Robert Tracinski explains why the move to social media was dangerous to free public discourse despite the otherwise-attractive nature of TwitFaceTube and other factions of the social media Borg:
Was social media a mistake? Two recent events crystallized my answer to this question. First, conservative comedian Steven Crowder had his Twitter account suspended for a week because he posted a video on YouTube that was critical of “gender fluidity” and used a Bad Word. The video was also pulled from YouTube, which you might not think of as a social media platform, even though it definitely is.
Then Brandon Morse noticed Twitter was preventing him from tweeting a link to an article by a controversial conservative columnist. This follows stories of Google-owned YouTube “demonetizing” videos by conservatives, unplugging them from the ability to make money from ads, and Facebook and Google targeting conservative sites for hilariously inaccurate and tendentious “fact checks.” It’s becoming clear that the big social media companies are targeting ideas and thinkers on the Right, and not just the far-out provocateurs and trolls like Milo Yianopoulos, but everyone.
What strikes me most is the contrast between this and the Internet era before social media, before Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube swallowed up everything. I’m talking about the 2000s, the great era of the blogs. Do you remember what that blog era was like? It felt like liberation.
The era of blogging offered the promise of a decentralized media. Anybody could publish and comment on the news and find an audience. Guys writing in their pajamas could take down Dan Rather. We were bypassing the old media gatekeepers. And we had control over it! We posted on our own sites. We had good discussions in our own comment fields, which we moderated. I had and still have an extensive e-mail list of readers who are interested in my work, most of which I built up in that period, before everybody moved onto social media.
But then Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube came along and killed the blogs. There were three main reasons they took over.
I have various social media accounts, but in most cases I just use them to link to my blog posts. The old saw about never reading the comments applies with even greater force to most of the social media platforms. I don’t do “breaking news” on the blog, because that’s one thing social media can do better — most of my regular visitors come here once a day to see what I’ve posted since their last visit, not to check for smoking hot takes on something that happened in the last fifteen minutes. For immediacy, the social media sites will win over the blogs (and even the mainstream media, in many cases).
H/T to American Digest for the link.
