We think of social media as a level playing field. A place where everyone’s voice matters. But when you look below the surface, social media has become a false democracy. You may remember this news story from 2015:
“Red Starbucks Cup Brews Controversy on Social Media.”
If you don’t remember this news story, congratulations. You must’ve had a very peaceful November. You couldn’t go on Twitter that month without seeing someone’s opinion about how the cups were evil, the cups were great, the whole thing is meaningless, or the whole thing is super important, or whatever.
The first line on MSNBC’s archive of the story reads: “Customers are angry with Starbucks over new plain red holiday cups.”
Is that news? Customers are angry all the time. Why is this on the news?
Seeing it on the news makes you think, “Oh, lots of people must be angry about this. How stupid.” But honestly, who’s more stupid, the guy on the street corner yelling that Obama’s an alien or the guy who sits and listens?
Everyone has a voice, but the loudest most offensive voice gets through more often than the level-headed ones. Social media takes free speech, a core American value, and twists it into a kind of false democracy.
Voting in a False Democracy
I use this controversy as my go-to example precisely because of how unimportant it is. It isn’t the only controversy of its kind. We care so much so often about things that matter so little.
Most of you probably don’t care about it now and didn’t care about the cups when they were released. So why do you remember it?
We remember these controversies because of the power they give people. One day, a random guy tweeted about 30-50 feral hogs in his backyard, and then his tweet is forever immortalized in Good Morning America’s “10 Memest Memes of the Decade.” (oof, what a title)
The tweet was also talked about by Wired, The Guardian, and GQ under their “US News” sections.
It’s almost like we get to decide what the news covers. If we make something trend, it’s important and then the news covers it. Exactly what the founding fathers wanted, right?
Is Smokey Robinson dead?
Twitter feeds the news, but this becomes a problem when looking for information that can’t be decided by a vote. Like whether or not a person is dead.
It happened a few weeks ago. “Kim Jong Un dead” trended on Twitter, but most of the tweets causing it to trend said, “Is Kim Jong Un dead?” Still, it trended as a declaration which led people to keep asking the question.
The same thing happened on an episode of The Office. Ryan read that Smokey Robinson died and made a big deal about it. Oscar discovered it was a hoax within minutes by just looking it up.
Twitter has become a source of news because the press uses it as a way to inform people about developing stories. But it was that very strategy that lead to confusion about Kim Jong Un’s death.
False Democracy in the Real World
We need the news to be independent of the false democracy, which is why it’s so troubling that the press treats Twitter as a source of news and a place to communicate it.
Twitter is in the News category on the app store, but where is the incentive to keep misinformation off the site? In traditional media there are journalistic checks in place but Twitter and its users reward incendiary, unhelpful people. It values the immediate over the accurate. Twitter is changing our expectations of what news is.
In false democracy, the weight of your idea isn’t what matters, your following does, which is why Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil have appeared on the news to discuss coronavirus, despite it not being their field. It’s why Bill Nye appears beside Neil deGrasse Tyson, despite him only having a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering.
The news rewards journalists and personalities for being incendiary because it gets online engagement and viewership which leads to ad revenue. All you have to do is watch the 6:00 hour on MSNBC, CNN, or FOX to see the never-ending pot shots they take at each other.
Oh, did Sean Hannity say that? Rachel Maddow said WHAT? It’s exhausting, self-congratulatory nonsense and it’s doing nothing to inform people. It’s like a never-ending episode of Degrassi.
It doesn’t even stop when we’re dealing with a crisis like the one we’re in. This kind of behavior was already tiring before March 2020 but now it seems painfully tone deaf.
False Democracy and You
The false democracy doesn’t just affect what we know. I can also determine what other people know about us.
In his book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson interviews about a half dozen people who have had their lives changed or seriously altered by social media. None of them were big names, in fact you probably don’t remember their “crimes.”
All of these people were victims of the false democracy of Twitter and Facebook. They made (admittedly) stupid jokes, they were published (sometimes against their wills,) and over a few days were the subjects of intense public scrutiny.
They all lost jobs, some fell into severe depression, and they’re all still marked with the top result on the Google search page being the dumbest thing they ever said publicly.
All of them had someone with a larger following make an example out of them (none of them had more than 500 followers). That person was able to make a hero out of themselves and a villain out of the person. But Ronson missed something about the public shaming process.
These normal, every day people became news stories on a 24-hour news cycle that values salacious and incendiary stories. The media only needed something to fill time. A BuzzFeed contributor needed to make their quota. So, someone had their life destroyed.
That just doesn’t seem fair.
In a democracy, the people have power. But we aren’t the ones with the power. If you have less than 10k followers on Twitter, you don’t have the power to publicly shame someone, but you are at risk of being absolutely destroyed by someone who does.
We feel like we have power when we join in the pile-on, but a snowflake halfway down the mountain didn’t cause the avalanche, it just aided a little in the destruction. We get this sick thrill out of someone being a worse person than us. At least I’m not a bigot.
But these ordeals (in the original witch-hunting sense of the word) don’t do anything to dismantle systemic injustice. If anything, it pacifies people into thinking the problem is being taken care of. While the news is focused on reporting what people want to know, what people need to know continues to happen in the background.
How To Solve the False Democracy
Twitter has become an institution. It’s something everyone is expected to have at least some command of. Public professionals, journalists, politicians, etc. are expected to be on social media. This hasn’t come without a cost. We’ve handed over our means of information and our privacy over to a private company.
Social media is a good way to share information, but it’s a horrible source of information. The first step to reforming social media is to adjust the way we look at it. What’s on social media doesn’t always represent what’s true.
We use social media to determine what’s newsworthy. We use it to determine someone’s character. It doesn’t do either of those things, so we should stop using it that way.
Social media is a tool, pure and simple. It does things at a scale previously unmatched. But it isn’t a utopia. Its risks need to be recognized. It can spread misinformation, it can defame someone in less than a day, and it can be incredibly addictive.
At some point we have to ask ourselves: do the benefits outweigh the costs?
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