ARGUMENT: Anti-social mediaHow Social Media’s Obsession with Scale Supercharged Disinformation
The 6 January siege on the U.S. Capitol building illustrates just how powerful a networked conspiracy can be when it’s amplified through social media. “The attack was the culmination of years of disinformation from President Trump, which ramped up after Biden was declared the president-elect — and largely the product of social media companies’ inability to control the weaponization of their products,” John Donovan writes.
Over the last four years, disinformation has become a global watchword. After Russian meddling on social networks during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, experts expressed concerns that social media would continue to be weaponized — warnings that were often dismissed as hyperbolic.
Joan Donovan writes in the Harvard Business Review that the 6 January siege on the U.S. Capitol building illustrates just how powerful a networked conspiracy can be when it’s amplified through social media. “The attack was the culmination of years of disinformation from President Trump, which ramped up after Biden was declared the president-elect — and largely the product of social media companies’ inability to control the weaponization of their products.”
Donovan adds:
Over the years, we’ve witnessed different approaches to weaponization take shape. While Russian meddling illustrated the potential for well-placed disinformation to spread across social media, the 2017 “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, Va. showed how a group of white supremacists could use social media to plan a violent rally. The Capitol siege had elements of both — it involved a wider ideological spectrum than Charlottesville, and participants had not simply coordinated over social media, but had been brought together through it. The insurrectionists were united by their support for Donald Trump and their false belief that the election had been stolen from him. At the apex of the moment, Trump used social media to message to the rabid crowd in real time from his mobile phone at a safe remove.
This has raised fundamental questions about the future of the platforms where this all played out.
In order to know what comes next, Donovan writes, we need to ask: How did social media become a disinformation machine? And how do the business models of these tech companies explain how that happened?
He concludes:
As we, as a society, consider next steps, we should keep in mind that emphasizing scale has a trade off with safety. Furthermore, failing to act on disinformation and viral conspiracy doesn’t mean they will eventually just go away; in fact, the opposite is true. Because social media seems to move the fringe to the mainstream, by connecting people with similar interests from the mundane to the utterly bizarre, tech companies must come up with a plan for content curation and community moderation that reflects a more human scale.
Tech companies, including start-ups wary of overreach, and VCs should begin to draw up model policies for regulators to consider, bearing in mind that openness and scale pose significant risks not only to profits, but to democracies.
