Social Media To Me

For a long time I’ve generally leaned towards the notion that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are bad for our society. I get that they’re popular (even my parents are on Facebook), but now and then I’ve read stories on the epidemic of misinformation that has been spreading across social media sites, and that has deterred me from joining the “hive mind” so to speak (I do own a Facebook account, but I originally got it just so that I would qualify for a discount on some ice cream; it’s been almost completely unused since then). It’s also been pointed out that the channels of speech seem to be increasingly monopolized by just a small number of private companies such as these. Donald Trump was banned from both Twitter and Facebook recently, and although I certainly don’t like Trump, some see this event as a sign of the dystopian social media landscape we could one day reside in. In the years since Trump was elected, there were times when I personally felt that both liberal and conservative media outlets had a responsibility to stop giving airtime to Trump and effectively increasing his credibility amongst the right despite his reputation of falsehoods. That’s why I still don’t know what to think about him being banned. To be clear, I’m not comparing Facebook and Twitter to the likes of Fox News. The hogwash that comes from sites like Fox News comes as a result of private elites deliberately misleading the public for personal profit. The hogwash that comes from social media is more like the collective ignorance of society manifested. Anyway, I guess that the bans would have been more practical had they come four years ago, because then there would have been less of a chance that they would be seen as politically motivated. Twitter has rules policing hate speech but made huge exceptions for Trump on the grounds that he was a public official, allowing Trump to spread damaging lies and subsequently use those lies as the basis for policy. To ban Trump this late in the game could fuel right-wing conspiracies and push conservatives off of mainstream online forums and into the darker side of the internet, further destroying any hope of our society uniting under a single civil discourse where we might actually understand each others’ ideological viewpoints. That’s a worst case scenario; only time will tell what the bans mean for the future of social media and our country as a whole.