All about social networks

Social media platforms don’t produce a common public; they produce competing sub-publics, each with its own sense of what everyone knows. To answer the question Habermas never adequately posed: the public sphere, such as it is, functions for those who own it.

Yuka Shiratsuchi (白土由佳『はじめてのソーシャルメディア論』, Sanwa Shoseki, 2024, p. 60) defines social media by three elements: many-to-many communication premised on exposure and observation, individually optimized diversity of experience, and accumulation of digital footprints.

In every case, the platform's architects // successors assumed that the product was the platform and the community was an emergent feature that would re-emerge given similar conditions. They had the relationship exactly backwards. The community was the product and the platform was the container, and when the container breaks, the product spills and... See more

Some of the people populating the world’s feeds are doing valuable work—the journalists and open-source-intelligence gatherers trying to confirm events and produce original reporting, for example. But they are outnumbered by propagandists, trolls, anxious commentators, war-market gamblers, and clout chasers