
Quit social media. Now. There are no excuses.
13
“You can’t shut it off,” the executive said flatly. “It’s too late.”
Sounds like a man convinced of his own omnipotence. My guess is, yes, you can.
128
@Stuart He probably also thought the Internet couldn't be subdivided into segments or restricted by governments, because information wanted to be free.
9
I'm a computer scientist and I have been on the Internet or its predecessor for 49 years. I remember the days of civil discourse on the network. Those are gone, except perhaps for moderated forums like this one.
If this country shut down Facebook, Twitter and the like for several days after an act of terrorism, that might provide some incentive for social network companies to change their behavior. If they don't do that, we can only hope that their irresponsibility ultimately causes them to self destruct.
105
I was young and naive when I began using the internet's predecessors (BBS, USENET, and Gopher). In hazy hindsight, those seem to be more innocent days and platforms. Was it really different in nature? Or was it just a difference in scale? There were some pretty dark alt.* newsgroups.
3
Unfortunately, the Reagan meme--government is the problem---has taken hold. Any talk of any form of regulation--whether it be CO2 emissions or Facebook or Boeing or Banks or health care or monopolies---the Congressional responsibility to step in is deferred to the meme that any form of governmental oversight will end with an overblown ineffective bureaucracy. But at this point---with the daily tragedies resulting from out of control market forces---I am willing to put up with some red tape if I know that the plane I am boarding is stays in the air.
105
@Amanda Jones I agree that most Americans see the government as the problem. And the financial and political class, especially the GOP, are against government regulations whether it's the environment, guns, financial institutions or social media. But I do not expect them to do anything about these problems unless something horrendous happens like the 9/11 attacks. Then they did something about airport security. I'm in favor of rules and regulations. The problem is to develop rules, etc that are effective, enforced and not overly burdensome. We will not see any thing from the current administration. Trump does not believe in laws, rules etc. Plus he thinks they do not apply to him and his friends and family. Luckily I do not have to fly anymore and I have never had a FB, Twitter or YouTube account. I reluctantly joined LinkedIn which I use very seldom. Recently it's become evident that these tech companies are able to collect a lot of info about you if one does not have an account with them.
1
I challenge anyone to persuade us that climate change is a more imminent existential threat than what Swisher describes. The social media deniers are sounding more and more like the gun lobby. People with guns kill people. So do people with uncontrolled access to SM.
11
@Maj. Upset: Well major, your position is the same as every totalitarian government in the word, going back to the beginning of time. "Free speech is bad unless it is speech that I agree with."
3
@Maj. Upset What if the government decides that the NYT and YOU in particular have too much access to spread your ideas. After all a NYT story or opinion piece can set the agenda for elections and much more. Shouldn't that power be regulated?
Or perhaps not because that's speech that you like.
2
@Jeff
The Supreme Court ruled that free speech does NOT include the right to scream *Fire!" in a crowded building. Is that totalitarian? Total, unregulated free speech is a dream of brats, not adults.
6
Now what? They aren’t going away; regulation has many sides, not all of them beneficent; in any event it’s ineffective; Facebook and Twitter have no consciences at all; and the world is a more hate-filled place every day. So now what?
1
If the film is true, Zuckerberg's first successful effort in networking involved: theft of private information; the objectification of women; hateful bullying.
In your beginning is your end, Mark.
24
As one who has personally avoided social media from the beginning but watched the pernicious entities grow in size, monetary value, influence and virulence, I also see the seeds of war and massive destruction. I hope this Opinion essay will prod the many presidential candidates to introduce a plank for government control of social media. We need to get this monster at least part-way into a bottle.
21
I do not believe it is Facebook’s responsibility to police, and then to insure its eradication from its “platform,” all the hate-speech that is possible in a free world. However, I believe Facebook should try to police hate-speech knowing it will be impossible to catch all of it. It was the smartphone that allowed the New Zealand mosque murderer to live stream his murdering. Shall we ban video from being played live on an iPhone? Where does Swisher’s censorship stop? Hey, why not ban keyboards for they allow humans to write hateful media posts. It is an illusion that we can live in a hermetically sealed social media vacuum where hate speech is permanently banned. It is impossible for Democracies based on freedom to be that safe and secure. We can try to root the haters out all the while knowing we will fail. To expect social media companies like Facebook with billions of users to can actually find ways to protect us from hate and violence is naive.
3
@Dave Thomas
Freedom and democracy did just fine before Facebook.
Some would argue it did better.
Sure, there have always been lunatics out there bent on mayhem, but Facebook marinates the already paranoid in a toxic stew of hate and misinformation, and the result is plain for all to see, if they're only willing to open their eyes and not bury their heads in the sand.
If Facebook were to face liability for facilitating hate crimes, trust me, they'd figure out a way to stop it. And if they can't and go out of business, I doubt there will be many mourners at its funeral.
