If we desire an enhancement in online discourse, it is imperative that we transcend the realm of major platforms.
We find ourselves in a peculiar phase with regards to the internet. It is a well-established fact that the internet is flawed. Yet, there is an intangible shift in the atmosphere, a feeling that change is on the horizon. For the first time in years, it appears that a truly unique and unprecedented shift in our online communication is taking shape. The stranglehold that prominent social platforms have maintained over us for the past decade is gradually weakening. The question at hand is: What shall we envision for the future?
There exists a prevailing notion that the internet is inherently irreparable, a toxic landscape teeming with "hellsites" to be avoided. The proliferation of social platforms, driven by their insatiable hunger for data-driven profits, has opened a Pandora's box that seems impossible to close. Undoubtedly, the internet is host to abhorrent occurrences, particularly detrimental to individuals from marginalized groups who are disproportionately subjected to online harassment and abuse. Profit motives have frequently led to the negligence of such abuse, while simultaneously facilitating the dissemination of misinformation, the erosion of local journalism, the polarization of society, and the emergence of new forms of cyberbullying and misconduct. This merely scratches the surface of the profound issues at hand.
However, it is essential to recognize that the internet has also served as a refuge for marginalized communities, fostering support, advocacy, and a sense of belonging. It stands as an invaluable source of information during times of crisis, aiding in the reconnection with long-lost friends and acquaintances, providing moments of laughter, and even facilitating the delivery of a pizza. The internet is a realm of duality, comprising both positive and negative elements, and I firmly stand against the notion of discarding the dancing-baby GIF in an attempt to rid ourselves of the undesirable aspects. The internet is indeed worth fighting for because, amidst the prevailing misery, there remains an abundance of goodness to be discovered. Nonetheless, addressing the intricacies of online discourse poses an incredibly challenging problem. Fear not, for I possess an idea.
What truly defines the internet, and why does it seemingly follow us wherever we go? To heal the patient, our first task is to identify the illness.
When we discuss mending the internet, we refer not to its physical and digital network infrastructure. The protocols, exchanges, cables, and even satellites, for the most part, are functioning adequately. (Admittedly, there are certain issues that need addressing in these areas, but that is a separate matter, albeit one that involves Elon Musk in some capacity.) Instead, "the internet" in this context pertains to the prevalent forms of communication platforms wherein discussions take place, platforms that most likely engage you in some way through your mobile device.
Some of these platforms are colossal in scale: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and many more. It is highly probable that you possess an account on at least one of these platforms. Perhaps you are an active contributor, or maybe you simply peruse your friends' vacation photos while seated upon the porcelain throne.
The internet comprises positive aspects, such as Keyboard Cat and Double Rainbow. It encompasses personal blogs and LiveJournals, the distracted-girlfriend meme, and subreddits dedicated to identifying peculiar insects. While the specific content we encounter on these platforms may diverge significantly from person to person, the media's delivery is universally structured to align with the respective platforms' business goals. Though a teenager in Indonesia may witness disparate images on Instagram compared to my own experience, the fundamental process remains similar. We scroll through photographs shared by friends or family, engage with memes and celebrity posts, progress through the feed's transformation into Reels, watch videos, and occasionally respond to a friend's Story or send messages. Despite the variation in actual content, our reactions are often comparable, and this is by design.
Beyond these major platforms, the internet manifests in other forms, such as blogs, message boards, newsletters, and various media sites. It extends into the realm of podcasts, Discord chatrooms, and iMessage groups. These alternative platforms offer more tailored experiences, which may greatly differ from person to person. They often exist in a symbiotic relationship with the dominant players, relying on their content, algorithms, and audience.
The internet encompasses positive elements for me, such as Keyboard Cat and Double Rainbow. It embraces personal blogs and LiveJournals, AIM away messages, and MySpace top 8s. It encompasses the distracted-girlfriend meme and subreddits that discuss obscure subjects like peculiar insects. It includes renowned threads on bodybuilding forums where individuals debate how many days are in a week. For others, the internet engenders enjoyment through Call of Duty memes and mindless entertainment provided by YouTubers like Mr. Beast. It serves as an avenue to discover highly specific ASMR videos one never knew they desired. It fosters anonymous communities that support abuse victims, allows for laughter inspired by the memes of Black Twitter about the Montgomery boat clash, and facilitates the exploration of new makeup techniques discovered on TikTok. Yet, the internet also harbors highly negative aspects, including 4chan and the Daily Stormer, revenge porn, fabricated news platforms, racism on Reddit, eating disorder encouragement on Instagram, cyberbullying, adults soliciting minors on Roblox, harassment, scams, spam, incels, and the increasing need to ascertain whether something is authentic or AI-driven.
