The problem with social media is not content but its distortion of reality

We humans are decision-making machines. We spend our lives capturing and storing information about our world and using that information to build detailed mental models. We start from the moment we are born.

We sense and explore our surroundings, and we test and model our experiences. We keep building these models until we can accurately predict how our own actions, and the actions of others, will impact our future. 

Social media changes what it means to perceive our world and generalize our experiences. This distortion drives each of us to make significant errors when we build mental models.  

The arena in which individuals come together to share issues of importance, exchanging opinions through discussion and deliberation. It is within the public sphere that society develops an understanding of ourselves — our collective wisdom. 

The public sphere of course does not represent a singular view. It encompasses the whole spectrum of views, spanning a range of cultural and political perspectives from mainstream to fringe. That spectrum represents our common reality.

Social media has distorted the public sphere beyond recognition. Each of us now has a deeply flawed mental model of our own communities. This damages our collective wisdom, but it is not the content itself that is most responsible. We must instead blame the machinery of distribution.  

Social media has inserted itself between each of us and our daily experiences, moderating and manipulating the information we receive about our society.

Platforms do this by profiling us over time and using those profiles to target us with selective content - custom curated news, ads, and posts that do not represent our society as a whole.

• The warped public sphere we each inhabit is not random. It is custom-curated to target us with information that will most likely resonate.
• This dynamic amplifies extreme perspectives and drives polarization, but even worse, it destroys our collective wisdom as a society.

The biggest problem with social media is not the content itself, but the machinery of targeted distribution.

To fix this, we have two options: ban profiling and targeting practices or make the strings visible so we know when we are experiencing distorted views of our world.

We can make the strings visible without disrupting business models, but we need to do it in an aggressive way. For example, we could require that every piece of content on social media be clearly labelled in ways that allow us to understand how it fits into the public sphere.

Is it shared among large segments of the population? Or is it fringe content that is targeted and shared among very narrow groups?

Providing such context would help restore our understanding of the public sphere.

An outright ban on profiling and targeting would help restore the public sphere to a far less distorted representation of society. Unfortunately, the economy of social media is built on profiling and targeting. These practices form the core of most platforms’ advertising models. As such, major technology corporations would vigorously fight such restrictions. 

Currently platforms like Facebook and Twitter allow users to see primitive targeting information about advertisements. To find this information, users need to click multiple times, which they will rarely do. 

We should push for transparency in targeting. This means requiring platforms to clearly disclose the demographic characteristics of the exposed population when targeting us with any piece of content that is not distributed broadly.