8
All the the social media giants have allowed their platforms to become propaganda machines for profit. They use the excuse of non-censorship. But when they are allowed to be tools for spreading hate and violence, they should be shut down or at least firmly regulated under heavy penalties. They show no capacity for self-regulation whatsoever. They are Marketing Machines for profit at the expense of hundred and thousands of lives around the globe. Speaking of international disasters, Facebook was even used to elect Trump.
3
Once you start restricting free speech, where do you stop? I do not myself pretend to know the answer. But I worry we risk crossing the precipice of a slippery and steep slope.
The New York Times seems to have become one of the greatest enemies of free speech. The paper is highly critical of the SCOTUS decision in the well-known Citizens United case, in which the Supreme Court ruled a political advocacy corporation had the constitutional right to broadcast a video critical of Hillary Clinton. Does the Times, itself a corporation, feel that only left-leaning media enjoy the right of freedom of the press?
A few weeks ago, the Times published on its home page the statement “Mr. Murdoch, the founder of a global media empire that includes Fox News, helped topple governments and destabilize democracies around the world.” Mr. Murdoch’s media empire tends to lean right of center. The NY Times regularly publishes left-leaning editorials designed to influence democratic elections. Are left leaning opinions good for humanity, while right leaning ones “destabilize democracies?”
I too worry about the demonstrated ability of Facebook and social media to foment hatred and violence. But they also enable the communications on which informed democracies are built. How do you stop the former without interfering with the latter? Who decides when information becomes misinformation? We do need limits on speech that encourages violence, but we must impose such restrictions with caution.
2
@Alex
The ruling on Citizens United means that corporations are considered "people", and thus have the same rights to free speech as people do under the first amendment, as written in the Bill of Rights. Prior cases established that "free speech" equals "spending money on candidates," which is also a problem in my view.
Corporations are not people, and the Bill of Rights was not written to protect corporations. Citizens United fundamentally undermines the core American construct that the legitimacy of our government exists due the will of the people. To illustrate this, I would note that the Constitution does not start with "We the people (ie corporations)..."
When corporations financially control our elected representatives, the legitimacy of our government is destroyed, and our country no longer exists as it was intended and as we enjoyed it for over 200 years.
4
@Alex killing innocent people while you film & broadcast it is not "free speech" - it's psychopathy and/or sociopathy.
1
@Alex"Are left leaning opinions good for humanity, while right leaning ones 'destabilize democracies'?" you ask.
Yes.
Despite what Trump and Fox would have us believe, the mainstream American left (i.e., the Democratic party) is not extreme and sits pretty much where it always has on the political spectrum – pretty much dead center in comparison to democracies like Canada, Germany and Scandinavian countries.
The American right, however, has become extreme. The Republican party has been hijacked by undemocratic xenophobes like Steve Bannon who openly admit their goal is to destabilize democracies. MAGA is crypto-fascism.
One side—the mainstream left—is indeed trying to make humanity better (affordable healthcare, public education, environmentally responsible policy, public safety, reproductive rights, racial and gender equality, etc.), the other side is trying to usher in some kind of hyper-individualistic, post-democratic, theocratic, apocalyptic nightmare à la Mad Max – doing its best to convince Americans that this is a zero-sum game: jobs or immigration, jobs or the environment, jobs or healthcare, jobs or regulation, etc. At a certain point the right-wing rhetoric becomes reckless, un-democratic and dangerous and it should be censored. Trump and his supporters retweet, like, repost, and share this venom (wittingly or not; many of Trump’s supporters have been fooled into thinking they are being “patriotic”) and ARE destabilizing our hard-won democracy.
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It seems that one method of coming to grips with the misuse and abuse of social media is to name the owner of the service (Google, Facebook or whatever) as the publisher of the information. If a newspaper prints a libelous advertisement or letter to the editor, the publisher remains accountable for that content. The editorial content showing up on social media is ultimately the responsibility of the service making the information/misinformation available to the public. Google, Facebook and company will whine and insist that the First Amendment is being trod upon. Nonsense. The First Amendment does not license journalists or anyone else to freely publish libelous lies and disinformation or to “cry fire” in a crowded theater. The part about publishing lies and disinformation is a problem for Fox Propaganda and right-wing radio hate mongers but they have dodged responsibility thus far.
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A crucial difference between social media platforms like Facebook and for instance, reddit, is Facebook is a closed circuit where there are only likes, no dislikes.
So on Facebook a small but vocal minority of people can band together and spread disinformation and hateful messeging through "likes" that help spread the post and can lead to violence, even if an overwhelming majority of people thay dislike the post would prefer it go to the dustbin of the internet for few to see.
Reddit on the other hand aggregrates content based through a system of likes and dislikes.
