Who Needs Social Media?

The downsides of social media have outweighed the benefits, almost since social media began. The politicization of these platforms makes it harder and harder to justify their use.

One of the more noteworthy headlines this week is Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Facebook would no longer be fact-checking posts, leaving the monitoring instead to the Facebook users in the form of “community notes” — the model that X/Twitter adopted after Elon Musk fired all of that platform’s content moderators.

Facebook users already live in silos of information that are geared specifically toward their existing views. Social and political biases have been targeted and magnified from the day a subscriber signs up. What happens when the algorithms that direct posts to people already likely to be receptive of those posts now expect those same people to fact-check misinformation that supports their existing biases?

For example, if I add a post or a response to a post on a right-leaning subscriber’s page stating that Joe Biden set fire to the Lincoln Bedroom before leaving the White House, are that subscriber’s other right-wing followers really the best people to fact check that p…