Antisocial Media
Why are online communities so broken?
I’ll be the first to admit I’m not innocent when it comes to internet argument. Just today, I gave in to the urge to dunk on a bad Georgia take on twitter - a site I unsuccessfully left three weeks ago due to the online toxicity that I can’t seem to stop myself from participating in.
Meanwhile, over on BlueSky, we were told that moderation tools and an ethos of “report, block, do not engage” will produce a safer, cozier form of social media. That seemed to be working fine before the X-odus, but there is growing concern among the “bluesky elders” that twitter refugees are bringing their baggage with them.
On BlueSky I have tried to be on my best behavior - refraining from twitter dunks - but this feels like unilaterally disarming myself. When someone insults me out of nowhere over a misunderstanding about political theory, I don’t clap back. I just report, block, move on. And yet, this is not satisfying either. The misunderstanding was never cleared up. It just hangs there, bothering me, like an itchy scab.
Imagine an analogous situation in a physical community space - maybe a discussion club at a university. Some people are having a conversation. I come and chime in with my opinion. The person I’m responding to calls me a moron. My response, as prescribed by BlueSky community norms, is to turn around and walk away, perhaps file a complaint with the club president, and then never, ever talk to or listen to the person who called me a moron again.
The result is not a community. The result is instead a space where you can air your opinion and then if anyone dares to disagree you can either kick them out preemptively or bully them into leaving.
In a community - a debate club, a classroom, a family dinner, a social gathering of friends - someone would step in to repair the damage to the social fabric. This might be a community leader, a moderator, or a neutral third party. It might be a mutual friend, a teacher, a parent, a coach, a club president, etc. An ideal resolution would address the reason for the conflict and end with the offending party or parties apologizing.
Obviously not every community is ideal, online or off. In some societies, an insult would be met with a fight or a challenge to a duel. Some parents spank their kids for namecalling rather than trying to teach them conflict resolution and empathy. Some teachers just send kids to the principal’s office - or call the cops on them - rather than trying to reintegrate those kids into a functioning social order. But even though not every community is good, a good community should be our goal. Not an atomized collection of individuals who have no ties to each other and owe each other nothing.
Blocking is a form of social exclusion. Sometimes it’s necessary to socially exclude some people - this is a fundamental fact of human society. But in physical communities there are counterveiling forces: compelling reasons *not* to exclude others, which must be weighed - by the community - before someone can justly be excluded. Promulgating a norm where anyone can socially exclude anyone else at any time for any reason is fundamentally anti-social. It supposes that there are no social ties whatsover which should bind one person to another - no mutual obligations, no compelling reasons to cooperate with people with whom we may sometimes have disagreements or misunderstandings.
Social exclusion can also be hurtful. Of course, we don’t owe it to our abusers to give them the right to keep abusing us. But is the offended party in every conversation the best person to judge whether they’re being offended, insulted, or abused? Someone called me a moron. In that moment, I was not just offended, but enraged. How dare this person insult me? If I had the power I would not just have blocked them, but nuked every social media account they ever had and forced them to live in a cave in a mountain with no electricity or running water, surviving by scavenging nuts and berries from the surrounding woodland.
But that guy was probably just as angry with me for saying the thing he thought was moronic. He wasn’t a bully, a troll, or an abuser. He was just a regular guy who got annoyed on the internet - as I have done thousands of times - and resorted to impolite language to express that anger. A social media structure which validates those feelings - the immediate rush of blood to your face when a stranger says something moronic or calls you a moron for something you said - amplifies the most reactive and aggressive tendencies of human nature. The most fundamental requirement of a functioning society is that it must teach us to repress those tendencies for the sake of cooperation.
And what have we learned? The guy who called me a moron learned that if he doesn’t like what someone says, there are magic words he can say to make that person go away, and there are no consequences whatsover to using those words. I have learned that if I don’t like what someone says, there’s a button I can push so I never have to hear from them again. We have learned, in other words, that the internet offers us instantly gratifying ways to foreclose communication and cooperation, while in the meantime the underlying conflict simmers beneath the surface, fueling future rageful interactions. He’s learned that people on the internet are morons, and I’ve learned that they’re assholes. By socially excluding him in a moment of anger - justified though it might have been - I’ve hurt both of us. A deeply and fundamentally antisocial outcome, brought about because I followed BlueSky’s norms to the letter.
But what about actual harassment? Suppose that guy didn’t just call me a moron once. Suppose he followed me around the internet, from one social media site to another, constantly insulting me and calling me names - wouldn’t I then be justified in blocking him? Well, of course, but the problem isn’t what we as individuals are justified in doing. The problem is what outcomes social media as a system produces when its users act according to its dictates. Does “block, report, do not engage” even prevent harassment? Maybe if it’s one guy who is not particularly determined. But a big account can direct thousands of followers to harass their target, at which point the onus is now on the victim of harassment to block and report thousands of accounts. Sometimes it’s not even a big account, but an organic mob of people who decide that for some reason they don’t like a woman getting a PhD in the use of smell in English literature, or want to bully a cancer widow about not masking during an outdoor wedding. In these cases, people have to turn off replies, mute terms, and sometimes even hide, lock, or delete their social media accounts entirely. Meanwhile, there are rarely if ever any consequnces for the harassers.
I’m sorry, but if I became the target of an online harassment campaign and had to delete my social media accounts, “well at least I don’t have to read the hatred” is not going to be comforting. Again, the solution to harassment is social exclusion - in this case, I’d have to socially exclude myself from all of social media to avoid being bullied or harassed. Well, this is no solution at all. A solution would be one that punishes the harrassers, not the harrassed.
Blocking is at best a stopgap to mitigate further harm when someone violates social norms. It does nothing to actually repair that harm, for either the individual impacted or the communities whose social fabric have been damaged.
To review, the “block, report, do not engage” rule structurally produces the following outcomes:
- bad actors rarely suffer any meaningful penalties and are sometimes rewarded
- the onus is on victims of harassment to exclude themselves if they want true safety
- people who have honest disagreements and misunderstandings are pushed further apart rather than closer together
- individuals are pushed towards atomized, segregated spaces rather than encouraged to form communities
- underlying conflicts and contradictions fester and boil under the surface rather than moving towards resolution
And to be clear, this is not just a problem with BlueSky. I have seen poorly-moderated Discord communities with the same ethos and the same problems arise, except on Discord it’s worse because the people who you block can still see what you’ve said, and when you block someone you see “hidden message” notifications that constantly tempt you to read them.
Perhaps one might opine that the purpose of social media isn’t to form communities. Perhaps the function of twitter/bluesky is really to disseminate information from content creators, witnesses to major events, and other primary sources in a decentralized fashion, circumventing the gatekeepers and spinmasters of legacy media. Perhaps there’s a deep contradiction in looking for community to arise from a techno-libertarian “decentralized” platform. Perhaps “community” through 300 characters of text is a unicorn, and the best we can hope for is a set of weird parasocial relationships that we can maintain only to the extent that we become good at ignoring ragebait. Perhaps social media is “social” only in the sense that it allows us to express tribal and/or brand loyalty and feel like we’re a part of something that we have no contribution to whatsoever.
I don’t know, that seems pretty bleak and dystopian to me. The Internet promised us that we could find and connect with like-minded people, but in the process we’re rapidly losing our ability to connect to anyone else, and I really don’t think the tradeoff is worth it.