The negative aspects extend beyond simple rudeness or trolling. There is a widespread prevalence of sadness, loneliness, and cruelty that seems to perpetuate itself in various online spaces. In certain cases, the consequences can be matters of life and death. The internet serves as a source of inspiration for the next mass shooter, who learns from the actions of previous shooters, who in turn were influenced by earlier online communities. Furthermore, it serves as a platform for incitement to genocide in countries where Facebook's insufficient number of moderators, who lack proficiency in the local language, reflects the company's prioritization of growth over safety.
The fundamental issue lies in the fact that both the best and worst aspects of the internet stem from the same underlying reasons, utilizing similar resources and often growing in tandem. This raises the question: where did this toxic environment originate? How did the internet become so hostile? To gain a deeper understanding, we must delve into the early days of online discourse.
There exist a myriad of harmful elements on the internet, including platforms such as 4chan and the Daily Stormer, revenge porn, fake news sites, racism on Reddit, incitement of eating disorders on Instagram, bullying, adults preying on children through platforms like Roblox, harassment, scams, spam, and incels.
The internet's original flaw lies in its insistence on freedom — freedom in numerous senses of the word. Initially, the internet was not designed for profit; it evolved from a communication system intended for military and academic purposes (as late as the early 1980s, some in the military wished to restrict Arpanet solely to defense use). As its popularity grew alongside the emergence of desktop computers, various popular early applications like Usenet were predominantly utilized on university campuses with network access. Users would express dissatisfaction each September when their message boards became flooded with new users, until the "eternal September" arrived in the mid-'90s, characterized by a constant influx of new users due to the widespread availability of home internet access.
During the commercial expansion of the internet in the 1990s, its counterintuitive culture emerged, characterized by its opposition to commercialization. Many leading internet pioneers of that era belonged to a group of Gen Xers and anti-establishment Boomers who read AdBusters. They were passionate about developing open-source software, and their rallying cry became "Information wants to be free" — a phrase often attributed to Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and the pioneering internet community, the WELL. This philosophy also extended to a fervent advocacy for freedom of speech and a sense of responsibility to safeguard it.
Ironically, many of these individuals were affluent white men residing in California, whose perspective failed to anticipate the negative consequences of the free-speech and free-access havens they were creating. (In all fairness, who could have predicted that the outcome of those early discussions would entail Russian disinformation campaigns targeting movements like Black Lives Matter? But I digress.)
The notion of free access necessitated a viable business model to sustain it, which ultimately materialized in the form of advertising. Throughout the 1990s and even into the early 2000s, advertising on the internet operated as a precarious yet tolerable trade-off. Early advertising often took the form of unsightly and bothersome elements, such as spam emails promoting dubious products, poorly designed banners, and dreaded pop-up ads. It was undeniably crass but enabled the pleasant aspects of the internet, such as message boards, blogs, and news sites, to be accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
However, advertising and the internet are comparable to a small submersible deployed to explore the Titanic: the carbon fiber hull functions efficiently until subjected to enough pressure, at which point it crumbles.
The advent of targeted advertising and the subsequent monetization of individuals' attention transformed the landscape. In 1999, the advertising company DoubleClick devised plans to combine personal data with tracking cookies, enabling the tracking of individuals across the web to enhance the effectiveness of their ad targeting. This development altered people's perceptions of what could be achieved. It transformed the cookie, originally a neutral technology for locally storing web data on users' computers, into a means of tracking individuals for the purpose of monetization.
This move was widely regarded as an abomination by internet users at the turn of the century. Following a complaint filed with the US Federal Trade Commission, DoubleClick scaled back the specifics of its plans. Nevertheless, the concept of advertising based on personal profiles gained traction. This marked the beginning of the era of targeted advertising, which gave rise to the modern internet as we know it today. In 2008, Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. That same year, Google generated $21 billion in revenue from advertising. In the most recent fiscal year, Google's parent company, Alphabet, reported a staggering $224.4 billion in advertising revenue.
