All about social networks

When a platform is designed to suppress your reach while amplifying extremists, staying isn’t pragmatic. It’s masochistic.

This all fundamentally misunderstands the nature of power on these platforms. Success on social media is about building community. And you can’t build community if someone else has all the control over how that community works.

Instead of asking whether or not a platform optimizes for engagement, it can be more helpful to ask how explicit or implicit these engagement signals are, and provide users with more controls to allow them to tweak their online experience.

However, some types of engagement, such as votes and likes, come from controls designed to solicit feedback, while other types of engagement, such as clicks and watch time, are more implicit. In general both implicit and explicit engagement signals provide distinct and useful information to recommenders.

If this is all downstream of a small and relatively well-off group of high frequency posters (some of our elected officials among them), that would suggest what we might call an ‘elite radicalization’ theory of online politics. The idea is that social media has empowered a (relatively) small group of political influencers who, in response to the pe... See more