Social Media Impacting our Views on the World

Concepts: 

• Freedom of speech
• Ideology
• Misinformation

Trump on Twitter and Facebook: 

• Trump used his social media to share misleading content and 'inflame' his millions of followers
• As a result of this, Trump was banned from both media platforms (FB indefinitely, Twitter permanently)

Arguments supporting this: 

• Those who feel the bans were appropriate acknowledge that simply banning a single account is hardly an adequate solution to address the deep-rooted issues that led to the event of the Capitol attack on January 6
• Trump's violence-inciting posts were a significant factor, but social media platforms' broader tendency to promote and amplify conspiracy theories, fringe groups, and other problematic content must also be addressed

Arguments against this: 

• Many people criticized these decisions as infringements on free speech
• The first amendment only protects individuals' speech from US governmental oppression - there is nothing illegal about a private firm censoring people on its platform. But even if it's not a legal issue with respect to the First Amendment, the question of when and how it's appropriate for private companies to "de-platform" people - especially notable public figures such as Trump - is not obvious
• Freedom of speech aside, many Americans suggest that these actions clearly illustrate the inherent bias they feel mainstream media holds against conservative voices
• Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel has validated these concerns, with her spokesman noting that the "right to freedom of opinion is of fundamental importance," and that as such, it is "problematic that the president's account have been permanently suspended."

Key reasons that these issues are so difficult to untangle:

1. Social media is fundamentally different from traditional media (newspapers, radio, broadcast networks), and so traditional approaches to regulation have largely fallen short
   - Traditional cable news are defined by limited by bandwidth. There are a limited number of news media networks, and a limited number of primetime windows and headline slots with which to influence as large an audience as possible
   -Social media platforms offer essentially infinite bandwidth, with millions of accounts that can each target much narrower audiences
   
   
2. Traditional news content is produced with editorial oversight: A set of producers with executives above them determine the personalities and viewpoints to be broadcasted across their networks or given coveted publication space. This means that it's easier for companies to supervise the content that is shared on their platforms, and it's also easier for third parties to hold companies accountable.
   This is in contrast to social media, in which platforms are merely conduits for user-generated content that's subject to much less moderation
   
   
3. In general, viewers and readers of traditional news media must proactively choose the content they consume - whether that's a show they choose to watch or a column they choose to subscribe to
   Social media users, on the other hand, have almost no control over the content they see. Instead platforms use complex algorithms to serve content they think will keep users scrolling, often exposing them to more radical posts that they may never have sought out on their own
   
   

Social media platforms and many traditional media companies are profit-driven. But their strategies for maximizing profits are fundamentally different, and so applying the same regulatory frameworks across both doesn't work

While traditional media business model can lead to significant polarization, the limited bandwidth and editorial oversight generally incentivizes these companies to attempt to reach broader markets, keeping them from publishing extremely fringe content

The social media business model, however, relied on leveraging individual users' data to push highly-personalized content in order to maximize scroll time, incentivizing more customized, and thus potentially more extremist, content.

A possible silver lining is that they highlighted the ongoing problem so clearly that they could serve as a real turning point in efforts to work towards a solution. Indeed, Facebook and Twitter's unprecedented bans of President Trump suggest that a new era of social media regulation (enforced both externally and internally) may be close at hand.