On Charlie Kirk and Saving Civil Society (opens in new tab)

Social media is 90% outrage farming by nation states and individuals with agendas. I think the experiment failed. Humans in large groups are so trivially manipulated by algorithms.

Our ape brains at large just can't deal with a firehose of manipulation. We're just giving bad actors a key to our subconscious to destroy the fabric of our civilization, and those bad actors are using it as much as they can.

This article is really missing the discussion on the fact that social media is far, far more inauthentic than real humans these days.

Iryna Zaruska is why I'll keep an eye on alt media. I don't trust conventional media not to curate away content for my own good. You can mock it as FOMO, or racism, but I want to know where in the subway not to sit. This is news I can use. I can't be convinced to go back to Walter Cronkite for my daily memes.

I don’t think it is possible to just “quit” using social media. The problem is that quitting feels to most people like giving you your weapons when your enemy still has them. Maybe if everyone “disarmed” at the same time it would work but how could you coordinate that? No one wants to sit out social media only to let their opponents continue to use it as an effective way to spread THEIR message.

I agree that these platforms are an issue, but I think it's also a matter of how you use them. I spent a couple years on Twitter/X and regret every minute, whereas my time on Instagram has been great. That's because I fed my X algorithm all sorts of rage bait and political content through my interactions and follows, and likewise my Instagram is full of friend's posts, comedy skits, and poetry/literature due to mindful interactions with content. I'm not saying the platforms aren't at fault, because they definitely are, but it's also possible to curate your feeds for stuff that's healthier.

That being said, we shouldn't have to put effort into curating our feeds to ensure we don't become mentally unwell. I'd be happy if every social network disappeared and we went back to chatrooms and maybe 2013 Instagram / some way to share photos with friends.

I'm an older gen-z and I see my younger peers starting to become mindful of the harms of social media. I don't know if it will ever be seen as harmful as smoking, but I have a feeling that the younger crowd is ready for a more mindful form of social media. Anecdotal, but it feels like my generation mostly uses Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok, FB and X are more for millennials. We're aware of doomscrolling and stuff, perhaps in the near future we will drop our usage of TikTok and a new, more mindful form of social media will emerge.

edit: just realised I wrote "mindful" 50 million times

Completely agree with Cal but this just isn't going to happen. People's livelihoods depend on these platforms. They're extremely addictive. If one side retreats it only amplifies the voice of the other side. The only way something like a mass exodus from these platforms is possible is through legislation. But the platforms are so powerful and well funded and well lobbied that this is next to impossible. Expect things to get worse before they get better (if they do in fact eventually get better).

the article reads a lot more like [on social media and saving civil society]

Regardless of what social media is, my hope & desire is that we can get better at it. If we can layer in more context to the things we see online, if we can provide digestible context on who it is posting, I think a lot of the harm and damage could be ameliorated.

But we need to be in a position where folks can build & develop the social networks, where we can experiment more broadly. There's very social technologies available where humanity is afforded some hooks to improve their social media-verses.

It's interesting to me that the Kirk submission that criticizes those celebrating death, and advocating for stepping away from social media, is the one that gets flagged.

I think it's lazy to say social media is to blame. Political murder and radical ideas have been around pretty much from the beginning of history. Is social media really more effective in radicalizing people than folklore, religion or mass propaganda? People didn't change much, only the means by which they communicate and share ideas.

The root cause is the economic inequality. People are angry they so little while Billionaires have massive amounts of money.

> To save civil society, we need to end our decade-long experiment with global social platforms. We tried them. They became dark and awful. It’s time to move on.

I mean, the lack of global social media platforms didn't do much for RFK or JFK or MLK Jr or Malcolm X or Harvey Milk or...

This sort of thing happens in any society where people have differences over how the state or capital should be used, and where at least some of those people can obtain or craft weapons. It's not just the US, either, though the availability of firearms is far more widespread here than in other Western nations. Canada, the UK, France, all have had politically-motivated assassinations (or attempts at assassinations) in the pre-social media era.

Humans are very good at being awful.

It's classic white-on-white violence. We need to find out why he was radicalised.