Our contemporary internet relies on highly targeted advertising that utilizes our personal data. This is what allows it to remain free. Major social platforms, digital publishers, and Google all operate on ad revenue. For social platforms and Google, their business model centers around delivering sophisticated targeted advertisements. (And they are thriving: in addition to Google's substantial earnings, Meta generated $116 billion in revenue in 2022. Almost half of the world's population are monthly active users of a Meta-owned product.) Meanwhile, the sheer amount of personal data we willingly provide in exchange for accessing these services free of charge would astonish individuals from the year 2000, accustomed to flip phones.
This targeted advertising process remarkably determines who we are and what piques our interest. It is this precision that leads people to believe their phones are eavesdropping on their conversations. In reality, it is more accurate to say that the data trails we leave behind become roadmaps to our thoughts.
When we contemplate the most glaring problems with the internet—harassment and abuse; its role in fueling political extremism, polarization, and the dissemination of misinformation; and the detrimental impact of Instagram on the mental well-being of teenage girls—the connection to advertising may not be immediately apparent. However, advertising can, at times, have a mitigating effect: Coca-Cola, for instance, does not wish to display ads alongside content related to Nazis, prompting platforms to develop mechanisms to prevent such occurrences.
Nonetheless, online advertising demands attention above all else, ultimately enabling and fostering the worst aspects of internet content. Social platforms were incentivized to expand their user base and capture as many eyeballs as possible, for as long as possible, to serve an increasing number of ads. More accurately, they aimed to serve you, the user, to advertisers. To achieve this, these platforms have devised algorithms designed to keep us endlessly scrolling and clicking, inadvertently catering to some of the most undesirable inclinations of humanity.
In 2018, Facebook adjusted its algorithms to prioritize "meaningful social interactions." The intention was to encourage users to engage with one another more frequently and keep them captivated by the News Feed. However, this modification resulted in users' feeds being inundated with divisive content. Publishers began optimizing their content to elicit outrage since it generated substantial interaction.
YouTube, where "watch time" took precedence over view counts, employed algorithms that recommended an unending stream of videos. In the quest to retain attention, these algorithms frequently led users down intricate paths to conspiratorial domains inhabited by flat-earth truthers, QAnon followers, and similar groups. On Instagram's Discover page, algorithms are tailored to keep us scrolling (and spending) even after exhausting content from our friends, often promoting popular aesthetics irrespective of the user's previous interests. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2021 that Instagram had long been aware of its contribution to the harm inflicted on teenage girls' mental health through content related to body image and eating disorders, yet they disregarded these reports. Just keep scrolling.
There is a viewpoint that the major platforms simply provide users with what they desire. Anil Dash, a tech entrepreneur and blogging pioneer who worked at SixApart, the company responsible for developing the blog software Movable Type, recalls the backlash when his company began charging for their services in the mid-2000s. "People were like, 'You're charging money for something on the internet? That's disgusting!'" he shared with MIT Technology Review. "The shift from that to, like, 'If you're not paying for the product, you're the product'... If we had coined that phrase earlier, the entire landscape would have been different. The social media era would have unfolded divergently."
The relentless focus of major platforms on engagement at any cost made them susceptible to exploitation. Twitter turned into a haven for malicious individuals, where trolls from platforms like 4chan discovered an effective forum for coordinated harassment. Although Gamergate originated in murkier waters such as Reddit and 4chan, it transpired on Twitter, where legions of accounts attacked their chosen targets, predominantly female video game critics. Trolls also realized they could manipulate Twitter to popularize repugnant phrases. In 2013, 4chan achieved this with the hashtag #cuttingforbieber, falsely claiming it represented teenagers engaging in self-harm in support of the pop singer. The dynamics of these platforms created an environment rich in targets, thereby enabling intelligence services from countries such as Russia, China, Iran, and others to exploit them for the purpose of sowing political division and disseminating disinformation, even to this day.
Humans were never intended to coexist within a society housing 2 billion individuals," states Yoel Roth, a technology policy fellow at UC Berkeley and former leader of trust and safety at Twitter. "If we regard Instagram as a society, albeit by a convoluted definition, we have entrusted a company with the governance of a society surpassing any in human history. Unsurprisingly, they are bound to encounter failures.
