Social Media Isn't the Problem... We Are

Social media has been blamed for large, widespread public protests, promotion of radical conspiracy theories, threats and hate-mongering.

Social media is in fact the latest tool for things happening for centuries, just like letters, radio and the telephone. Polarization is not happening due to social media, but due to the growing income inequality, globalization and multiculturalism.

Fake news is often credited as the biggest demon-child of social media. The truth is that fake news has existed centuries before when people published pamphlets and newspaper columns to taint their(political) rivals.

Political activism, unethical lobbying and spreading false propaganda were seen many decades before social media came along.

Google and Facebook, the companies most people believe are profiting off the disinformation and conspiracy theories, have shown that they are all in fact trying to diffuse the problem and remove the ‘looney figures’ spreading hatred and fake news.

Conspiracy theories and fear-mongering were common much before social media existed. 

Y2k, the fear of computers not recognizing the year 2000 and crashing, as they were not programmed to handle dates beyond 1999, was blown out of proportion back in the late 90s.

Social media, whether it is Facebook or a Clubhouse audio chat room, is simply a powerful tool to connect with like-minded people and do stuff, anything that people do otherwise, good or bad.

The Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule, essentially states that a majority of output is a result of a much smaller input. Similarly, the 90/9/1 rule talks about the content that is generated on the internet.

According to this rule, 1 percent of users generate a huge majority of content(90 percent) acting as content creators. 9 percent of users create 10 percent of the content, and the rest of the 90 percent of users are simply an audience.

The disparity in the amount of content creation gives rise to fanatic influencers who rack up most of the noise, resulting in truth getting drowned and falsehoods(repeated often and loud) becoming the mainstream beliefs.

• Due to the 90/9/1 rule, a majority of people do not have any influence on our cultural narrative, leading to distortion and twisting of reality.
• Issues and agendas that have a loud community and media backing get highlighted, whereas real issues like mental health, homelessness, healthcare etc. remain sidelined.
• Radical, unconventional, man-bites-dog stories and viewpoints receive plenty of airtime and mindshare among people, due to their novelty.

For people in the media, like TV journalists and podcasters, things have changed a lot. A few decades ago, content was produced for a few outlets, channels and newspapers, and creators had to make it universally likeable, focusing on the consensus.

When the internet came, and there were thousands of choices available, news agencies and media publishers switched to a different strategy to sell their content in a crowded marketplace: Controversy.

The end result is a media circus, which distorts reality to resemble a wrecking ball hurdled on our planet.

Social media focuses on two very different extreme versions of reality, the very good and the very bad.

This is because normal beliefs and regular content do not provide the ‘clicks’ or the ‘eyeballs’. It has not corrupted mankind, but only revealed again what mankind really is.