This video by a Danish military expert, Anders Puck Nielsen, talks about social media and how to improve it. What he suggests is typical of most well-meaning people who want to improve social media, but all of them are at least slightly bizarre because we all know that won’t happen without government regulation.

While watching Nielsen’s post, I saw some fnords. First, Nielsen starts by suggesting an unbiased algorithm. He’s talking about right-wing versus left-wing. He ignores – as do most people – that the biggest and most significant bias in social media algorithms is the one that creates profitability for their owners. I’d say that most of social media’s problems for society have this as their root: they are designed to make their owners fabulous amounts of cash and give them enormous power, and they’re highly successful in that goal, and everything else flows from the “make money and grow powerful” imperative.

You can’t make an algorithm that is politically moderate if it is based on unchecked greed. You can’t have good moderation if the goal is to maximize the profits and power of the owners. Social media doesn’t moderate, say, pornography because they’re against it but because adding it to a site “for everyone” diminishes their profits! It drives away more people than it brings in! That’s it. Same with Nazis and bigots of every stripe. Social media wants to be “for everyone” not to create a just, fair, and equitable society but to make more money. (1) They want to profit equally from the right wing and the left wing. They want to make money on both Nazis and their victims. They will push this to the point of maximum profitability, which means, in large, alternately making us angry and showing us pictures of cats.

Before the modern wave of social media – circa 2005 – this wasn’t a problem. Back when “social media” was an RSS feed of blogs you decided to follow – to which you opted in – no one cared about moderation except locally, on a site-by-site basis. If you didn’t like the content of a blog or its moderation, you didn’t follow it!  Social media was passive.

Now, because social media companies are essentially digital magazines and not digital printers, going to the site inundates you with whatever they decide you will see to keep you there as long as possible. They are active.  They push content.  They opt you into whatever they want you to see when you go to the site, which has created the need for general discussions about moderation. In 2000, you didn’t go to the blog hosting site to complain about a blog’s moderation policies, you went to the blog’s owners or moved on.  Modern social media has created enormous content centralization, giving its owners oligopic control over online media.  (2)

The second fnord is that social media is believed – with incredible naivete, in my opinion – to be a “digital town square.” It is not. Town squares are common areas administered by communities to benefit their citizens by democratically elected governments. (At least, this is true in Denmark, the US, and other nominally democratic countries.) Real commons do not exist to make money and are, indeed, supported by taxation. Facebook, X, and YouTube aren’t your town park. They’re more like malls where, should there be any culture, they exist for the benefit of the shops and mall owners.

The third fnord is to acknowledge that social media in its current form is psychologically toxic and addictive. It might be impossible to make modern social media sites (designed to command attention as profit and power) that aren’t toxic and addictive. It is simply a demonstrable fact that social media sites are bad for people’s mental health and, indeed, society as a whole. It’s hard to spot the benefits of social media. Effectiveness as an advertising platform seems a trivial social good and possibly (well, certainly, in my estimation) part of their social harm.

There is something that would bring all of this under control, though both would likely destroy every social media company that now exists, and the ones that remained would make far less money: acknowledge that social media companies, as they know exist, are publishers.

The basic law in the US governing social media is the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the DMCA. Social media firms successfully argued that they can’t be held responsible for things posted on their site. (Title II of the act, Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, specifically.)  Social media companies were clear: if they were required to be held to the same standards as publishers, they would not be able to make money. We do not, however, owe them profitability at the expense of civil society. I mean, yeah, if drugs were illegal, a lot of money could be made, but we still have laws limiting the sale of narcotics. Profitability itself does not justify deregulation.  Other countries have followed similar reasoning to the DMCA in their social media laws to similar ends.

