Zuckerberg’s social-media-shaped public does not turn around Zuckerberg in the same way. But even so, Zuckerberg is reshaping the algorithms so that some aspects of the public - in particular hostility to immigration, to women and to sexual minorities - will likely come to the fore, while others will recede. The extent to which this reflects his... See more

The resulting problems are not primarily problems of disinformation, though disinformation plays some role. They are the problems you get when large swathes of the public sphere are exclusively owned by wannabe God-Emperors. Elon Musk owns X/Twitter outright. Mark Zuckerberg controls Meta through a system in which he is CEO, chairman and effective... See more

Bringing this all together, the technologies through which we see the public shape how we understand it , making it more likely that we end up in the one situation rather than the other. As you have surely guessed by now, I believe Twitter/X, Facebook, and other social media services are just such technologies for shaping publics. Many of the... See more

In short, the technologies through which we see the public shape what we think the public is. And that, in turn, shapes how we behave politically and how we orient ourselves. We may end up believing - in a highly specific way - in things that we know we are ‘supposed’ to believe, given that we are Republicans or Democrats, Conservative or Labour... See more

So what can we do to ameliorate this problem? Making individuals better at thinking and seeing the blind spots in their own individual reasoning will only go so far. What we need are better collective means of thinking. As Hugo, Melissa and I argue here (academic article, but I think fairly readable), much of the work on human cognitive bias... See more

The collective perspectives that emerge from social media - our understanding of what the public is and wants - are similarly shaped by algorithms that select on some aspects of the public, while sidelining others. And we tend to orient ourselves towards that understanding, through a mixture of reflective beliefs, conformity with shibboleths, and... See more