When I heard that Elon Musk is toying with the idea of buying Twitter, I wondered why he’d want it.  I suppose he thinks on grander societal scales than I do, and perhaps he sees some strategic use for the platform.

Personally, I wonder if social media is a failed experiment.

This sounds flippant but knowing how humans think leads me to believe that the present state of social media is ultimately where social media will always be.  I’m not talking about the web itself, because it’s too large and fragmented and it doesn’t coalesce people the way SM does.  I’m thinking of Twitter, Facebook, and their ilk.

As I see it, SM only plays out one of two ways.

First, you have the Open Platform scenario.   Here I’m thinking of Twitter.  The problem with this scenario is that the platform is inevitably flooded with

(a) People who are politically, religiously, or socially passionate about causes, and the more passionate they are they more they participate because their fervor leads them to post more.  These communities are also far larger than they are on the Internet in general (where one can easily avoid visiting a web site) or in offline life because these platforms bring together people from many disparate geographies and continually welcome new people who’d otherwise never discover them.

(b) Corporations who have the resources to manage social media as an advertising/publicity platform and an outspend others to make sure that their brand is promoted and robustly defended

(c) Government subversives who have practically unlimited resources to manipulate the platform subtlety, explicitly, periodically, continually, or however else they choose.

(d) The platform itself – or others, who develop scrapers, API interfaces, whatever with or without the platform’s consent or abetting – which plunders user’s privacy.  Even platforms where the main modus operandi is public (e.g., Twitter) can still harvest all kinds of information through cookies, trackers, etc.

In short, very quickly the platform is not really very social but more an arena of competing megaphones, angry mobs, hucksters and shills, and crusades.  This to me seems inevitable because those with the time (passionate people), financial power (corporations, governments), or devious self-interest (the platform itself) are going to dominate.

So what’s scenario two?  Maybe we should just put in some rules to exclude the really bad stuff, and let people make their own channels or filters so that they can interact with only groups and people they want to interact with.  Ah, you mean Facebook.

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