To be fair, this wasn’t such a big deal when the DMCA was passed into law. DMCA was created in 1998 and was directed primarily at internet service providers and blogging sites like GoDaddy.  Facebook was founded in 2004. Twitter in 2006. Youtube in 2005. Everyone assumes that modern social media sites like Facebook and TikTok fit the same criteria as older services, but there is a key distinction. GoDaddy, Livejournal, and the other open blogging sites didn’t push content.  They were passive, places you put your content, and it was up to you to advertise it to others (or not.) You’d go to Livejournal, see if any of your friends had posted anything, maybe post something yourself, and that’s it. Maybe you’d build an RSS feed of webcomics and news sites you enjoyed. But the “push” of unasked-for content did not then exist, not in a substantial way, anyway. I argue that when social media companies started pushing content, they took an active hand in deciding what you’d see, they violated the terms of the DMCA and other such laws and are no longer covered by limited liability. They are, functionally, digital magazines and should be held to the same editorial standards and liability protections as, say, newspapers. If they know their content well enough to push it, they are responsible for what they push. To me, this is obvious. The laws were designed for a different kettle of fish.

However, if social media companies were reclassified as publishers (which they would fight against with the truly vast wealth and influence at their disposal, c. ref. TikTok,), it would destroy modern social media’s profitability and power. They would still have ads, and those ads would still be algorithmically driven, but if your Facebook page was only people you’d friended, people would go to Facebook, take a few minutes to read their feed, post a thing or two, and then ignore it – possibly altogether. It would not be compelling, nay, addictive. The same is true of all social media.

Which is a good thing. Social media companies and “influencers” would argue about all the money they’re going to lose, but overnight, the ability of abusers to find victims, the toxic spread of disinformation, and most data mining would take serious hits.

It would also be less convenient, but only slightly so. It was easy to set up RSS feeds before social media destroyed that concept, with social media itself becoming a de facto (though shitty) RSS feed.

None of this matters, though. I think we, as a society, have become addicted to social media. When it looked like the US was going to stop TikTok, millions of Americans gave their information to the Chinese government! The premise that social media is the problem is currently unthinkable, despite the abundant research that it’s bad for its users and bad for society. Or perhaps it’s capitalist triumphalism: we can no longer image a world where people do things without a profit motive, and that motive is believed necessary with the fanaticism of fundamentalist religion. Regardless, it is difficult to imagine addressing social media’s profit motive, which drives so much of their toxic behavior. If we can’t imagine the problem, we can’t address it.  So, let’s try to imagine it!  The problem with social media is profit motive and we can fix it with a simple change to the law.

(1) And another fnord!  The way capitalism regulates toxicity is by making it unprofitable.  By normal capitalist reasoning, the big tech guys are ideologically libertarian capitalists.  If something is profitable, it is ipso facto “good.”  Right now, it is highly profitable to target the extreme right wing because they have devoted themselves to making everything that doesn’t support them and their hate-filled ideologies unprofitable, leveraging their traditional control over media, government, and society to shut out dissent.  Women, people of color, queer people, and minorities have been historically forced to accept media directed exclusively at rich white men for generations after all.  If discriminated groups opted out of the culture of rich white men, everywhere where they didn’t have a voice, they would be unable to participate in society.  It gives existing traditional power structures an immense advantage in deciding profitability, which is how capitalism decides things.  Not for nothing, capitalism was invented by rich white men to rationalize their wealth and power.

(2) I would argue that the behavior of social media companies forms a ladder conspiracy, which is when people in related fields of business are driven by mutual self-interest to act monopolistically. The example I remember was the consolidation of cable companies in the late 20th century when they didn’t intrude into each other’s territory to allow the creation of de facto regional monopolies, which could also be said about airlines, for instance, in their collective efforts to make everything worse. Google, Amazon, X, TikTok, Facebook, etc., don’t need to talk to each other. Their similarity of ideology and goals means that the system itself conspires against the users to colonize our minds and souls while realizing massive power and profits for themselves. Cory Doctorow has called the modern wave of ladder conspiracies “the enshittification,” a term I quite like.