What, all of it?

The issue of banning social media is gaining traction, always framed as a way to prevent harm to our children. Most popular social media does irreparable harm to society; harm to our children is merely the easiest to detect and understand.

Some forms of social media must be banned entirely. Which ones?

The harm is becoming obvious, but we need to understand this why this happens, because it isn’t “the internet,” it isn’t “Wikipedia,” and a ban is not “censorship” if it is directed at a specific type of communication, not due to its content, but instead, to the way in which it subverts the structures of human society.

Social media gives everyone a chance to say whatever they wish to everyone else, often anonymously, and it relies on advertising for profit and to cover the cost of providing the servers and communications systems on which it relies. Its algorithms exist because no matter how fast we read, we cannot read the work of a million people writing simultaneously. As a result, “algorithms” are a required part of any form of system that purports to provide such mass communication. The objective is to keep you posting and active, so that it can charge for that advertising. “Well-informed” is nowhere to be found among the motivations underlying this process, but making you angry enough to engage with a post increases profit.

An analogy might be found in our rules of order, the processes by which we manage our public deliberations. We can imagine a meeting of 60 people, with but one microphone, talking and listening by turns, and reaching some result over the span of a day. Everyone has a few minutes to speak. Everyone gets heard. If someone says something outrageous, the group does not repeat it. Slow, but workable. Instead, we have given all sixty people microphones and headphones, but there are hidden controls determining which microphones are live and who will hear what; more people are intentionally fed the outrageous statements. It is not something I would expect to work well, unless the objective is to bring those sixty people to a condition of chair-throwing disagreement.

In addition to this flaw, the owners of our social media can use their algorithms to manage the chance that anything you say is heard. If you are in political disagreement with them, your chances may become very limited. The algorithms promote outrage, demand a high follower count, and may well reward followers of a specific ideology, yet they are necessary because of the torrent of posts from everyone who craves attention. The only filters present, if they are present, relate to outright pornographic content.

The people who currently own our information systems are among the wealthiest on the planet, and they want us misinformed and unable to unite. Their opinions dictate what part of the truth might be heard, if any. The Washington Post, being crushed by Jeff Bezos, is only one in a long line of examples of the dominance of wealth.

This brings us to our present situation, in which social media is not merely misinforming us wholesale; it is sucking advertising revenue away from the few sources of information that are still checking the facts they present to the public as news. Our social media amplifies ignorance, invective, and intolerance. It is not benign; it is actively destroying the information and common knowledge on which society is built.

What do we ban? For this to work, we cannot ban companies by name. We must identify specific actions or characteristics that necessitate shutting them down for the good of our society. For the good, in fact, of human civilization.

1. The condition of having too many eligible posts to present, necessitating an algorithm to select what a reader sees and to select posts to be shown to more readers than others, is evidence of a system that cannot be used in a human society.
2. If the system profits from engagements, it is not evidence, but when this is combined with item one, it becomes a signature of an unusable system.
3. The rejection of legal responsibility for the truth or falsehood of posts, for slander or libel committed by their authors, and for damage done to the community, is also evidence of an unusable system. Legal responsibility doesn’t easily apply until a detected/reported breach is not remedied.
4. Accepting posts from sources that are not fully identified is evidence of a system that is unusable. This does not mean that everyone has to know who the author is, but that the system and its owner must have taken reasonable steps to ensure that THEY know who the author is. Anonymity may be approved and necessary for some sensitive information. After all, reporters protect their sources, but the reporters who do also know who those sources are. By itself, this is not evidence.
5. The absence of any indication of the veracity of a source or their effort to check the accuracy of the things they say is evidence of an unusable system. This condition is commonplace in our current media environment. “Fox News” is an entertainment channel, and cannot, in legal terms, call itself news without incurring far larger penalties for lying than it has already suffered. There is no indication of this in its programming. In combination with item four, this becomes a signature for a system that cannot be used.

When item one is combined with any of the other four, the system is unusable.

When items three, four, and five are combined, the system is unusable.

Items three and four together are permissible so long as five is not present.

All of the problems discussed have been aggravated by the development of AI tools that enable anyone with the money to subscribe to them to create images and videos depicting any person, living or dead, in places they have never been, doing things they never did, and saying things they never said.

Why is it incompatible with a society of humans?

Humans, as noted elsewhere in my writings, have evolved to survive as groups that communicate and cooperate. The unit of survival is not the individual human; it is the family or the tribe. While limited by Dunbar’s number, we have evolved a number of physical and emotional characteristics that help us belong to our tribe.

We evolved without anonymity; members of the tribe know who you are, and you know who they are. We know, when we communicate, that you are not a robot or an alien. We know your reputation for honesty and intelligence. We have a basis to judge what is presented.

Without that information, we’re in trouble. When everyone is handed a bullhorn, the people we need to hear are unlikely to be heard, the people who govern us are unlikely to know what they are doing, and we have no way to detect the problems being created.

The more intelligent among us will know, but the idiots who have been given bullhorns outnumber them.umber them.