Should social media be our new public square?

In the US, teens are now spending on average five hours a day on social media, according to the latest Gallup poll. Nine years ago, UCWeb conducted a survey on social media use in Bangladesh and found that 70 percent of users spent more than an hour on social networking sites and about 23 percent spent more than five hours a day. Today, those numbers have surely gone up. And even though there isn't enough hard data on that, you can just tell by the number of people you see staring at their screens regardless of where they are and what they are doing.

As social animals, human beings have a desire for others to know what they are doing and saying. It's why we post on our social media accounts. But aside from posting, social media has become the go-to place for many to get their news, views and overall information, and for communicating them; thus popularising the notion that social media has now become the new public square, perhaps on a civilizational scale. That, however, is a false dichotomy, according to American social psychologist, author and professor at the New York University Stern School of Business, Jonathon Haidt.

In his book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Haidt argues that social media is not the modern day equivalent of the public square, but that of the Roman Colosseum. While having many positives, social media has essentially provided everyone with a dart-gun to shoot just about anyone else, sometimes based on something as trivial as the usage of merely one word they didn't like. There is an extraordinary amount of intimidation available via social media and this has led to leaders of all kinds of organisations and people who are more rational and on the saner side of any debating spectrum, "to run scared."

"Social media allows whoever is angriest and can mobilise the most force to threaten, harass, surround and mob anyone," according to Haidt. So, fundamentally, those individuals who disagree with the groupthink are being forced into silence in the face of this mob mentality—as the mob is less interested in having an open discussion with greater diversity of thinking, and just like in the Roman Colosseum, are more interested to see blood. But, "in a large and secular democracy, people have to be able to speak up," says Haidt, which is currently not happening via social media.

Another issue that people are just starting to realise because of Israel's genocidal actions against Palestinians—where pro-Palestine content is being heavily censored—is how easy it is for these social media giants to influence people to be "pro-this" or "pro-that" on any political issue. This is also obvious when it comes to a range of other topics. For example, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, TikTok—owned by a Chinese company—had reportedly changed its algorithm in support of Russia's side of the narrative. Similarly, as the Twitter Files exposed, during the 2020 US presidential elections, social media companies were heavily influenced by the US security state to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story as being false—in support of candidate Joe Biden—even though it was true.

The fact that social media giants are constantly under pressure from governments around the world (and other powerful groups) to manipulate their users is nothing new. Just recently, the Bangladesh government has threatened to ban social media giants Facebook and YouTube if they do not comply with its instructions to prevent the spread of "disinformation." However, as we have previously seen in the case of all governments—including ours—the government and its officials often tend to be the biggest originators and promoters of disinformation, or censors of true information that can debunk or counter disinformation. Under the guise of "preventing the spread of disinformation", they tend to regularly "censor true information" that can inconveniently disrupt the existing power structure.

As was revealed when the Twitter Files were coming out, a large percentage of Twitter accounts were bots, many of which were actively trying to shift people's opinion when it came to select important subjects. Such problems will only worsen as AI and other technological tools continue to advance in their levels of sophistication, and as countries and interest groups clash to establish their "narratives as reality," to push their agendas and promote their interests.

These dangers had been foreseen and warned about by some tech experts and human rights defenders long ago. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, once wrote that: "While the internet has brought about a revolution in our ability to educate each other, the consequent democratic explosion has shaken existing establishments to their core." This will lead to increased but "undetectable mass social influence powered by artificial intelligence [which] is an existential threat for humanity."

While still in its infancy, Assange believed that the geometric nature of this trend was clear—this "phenomenon differs from traditional attempts to shape culture and politics by operating at a scale, speed, and increasingly at a subtlety, that appears highly likely to eclipse human counter-measures."

Social media is a disruptive technology, that has immensely disrupted human societies—for better or for worse. But, its underlying technological structure is increasingly being encroached upon, for the purpose of discourse control. When you add the all too human flaws mentioned by Haidt into it, what you have is not fit to serve as the new public square.

What is essentially missing when it comes to the social media landscape are substantive discussions—since its deepest flaws remain a mystery to most—to establish the philosophical underpinnings that can drive changes on its technical front and, consequently, establish some universal legal norms to ensure that it is not being used to manipulate human perceptions, at least at scale. Until then, to assume that it should serve the purpose of a public square will definitely be foolhardy.

Eresh Omar Jamal is deputy head of editorial and opinion. His X handle is: @EreshOmarJamal

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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