A relatively small and vocal group of a few thousand people banding together spreading misinformation to the masses can be stopped by tens of thousands who know their message to be false or potentially lead to violence, by disliking it, so few people outside of the community spreading it will see it and be corrupted by it's misleading or false narrative.
Facebook is in the business of Likes.
Anything that slows down that train goes against their business model, so they can pander all they want about doing their best to police false and misleading stories on their platform, but as long as those posts are getting likes, it's their bread and butter.
I doubt giant social media companies like Facebook can be trusted to police themselves in any meaningful way, unless there's a drastic change to the way they aggregate content on their platform.
Implementing a "Dislike" feature would be a sure fire way.
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@Robert M I have often wondered why there was no "dislike" button and I just assumed it was old age ignorance.
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Way back in the 70's and early 80's those using the internet were primarily focused on academic pursuits. Usage was policed in 'subtle' ways and exploiting it was frowned upon. It was truly a public resource. It's sad to see what unregulated capitalism has done to it.
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The crux, as wisely stated: "..... the greatest experiment in human interaction in the history of the world continues to fail in ever more dangerous ways."
As our country generally acts, if it does at all, only in crisis, my hope is for other countries to show us the way to effective regulation.
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As someone who spent most of his business career in the tech world, I decided early on not to be on Facebook except for a family group. Their lack of control over illegal content, hate speech for example, and the usage of personal information for targeted ads is unacceptable. A recent NYT article caused me to turn off Android's location services. I had not realized what a treasure trove it was for Google. The web has the ability to spread hate and promote illegal activities without any real form of control. I don't think you can legislate controls but you sure can legislate fines. Make them very stiff and the web delivery services will take note and do something about it. By stiff, I mean millions of dollars and bad publicity.
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@D Marcot I have also disabled Google's location services, although I had before I read the NYT article. However, the insistence of Google that it needs to enable it every time I start Google maps reminds me of why these companies only want more data whether it is illegal content, lies, or hate speech. I wish that social media cost money so the business model was different.
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@D Marcot The government can not fine someone for being hateful. It just can't do it. You or I or anyone can go online and rail about THOSE PEOPLE (insert group here) and there's little that the government can do about it. That's free speech.
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Just one correction: billions of dollars, not millions, in fines. These companies will recognize and respond to nothing less.
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It didn't really take much foresight to see that "social media" would quickly morph into a toxic combination of data gathering, marketing, propaganda and disinformation.
What to do about it? In the words of the WOPR, "the only winning move is not to play."
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I also think that what the Sri Lanka government did was understandable and perhaps the right move in this particular case.
With that said, there are some issues that complicate this narrative:
1) Advocating for the idea that a government should control or shut off social media to prevent misinformation or hatred presumes that government is always the “good guy” in the scenario. In Myanmar, the government is the one promoting hatred against the Rohingya. During the India-Pakistan flare-up, both governments spread misinformation. And of course China is the ultimate example of this idea. Giving a government the power to regulate social media also gives it a monopoly to spread misinformation and hatred for its own ends, while silencing independent voices who are trying to promote the truth.
2) One of the problematic platforms in India is WhatsApp because it’s TOO private. Users get end-to-end encryption, which means the government couldn’t see their texts to see if users are spreading hateful messages. Is this a problem? If so, it goes against the narrative the NYT’s “Privacy Project” is pushing.
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A question for the social media companies: how many human lives is it worth for people to be able to connect on your platform
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Social media should be banished altogether.
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Kara, I am also in tech, and have been for the last 40 years. Thank you for stating so succinctly what I have been feeling as I've watched tech take over more and more of our lives, and the wild west world of the internet allow for context-free, out-of-date, false and unchecked information. It is getting harder and harder to recall that less anxiety-prone age I lived in before social media and it's impact on our culture. I too, would love to unplug it all, if that were indeed possible. I agree that this was NOT the vision I had when I started my career -- computers/automation, etc was supposed to be our helpmate, not our master or the turbo-charged engine of our own destruction.
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@Liz Alexander I unplugged from it all in a matter of minutes. I can't help but wonder why you don't think it's possible.
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@Liz Alexander I'm from tech world as well. This social media world wan't a big "thing" 10 years ago...that is not a long time ago and it is now growing exponentially. Nothing to say it won't self-destruct in another 5 years...it's on that path. Somehow we all got along fine without it..not long ago...easy for many of us to envision going back.
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@Liz Alexander
Liz, I started working with computers in 1978.
These days I feel like a Los Alamos engineer, who helped devise nuclear weapons of mass destruction, or perhaps some Fort Detrick scientist who devised an even more deadly nerve gas. Wall Street has co-opted decades of technical innovation and turned it on the public (yes, the Chinese public, too) and addicted them to a mind destroying drug.
It was all going to be so utopian (cheap nuclear power), until it wasn't.
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