5th November 2025
Social media platforms do not necessarily correspond to the outside world
Once upon a time the writer of this blog had far too many followers on social media, and when one has far too many followers, things start becoming distorted. And unless one does something about it, one can go quite mad.
By ‘quite mad’ it is meant that one’s sense of reality becomes disconnected from, well, reality. One begins to replace thoughts with ‘takes’ – and to replace developing those thoughts with promoting memes. The value of your takes and memes is then measured by likes and reposts from the similarly afflicted.
Pretty soon you are trapped within a self-contained and self-perpetuating system of understanding the world, and one becomes unable to see the world in any other way.
You are trapped within a latter-day Plato’s cave.
*
Many in politics and media now seem to also chained in that cave, unable to see the world other than via how X/Twitter and Facebook present this world.
No social media platform is perfect – the ‘social’ bit ensures that, as people are not perfect – but some platforms are better than others (I prefer Bluesky for law and policy, and Mastodon for general geekery).
Being able to differentiate the world around you from (mainstream and social) media representations of it is crucial to half-decent thinking about the world.
Of course, one has to take account of social media – the rise of Brexit and Trump require an understanding of how certain politics thrive with electronic networks. But social media is only one element amongst others – constitutional structures (and lack of structures), patterns of political participation, and social and economic contexts.
The challenge for liberals is not to ignore social media but to put it in its place: to use it and learn from it, but not to be overwhelmed by it.
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Before we turn to social media as a concept, I think it important that we consider it in three dimensions of broader concept. The first of these is technological – and we need to understand that the internet is the most powerful amplifier that mankind has ever invented – it takes anything that is good or bad about the human condition and amplifies it more quickly and through more orders of magnitude than anything else we’ve encountered since we climbed down out of the trees.
The second dimension is either sociological and/or psychological in nature and is simply that strong emotions are more animating than mild emotions.
The third and final dimension is that, just as the early universe was an equal mix of matter and anti-matter, but the anti-matter subsequently “disappeared”, so the strong emotions on the internet may have started as an equal mix of positive and negative, but in this case it is the positive emotions that have disappeared, leaving only the residue of negativity.
All this before we even get to concepts such as “98% of human communication is non-verbal” (which means that when we communicate via social media we are only using 2% of our communication spectrum to do so).
Despite my reference above to negative emotion on the internet, as social creatures we are naturally drawn to those with whom we are in accord, which means that, implicitly, social media acts as an enabler of groupthink [within respective communities and ideologies present on the platform]. This in turn can lead to the psychological concept of “risky shift” – as DAG references above – and the drift of the “group mind” towards extreme.
Beneath this, however, are a couple of things somewhat more serious. The first is the ease with which malign actors can use the implicit abstraction of social media to disguise their true identities whilst aggressively participating in the manipulation – for malicious purpose – of those idealogical groups. For example, a report from Global Witness published in July last year carried the title, “Investigation reveals content posted on bot-like accounts on X has been seen 150 million times ahead of the UK elections”… Or I could refer to the admissions of Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower Christopher Wylie, who has testified to parliament about the devastating effectiveness of his former employer when it came to manipulating social media activity on the question of Brexit.
If none of the above has swayed you closer to a deep skepticism of social media, then I would very much encourage you to pull out the terms and conditions provided by your bank for your credit card and current accounts. If your provider is anything like mine, you will see a section there which describes how the bank will use social media to monitor your behaviour and activities to inform and influence their relationship with you. Let me translate that for you: if you go to your bank and ask for a loan, they will check your social media profile to see how you spend your time and money as part of their decision-making process. I wonder how many adults explain this to children before said offspring begin their social media lives, or how many people are paying higher rates of interest on loans and credit cards because their social media profiles are full of images of them having good times with friends, at parties?
Or how about the countless fraudulent scams? Or the UK families whose houses have been burgled because one member of a household has posted a picture of them with their parents on holiday, somewhere else in the world?
I’m a technologist who has spent the last 27 years of their career at the cutting edge of cybersecurity, working for one of the largest financial institutions in the world. I’ve never had a “social media” account and no amount of money could induce me to obtaining one, because I like to think I have a very clear understanding of just how dangerous they are.
And one other rule has served me well over the years – which is that if I join a platform that allows posts – as DAG graciously does here on his blog – and if the discourse gets antagonistic, I will walk away. If I have to choose between trying to politely correct an aggressive and incorrect tekkie on slashdot, or some arrogant lawyer on EmptyWheel – and in the alternate going for a bracing walk along the beach for an hour, it isn’t even a close contest.
Which isn’t to say that social media is entirely bad, rather that it is an indiscriminate amplifier, an enlarging mirror capable of reflecting our best – and our worst – traits back at us, multiplied many times over.
“The right tool for the job” springs to mind here.
I like the way you have pigeonholed Mastodon and Blueskye for your particular workflows/use cases. In fact, I think that’s brilliant.
I find myself only on those two platforms, and to be honest, I pretty much duplicate my posts across the two, mostly mindless drivel that’s meant to elicit a least a quick exhalation of air (a closed-mouthed “ha!” if you will?), copied jokes* & memes, mixed in with my cathartic screaming into the void about the world’s political state. I think I need to segregate those two workflows across the platforms, because…I’m in Plato’s cave…
*If you’ll allow me to get up on my soapbox for a minute: The amount of vitriol and spleen I receive when posting a joke is truly a whole semester of study in psychology. People actually complain that I’ve somehow “stolen” the joke and am not attributing it to the originator. How could I? That’d be like being criticised for not attributing “Hard to Handle” to the Black Crowes, when it was Otis Redding’s original. With music/film/art, you can look up the records of their provenance. With jokes, these things are rarely recorded. But, and more to the point (I do have one, honestly), jokes are about human connections, about language and social constructs. We ALL repeat jokes and pass them on. It’s a way of bonding, of showing someone that you aren’t serious all of the time, that you have a softer side, of eliciting a guffaw, snort or an actual lol.
Jokes may be the original social medium…
Some social media seems useful(ish) but 98% is cr*p. So much electricity for so little. Maybe relates to so few people doing anything that looks ‘useful’. Few now work in ‘State Tractor Factory No 3’ or anything like it. All moved over to social media or sitting in front of a screen.
But a big slab relates to politics.
This very morning a former politician presents a blog view of the world that is close to a political black hole. An intense distorting field that changes the order and nature of events to suit (his) particular reality and produces a product that has the audience baying for more. Somehow this person (and team or AI machine) produce the same sort of stuff every day – even Sundays. Exhausting and how is this paid for? Social media is now big business.
For Western politics that has lost any ability to deliver, the blog world seems a ‘must have’. Play the game or disappear. Reality being so dull and unpleasant a heavily distorted presentation looks the way to go. Mere shadows on the wall we may have but and we are getting good at it.