Facebook Is Not the Town Square - The Bulwark - 0 views
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everyone knows that Facebook is just our new, digital Town Square, right? You can’t blame Facebook if it’s just a distillation of all our worst and best impulses.
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On Facebook, you have to endure anonymous abuse of this nature with absolutely no recourse other than to hit the “report” button and hope that some community standards drone, somewhere, suspends the offending account for a couple days.
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On Facebook, you’re dumped into a group of “friends” you’ve never met, or interacted with—many of whom might not even be actual human beings. And the only help you get in determining social context is a combination of text, emojis, and gifs.
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On Facebook, you may be arguing with hired Russian trolls who are actively employed by Vladimir Putin to sow discord in the world.
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In a real town square, if someone claims they plan to assault you and your family you can punch their physical face with your physical fist.
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In a real town square, you can fit, at most, a few hundred people. If you’re in the square of a giant, world-historic city in Russia or China, you might be able to squeeze in 600,000 people. On Facebook, you have . . . everyone on planet Earth!
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In a real town square, people who insist that COVID vaccines are filled with mind control nanobots and that the Jews are enslaving children are relegated to the fringes.
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Facebook follows you everywhere—like a psychotic ex. It’s always hiding in the bushes and you have no choice but to wonder what the heck it’s up to right now,
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In a real town square, if the entire town became convinced that their mayor is the Christ risen and decided that they needed to stockpile AK-47s in preparation for the apocalypse then visitors to the town would quietly leave (and warn the authorities).
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On Facebook, those folks get a guest pass to every other Town Square—again in the world—and are free to go around preaching their lunacy to others without being constrained by space, time, or economics.
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In a real town square, the town doesn’t benefit financially by attracting the stupidest/craziest/most pernicious townfolk to the soapbox and then doing everything in their power to make sure the residents of the town are afraid to leave the square for fear of missing something truly terrible.
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Facebook makes approximately all its money by getting you to rubber-neck through your day as you slow-roll past trainwreck after trainwreck.
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On Facebook, they are brought together into powerful collectives, afforded megaphones, and algorithmically ushered into everyone’s sphere of influence to corrupt otherwise rational and healthy discourse.
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But in fairness, there is one aspect of the town square metaphor where Facebook is a pretty decent facsimile of the real thing. It’s the one where we used to drag innocent people to a gallows, accuse them of something completely insane, like “witchcraft,” and then either ruin or end their lives.
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Facebook is pretty good at that because its fortunes are made by making sure that you keep coming back—it doesn’t matter if you’re sharing pics of kitties, contributing to a genocide, or part of an angry mob that’s destroying someone’s livelihood or reputation on some fanciful whim.
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What’s another real-world concept where a private unregulated enterprise gets to make a fortune running psychological experiments on the population of the world, which leads to a slow collapse of civil and civic order and drives everyone insane? I’m actually drawing a blank—but it sure as hell isn’t a “town square.”