Social media empower stupidity and hatred and cause violence

Sri Lanka Shut Down Social Media. My First Thought Was ‘Good.’

Subtitle: As a tech journalist, I’m ashamed to admit it. But this is how bad the situation has gotten.

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. 

And indeed, by Sunday morning so many false reports about the carnage were already circulating online that the Sri Lankan government worried more violence would follow.

It pains me as a journalist, and someone who once believed that a worldwide communications medium would herald more tolerance, to admit this — to say that my first instinct was to turn it all off. 

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.

. . . .

I noted this in my very first column for The Times almost a year ago, when 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.

“They have weaponized civic discourse,” I wrote. 

“And they have weaponized, most of all, politics. Which is why malevolent actors continue to game the platforms and why there’s still no real solution in sight anytime soon, because they were built to work exactly this way.”

. . . .

But while social media had once been credited with helping foster democracy in places like Sri Lanka, it is now blamed for an increase in religious hatred. 

That justification was behind another brief block a year ago, aimed at Facebook, where the Sri Lankan government said posts appeared to have incited anti-Muslim violence.

“The extraordinary step reflects growing global concern, particularly among governments, about the capacity of American-owned networks to spin up violence,” The Times reported on Sunday.

Spin up violence indeed. 

Just a month ago in New Zealand, a murderous shooter apparently radicalized by social media broadcast his heinous acts on those same platforms. 

Let’s be clear, the hateful killer is to blame, but it is hard to deny that his crime was facilitated by tech.

. . . .

New Zealand, under the suffer-no-foolish-techies leadership of Jacinda Ardern, will be looking hard at imposing penalties on these companies for not controlling the spread of extremist content.

Australia already passed such a law in early April.

Here in the United States, our regulators are much farther behind, still debating whether it is a problem or not.

It is a problem, even if the manifestations of how these platforms get warped vary across the world. 

They are different in ways that make no difference and the same in one crucial way that does. 

Namely, social media has blown the lids off controls that have kept society in check. 

These platforms give voice to everyone, but some of those voices are false or, worse, malevolent, and the companies continue to struggle with how to deal with them.

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. 

Well, they are gone now, and that means we need to have a global discussion involving all parties on how to handle the resulting disaster, well beyond adding more moderators or better algorithms.