Trump is Gone, but Social Media’s Toxic Power Remains

For those of us who have worked professionally in digital strategy—and who’ve been sounding the alarm about technology’s effects on society and democracy—former President Trump’s ban from Twitter was not inevitable, even if it came as a relief. Tech companies like Twitter, for all their utopian jargon, have proven they don’t necessarily have the public’s interest as their first priority, and both Twitter and Facebook have shown themselves to be influenced by political and economic pressure as much as principle. It’s not a coincidence they acted just as the political winds shifted in Washington.

These companies need regulation, an acknowledgement of their oversized influence on our lives. But our dysfunctional relationship with social media goes deeper than a few unaccountable and overly powerful CEOs like Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg.

The sluggish march to accountability for President Trump on these platforms, combined with regulatory pressure that took years to build up, exposed how outdated our institutions in charge of public health and safety actually are. We are using decades-old laws and precedents, and centuries-old documents (like, for example, our Constitution), to deal with very modern problems that are changing by the day—of which our Founding Fathers could have never conceived.

We need modern tools in our toolbox to address the very real problems of modernity. Technology is changing our society faster than the oldest democracy in the world can keep up. While we’ve been waiting for either someone in charge at one of these companies to get a conscience or someone in the federal government to get a spine, real damage has been done to public trust—and we can expect more real-world consequences like the events of January 6.

We also have not yet reconciled with the awesome power social media has given us as individuals. From the standpoint of history, we’ve been given the most powerful communication devices ever known to humanity practically overnight. We mostly have not come to terms with how our personal social media usage compounds with other individual users to create these toxic environments.

Professors Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner, co-authors of “The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity and Antagonism Online”, have compared our social environments to a biomass, in which our individual behavior contributes to misinformation, and ultimately, gives energy to influencers who yield retweets and shares to nefarious ends. When we quote tweet something we hate, even to say we hate it, it signal boosts the worst parts of our internet culture. President Trump may have been an apex predator of hate speech, but each of us contributes small amounts of negative energy to the social media biomass.

The new administration will needs a strong focus on internet culture, addressing each of these issues head on. For too long we’ve let social media underpin our public lives, literally controlling our discourse and creating our individualized experiences with the truth, without acknowledging its real-world consequences. Twitter may seem like a fantasy world of hyped-up politicos, but it helps determine our reality in a very real way.

Here are three paths forward:

First, regulatory pressure has to evolve to acknowledge not just the anti-competitive behaviors of these companies, but how their organic content, spread user-to-user, often contributes to information disorder and harms public good. Facebook and Twitter have resisted applying the same editorial standards as media companies, insisting instead on their roles as public utilities. Let’s regulate them like one.

Second, we need democratic reforms that acknowledge the holes in our institutions exploited by the Trump administration, but also that allow government to move faster to solve problems and create solutions in response to technology’s influence on our lives. We also desperately need to overhaul our communications infrastructure for public officials, acknowledging social media, as the Supreme Court has recently done, as the “modern public square.”

And lastly, we have to focus on digital citizenship: how to interpret and criticize media of all types, how to understand our own ethical responsibility to be good actors online, and how our online lives have become an extension of our democracy. We need educational resources for understanding the internet starting at very young ages, given the increasing prevalence of internet-connected devices for children.

The cultural lag created by social media has been a problem boiling for more than a decade, and it’s time we faced it head on. The internet is going to continue to disrupt our lives, but we’ll get the kind of disruption we’re willing to fight for.