The early days of social media saw the platforms embrace a popular image as absolute defenders of free speech, empowering the disenfranchised by handing them a global megaphone with which to speak directly to the world. The Arab Spring cemented the idea that social media could even topple dictatorships by freeing citizens all over the globe to come together. As terrorists began to use their platforms to recruit and promote violence, Twitter famously rebuked Congress’ request to reign in violent use of its platform by proclaiming that in the name of free speech it would never censor a terrorist. The past several years have seen this image come crashing down as it collided with the geopolitical reality of the world in which the social platforms exist. Most importantly, governments throughout the world, both democratic and autocratic, have awoken to the immense power of single centralized information and communications platforms to surveil their citizens at unprecedented resolution and to control and censor their speech. Is this new second era of social media empowering or silencing the world’s citizens?
The first era of social media was defined by the heady blind excitement of building tools that made it easy for ordinary non-technical users to publish content and share it with the world. In the place of the early techies-only web that demanded basic understanding of HTML and web technologies to have a voice online, or the complexity and lack of easy promotion of early blogging platforms, “social media” came to be defined by centralized platforms that both trivialized the publication of content and revolutionized how that content could be shared with the world.
One of the hallmarks of these platforms was the way in which they carved off a walled garden for their users that was distinct and private from the rest of the web, rather than attempting to integrate with the existing web like their predecessors. Their centralized nature created multiple parallel versions of the web that granted them absolute control over what was said and seen within their digital walls, but also enabled them to make it easy to rapidly promote content at a global scale, enabling the rise of citizen virality.
In the first social era, the technologists building these platforms blindly prioritized making it possible to share any and all content, regardless of societal ramifications. The platforms proudly embraced popular characterizations of themselves as swashbuckling free speech pirates fighting the evil overlords of censorship. Their walled gardens became a reprieve from a physical and digital world that was increasingly under attack from governments and elites that were extending their control over speech ever further. With its family photos and technology-first image, social was viewed by most governments as a rather benign tool that would have little impact on their ability to govern and wield power over information.
The Arab Spring brought that indifference to a rapid end as governments all over the world woke up to the disruptive potential of social to allow their citizens to overcome information asymmetry and organize mass movements. As Google General Counsel David Drummond noted in his address to the 2013 Google Ideas conference, “Governments have learned in what might be the steepest learning curve in history that they can shape this global phenomenon called the Internet and in ways that often go beyond what they can do in the physical world and they’re doing so at an alarming pace.”
At the same time, terrorist groups and trolls found their voices magnified a million-fold and discovered the incredible power of social’s viral nature to help them broaden their reach beyond their wildest dreams. Governments stepped forward to counter the rise of hate speech and calls to violence, but went further to demand a curtailing of criticism of themselves. Nation states discovered the ability of social to help them launch pinpoint precision information warfare campaigns capable of undercutting the legitimacy of social movements and even presidential elections with impunity.
Social platforms reacted to this sudden awareness by pivoting nearly 180 degrees, turning from the party of free speech to the party of absolute censorship. They began to mass evict users, blacklist organizations, purge topics and embark upon an overall censorship campaign that would have made the government of Orwell’s 1984 proud. While proclaiming the laudable goals of reducing usage of their platforms by terrorists, mitigating misinformation misuse and halting hate speech, the reality is that platforms have gone far further, embracing the idea of absolute censorship as the ultimate digital fix for all the world’s problems. In true Silicon Valley fashion, the socials have adopted the idea that any societal ill can be fixed with a few lines of code to patch it up.
While powerful people have always sought to control the public flow of information, never before have just a handful of people wielded absolute control over what so much of the entire planet’s population can see and say. Even in the most repressive regimes, information finds a way and in democracies, myriad independent news outlets, each with their own voice, compete to provide their own distinct narratives on the events of the moment.
Social media has unraveled these centuries of freedoms in the space of just a few short years.
The public today increasingly consumes its news through social media, especially Facebook, leading to a mass shuttering of independent news outlets. The news industry is in a state of economic collapse, silencing the richly diverse and energetic ecosystem of ideas that traditionally informs democracies. More insidiously, the centralized rulemaking of the social platforms extends their censorship controls globally. In the past, even the most repressive of governments could control only the flow of information within their own borders. Today, Facebook can control what a quarter of the earth’s population can talk about, eliminating the role and impact of national borders and traditional governments.
The elimination of national sovereignty is perhaps the most troubling aspect of the rise of social censorship, removing the right of democratically elected governments to ensure their citizens are able to learn about and express the views important to and representative of their cultures. In their place is the modern day colonialism of Silicon Valley, exporting a narrow slice of Western cultural beliefs as the global standard by which all inhabitants of planet earth worldwide are expected to conform.
At the same time, by teaching a generation of citizens to live broadcast their daily lives into the web, expressing their most intimate and sensitive beliefs and views for the world to see, they have also helped governments build the most powerful surveillance state the world has ever imagined.
In the end, the social media platforms that once empowered the world’s citizenry have instead today silenced those voices, elevated the elites and created a surveillance state that George Orwell would be proud of.
