Social media is now anti-social

“Social media,” such as Facebook and Instagram, are increasingly perceived as “anti-social media.”

The negative impacts include collection and sale of personal data, hate speech and cyberbullying, mental illness and suicides, and the fake news (both foreign and domestic) further polarizing our democracy and politics.

A social media’s income is a function of your TOD (“time on device”). The more its artificial intelligence (AI) learns of your leanings, loves and lusts, the longer it can hold you, seeing ads and bringing in dollars. The more raw meat it throws to the political wolves the more rabid and violent they will return.

The usual public policy or legal approaches to new societal challenges involve analogies and precedents — without stretching too far. Because differences of degree can easily evolve into differences of kind.

So it was with the magic of radio. A voice that could be heard for miles by thousands of individuals was different in kind from a speaker on a soapbox. As Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover said, “An obligation rests on us to see that it is devoted to real service,” and the Radio Act of 1927 was created.

That is what we confront today with social media. No radio or television station or network with an audience of thousands, or even low millions, can come close to the power of social media. Each of the top four, Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp and Instagram, have over two billion MAUs (Monthly Active Users). Facebook has three billion.

In 1926 House member Luther Johnson said of radio, “publicity is the most powerful weapon that can be wielded in a Republic, and when such a weapon is placed in the hands of … a single selfish group … then woe be to those who dare to differ with them.”

Imagine what he would have said in 1926 about a communications system that could reach two billion — the entire population on Earth in 1926.

There are few precedents or analogies appropriate for thinking about social media. We examine its issues through glasses that let us see only the founders’ 1791 First Amendment command that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech” and section 230 of a 1996 law drawing on concepts like defamation, obscenity and distinctions between publishers and distributors.

It's like looking to our municipal ordinances’ regulation of fireworks when planning our response to Vladimir Putin’s moving nuclear weapons into Belarus.

What’s the alternative? There are precedents.

Since 1988 the Human Genome Project has contributed to better disease prevention, diagnoses, and criminal investigations. But its director, James Watson, feared dangers as well. His first act? The creation of ELSI, the monitoring of its potential ethical, legal and social issues.

When will we finally undertake a thorough ELSI of our anti-social media?

Nicholas Johnson tries to keep his social media sociable. mailbox@nicholasjohnson.org