Don’t Be Sad It’s Over, Be Happy It Happened

In the wake of more controversies springing up over increasing censorship of major social media platforms, many people (especially on the conservative or more generally anti-progressivist side) are outraged and angry that their voices are being silenced. This should not be surprising, however. Another reading of the situation offers itself, where, instead of indignation over opportunities now being lost, they can be happy that the unlikely situation of having such options in the first place had been there for some time at all.

Large, Silicon Valley social media platforms almost all share a particular political culture. Over the past years, it has become clear that they broadly converge towards a left-wing, progressive consensus on most issues. Being a ‘community’ of sorts, where people often know each other or are even friends or colleagues, social media companies create a bubble, where beliefs are frequently reinforced and rarely disputed. Threats to this consensus get eliminated swiftly. Although there will be some people for which it is easier to simply conform and not raise alarms in such a situation, most people within these circles are likely to be sincere in their political leanings and expressions.

Inventors and developers of these social media platforms often did not realise at first what they were creating. What started off as a garage-scale project could grow almost immediately into a world hegemon. Overnight, engineers were turned into media personalities and coders into executives. They did not and could not foresee that their creations would become in many ways central to how large parts of the population relate to one another and communicate. They could not predict that the world at large would be shaped by the conversations and flows of information on their platforms.

But this is how it has gone. What happens on social media often shapes what subsequently happens ‘in the real world’. Politics is downstream from culture and culture at large is downstream from social media. 

For several years, discussions on the largest social media sites encompassed almost everything imaginable from all sides and viewpoints. That world is gone. The reasons are sometimes political; but, just as well, they can also be psychological. Social media platforms are the ‘brainchildren’ of their inventors, who, at one point, started to realize their creations were being used for purposes directly opposed to what they themselves stand for. Just as parents are protective of their children and are hurt when something bad happens to them, it is understandable that creators of social media platforms don’t like to see their ‘children’ ‘misused’ for ‘bad’ ends. It hurts to see something you created being used against what you believe - by people you despise.

Social media has enormous power and those who know how to tap into it are able to have an immense impact on the world. Content creators realized this earlier than social media bosses. This created a strange window of opportunity. For a time, these platforms could be used by enemies of their inventors. Anyone could use Silicon Valley’s own tools against Silicon Valley.

It is no surprise that Silicon Valley eventually realized they were helping to bring about their own demise. So in response, they started reclaiming their resources for themselves by restricting their usage. They realized that from their point of view, it was absurd for them to allow this to go on. Going forward, they will be working to avoid and prevent such a ‘mistake’ from happening again.

Political opponents of Silicon Valley should be happy that their adversaries were careless enough for a time to provide them with an opportunity to use Silicon Valley’s own resources in the fight against it. This was an inadvertent gift and a ‘loophole’ in how they can be expected to operate. No opportunities like this are usually available to the dissent against the mainstream, and this one was only created because the rise of social media had happened so fast and it took off in so many unexpected ways. Without such circumstances, the ‘loopholes’ would have been taken care of in advance.

We are witnessing a sad situation in which parts of the old internet are dying off and social relations on the web are being reorganized. The silver lining is that the same processes that gave rise to the previous internet era are still around us. The dynamism of the online marketplace makes it so that each future new ‘order’ will emerge as unexpectedly and as inadvertently as the last one. Regarding the shift we are going through at the present, the more political coverage is driven away from social media and decentralized to many different venues, the healthier that discussion is likely to be. The concentration of power breeds corruption. This is why social media censorship has become an issue in the first place, and also why the reign of Silicon Valley’s social media platforms was destined not to last long from the start.

Their move has been too slow and happened too late. Now, the issue of censorship is political, and social media giants cannot simply reclaim the control of their own resources to the full extent. Despite frequent ‘adpocalypses’ and ‘banwaves’, it is politically unfeasible now to flip the switch to simply remove all political commentary from their platforms and only keep the gaming, cooking, and animal fail video content up. Too many eyes are watching now. Were this not the case, we would see the extent of the censorship happening today as extremely mild.

People can mostly freely advertise other, competing services on Silicon Valley platforms, and they often do so. Social media companies are told they ‘have a responsibility’ to do one thing by one group and another ‘responsibility’ by another group. They are forced to try to maintain the appearance of being fair or impartial, despite what they do as well as what they would prefer to do. They got themselves into being in the middle of a massive controversy spanning all sides of the political spectrum. The only way out is to jump ship.

YouTube will likely eventually become the new, slightly more wide-reaching Netflix. Facebook might become more like WhatsApp. There will be many Twitters with many different communities. Broad and deep discussions about politics, society, philosophy, history, morality, or science will happen elsewhere. In five years, the social media spaces we know today will be unrecognizable. And the change will be for the better.