How to Fix it
Here is some encouraging news. We are currently experiencing a rare moment when a transition might actually be feasible. The systems and platforms that were once considered unchangeable and permanent are showing potential for transformation and the emergence of something new.
One encouraging sign is the growing recognition that sometimes we have to pay for quality content. Individual creators and publishers are receiving payments from people through platforms like Substack, Patreon, and Twitch. Moreover, the freemium model explored by YouTube Premium, Spotify, and Hulu demonstrates that there are individuals willing to invest in ad-free experiences. While a world where only those who can afford a $9.99 monthly fee are able to escape bothersome ads is not ideal, it does reveal that an alternative model can be successful.
Another reason for optimism (although its success is yet to be determined) is the concept of federation—a more decentralized form of social networking. Federated networks such as Mastodon, Bluesky, and Meta's Threads may appear to be simple Twitter clones on the surface—a feed of short text posts. However, they are specifically designed to offer various forms of interoperability. Essentially, rather than existing in a walled garden controlled entirely by a single company, your current social media account and data could be on Threads, allowing you to follow posts from someone you admire on Mastodon—or at least Meta claims that such functionality is on the way. This approach also allows for more precise moderation. In contrast, X (the website formerly known as Twitter) provides a cautionary tale of what can go wrong when one person, such as Elon Musk, possesses excessive power to make moderation decisions. Federated networks and the so-called "fediverse" present a potential solution to this problem.
The main idea is that in a future where social media is more decentralized, users will have the ability to switch networks easily without losing their content and followers. Paige Collings, a senior speech and privacy advocate at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, states, "As an individual, if you encounter hate speech, you can simply leave, without abandoning your entire community or your entire online life. You can move to another server, migrate all your contacts, and it should be alright." Collings believes that this presents a significant opportunity for improvement.
While there are substantial advantages to this approach, Collings remains cautious. She expresses concern that without a deliberate effort to prevent a repeat of the problems experienced in Web2, the transition to Web3 could perpetuate the same issues.
Federation and increased competition among new applications and platforms provide an opportunity for different communities to establish the privacy and moderation measures they desire, rather than adhering to content moderation policies created by headquarters in San Francisco. These policies frequently explicitly prohibit interference with user engagement. Yoel Roth's ideal scenario involves third-party companies specializing in trust and safety handling these matters in a world of smaller social networks. This way, social networks would not have to develop their own policies and moderation strategies from scratch each time.
The tunnel-vision focus on growth in the social media era led to detrimental incentives. People realized that to make money, they needed a vast audience, and often, the way to attain such an audience was by engaging in negative behavior. The new era of the internet needs to find a way to generate revenue without resorting to attention-seeking tactics. Fortunately, some promising steps have already been taken in this direction. For example, Threads does not display the repost count on posts, which may seem like a minor change but has a major impact as it does not incentivize virality.
As internet users, we also need to readjust our expectations and behavior online. We should learn to appreciate smaller corners of the internet, such as new Mastodon servers, Discord communities, or personal blogs. Rather than prioritizing the accumulation of millions of followers, we should instead place our trust in the power of "1,000 true fans."
Anil Dash has been advocating the same concept for years: people should purchase their own domain names, start their own blogs, and own their own content. Admittedly, these solutions require technical and financial capabilities that many people lack. However, with the shift towards federation (which, if not ownership, at least provides control) and smaller online spaces, it seems likely that we will witness the beginning of a move away from communication heavily mediated by large platforms.
"there is currently a significant and fundamental shift occurring," he asserts, emphasizing the need for a broader perspective of life before Facebook. This perspective allows one to recognize that certain aspects of the internet are arbitrarily constructed and not intrinsic to its nature.
Addressing the challenges faced by the internet does not involve shutting down Facebook, logging off, or retreating from the digital realm to reconnect with nature. Rather, the solution lies in expanding the internet itself: increasing the number of apps, creating more online spaces, and increasing the resources available to support positive initiatives of diverse nature. It also entails promoting thoughtful engagement from individuals in the online spaces they prefer, fostering greater utility, amplifying voices, and nurturing joy.
I must confess, my persistent flaw is my unwavering belief in the optimistic ideals of the early internet. Undoubtedly, mistakes were made, numerous things went astray, and the social media era has given rise to considerable pain, suffering, and negative consequences. However, it would be a mistake in its own right if we fail to learn from those experiences.
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