After years of complicity, it’s time to subvert Twitter, Facebook and other Big Social Media. Here’s why and how to start.
By Kai Chan
 |
| One riff off the "YouTwitFace" meme, from Pinterest. |
This inspired a meme and myriad riffs on all three of those platforms and more—by thousands of users … who kept right on using these highly addictive, polarizing, society-distorting platforms.
The joke is on us.
I’m no different. I was a holdout on all of these platforms, but I’m now a user of several. You almost can’t have much social influence these days without complying.
But now I see part of the way out. It involves working to build alternative platforms—that are designed for social action and meaningful connection—and bleeding market share away from the big for-profit companies that peddle in our attention and behaviours.
The Problem, In Broad Strokes
‘Big Tech’ has way too much power over our lives and societies. Social media companies distort policy through direct lobbying, and they enable others to distort elections and key social and health programs by spreading misinformation and sowing dissent. They elevate memes over truths, clickbait over news, trolls over meaningful conversation. And they directly fuel an economic model that manipulates our needs and desires to buy more.
Distortion and Dissent
 |
| A burned US flag after the Jan 6 insurrection at Capitol Hill, Washington, DC. Flikr |
Memes > Truths … Clickbait > News … Trolls > Conversation
I joined Twitter in 2011 as an experiment. I wanted to see how people were using this platform. Is there an opportunity to advance meaningful conversation, I wondered—without spending many hours skimming and elevating conversations that don’t feel important? I’m not saying “No”, but after more than a decade, I haven’t seen it.
How could a series of 280-character snippets culminate in a meaningful argument? What convinced me to investigate this was the notion that tweets could be much more than a tiny passage of text, because they could include links. Thus, a tweet could be an ad to a blog post or an article, that would really permit delving into the details. I tried this for years.
The problem is that—even if the format enables this facilitation of longer-form arguments—the vast majority of users don’t look to Twitter for this content. They look to it for the snippets and images. They like or skim over and move on. And the comments on these tweets often come from trolls, and often based just on the tweet/headline. As one recent example, when I tweeted an article about housing and tax policy, 3 of the first 4 comments were dismissively reactionary. Most clearly hadn’t read the article.
Meanwhile, my students do incredible things, like run ALL of Vancouver’s streets—1557 km (almost 1000 miles) while doing a PhD—and I can’t get them much love.
Fuelling Runaway Consumption
Perhaps the deepest problem with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram and the like, is that their whole business model is rooted in helping sell you things you mostly didn’t need, which is a key ultimate driver of the climate-and-ecological crisis.
Social media companies do this directly in two ways, not primarily via the countless influencers and celebrities that use these platforms to sell products and their visions of the world. The first way is of course advertising, which is a major revenue source for many of these ‘free’ platforms.
The second way is by selling your data—about your preferences and behaviours—to companies that seek to sell you things you don’t already want, or to manipulate you to do things you wouldn’t otherwise do. This is a primary revenue source for Big Social Media. There is no route more direct to boost runaway consumption.
Beyond consumption, the danger of this manipulation of our desires is that it furthers the myth that many of us don’t already have the roots of a good life (we do)—in our relationships with people and places—and that we can buy our way to happiness (we can’t). Arguably, these notions of a good life are even more fundamental to our current crises than the consumption itself.
A Partial Antidote: A Nonprofit Social Network Designed for Action
As I see it, the way forward has several key pieces. One is to limit our engagement with Big Social Media, and to use those platforms partly or largely to undermine the power they have over others (e.g., by making a public commitment and leading others to reflections/rationales like this one here). A second is to help build alternatives.
There are already some options that do most of what some of these platforms do, but without the profit motive and/or selling data. Signal is a messaging app like WhatsApp run by a non-profit organization; they don’t even store data linked to you. Ecosia is a search engine based on Google but that uses its profits to plant trees where they’re needed (search engines share some of the same issues described here). Ecosia is a B-corp (benefit corporation), meaning it exists for the purpose of advancing social and/or environmental causes, not only making profit. It still runs ads (that’s the revenue source), but there isn’t the potential deeper level manipulation.
 |
| CoSphere's hub on EarthNet. |
And now there’s EarthNet, a social network platform designed to connect people and foster collaboration across the environmental movement. You can easily create your own page, and control who sees what and how your data are used, unlike many platforms that are rooted in using your data for revenue. The interface is stripped-down to enable you to engage with meaningful content and conversation (including fact-checking), not designed to divert your attention away to other rabbit-holes. This nascent platform is still very much a work-in-progress, but now is the time to engage to help build it to serve as a foundation for a better internet and a better world.
The ‘catch’ is that EarthNet is a paid platform (albeit one “that puts planet over profit”). Unlike Facebook, you can’t create content on it for free (after the trial period). Some people—probably many—will see this as a major drawback. That’s my reaction, too: I like free stuff. The key is to keep reminding ourselves that there is no free lunch. If someone is providing a service apparently for free, they’re making money off you in other ways—likely ways that you wouldn’t like. Obviously lots of folks aren’t currently in a position to pay for these services. But if you are, maybe it’s worth it.
I believe it is, so CHANS Lab and CoSphere (a Community of Small-Planet Heroes) are proud to be on EarthNet.
CHANS Lab Views by Kai Chan's lab is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://chanslabviews.blogspot.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment