This war shows just how broken social media has become — The global town square is in ruins

Why do people operate under the assumption that the "town square" was anything other than crazy people shouting at each other? In the US in the 1600's we had witch hunts where people were killed over vague claims made by malicious people spreading lies. Why would people today be any better?

This War [...]

Unfortunately you'll have to be a bit more specific than that, too many wars going on at the moment...

The purpose of a system is what it does. "There is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.” These articles about how social media is broken are constant. It's just not a useful way to think about it. For example:

It relies on badly maintained social-media infrastructure and is presided over by billionaires who have given up on the premise that their platforms should inform users

These platforms are systems. They don't have intent. There's no mens rea or anything. There is no point saying that social media is supposed to inform users when it constantly fails to inform users. In fact, it has never informed users.

Any serious discussion about social media must accept that the system is what it is, not that it's supposed to be some other way, and is currently suffering some anomaly.

In the aughts we had to hunt down page ten articles from foreign papers to find out the latest on the CIA torture program and the actions of Blackwater PMCs in the kill zone.

In 2014, Twitter had streaming journalists on the streets of Ferguson during the unrest.

In 2020 reddit protest watch subs (some made specifically for the purpose) were showing hourlies, dailies and incident videos from the George Floyd unrest and protests. Like Ferguson it mostly was law enforcement misbehaving and calling it law and order.

In 2022 the Iranian civil unrest went hot when the government doubled down after killing Mahsa Amini. Protestors went from defying hijab and tapping imam hats to throwing Molotov cocktails and burning down state buildings. Far right militants started nerve-gassing girls' schools and the police engaged in mass executions. Then a deal was made. (Today 2023-10-16, a 16 year old teenage girl was put into a coma by the morality police. So stay tuned.)

A single platform is and never can be the global town square, partially because information about hot zones have to get through the fog of war and active measures to impede that content from getting to the public. Much like revolutionaries or resistance, information gets through when there are multiple avenues for traffic, enough that not all can be intercepted.

One billionaire (with some collaborators) spent $44 billion to neutralize one centralized information platform. Reddit and Google have also taken hits, but that isn't all of the internet. If our shadowy plutocratic masters are able to douse all the surface web, I suspect it'll be conspicuous and the public will want information, and access to the dark web may have to be transmitted.by word of mouth, but it will happen.

For all of us who are not conservatives, we've learned we can't trust official sources nor rumors that sound too good (or too awful) to be true.

Global town square? If anything, social media in the modern age is like Time Square: dirty, overcrowded, covered in billboard ads for brands, filled with cartoon characters in costumes and CD hawkers who are only there to take your money, and of course, the people shouting their political agendas at you through megaphones.

This war uncovered the conventional one sided “reporting” by most big media outlets especially here in the US which was in favor of Israel, turning a blind eye to the blight of the Palestinian civilians. People called them out because of social media and media outlets changed their tune to be more “neutral” as a consequence.

Social media sucks and but one thing it’s extremely good at is disseminating information, good and bad, and it should be used with that in mind.

By comparison, that Atlantic “article” is paywalled and can’t even disseminate its point beyond the headline.

Lol.

... I guess the concept of internet cancer is finally breaking into the mainstream.

Same as it ever was

I'm actually willing to bet that people are more informed in general these days because of social media and the internet overall. Look at all the biased bullshit in the news, back before the internet you just had to believe whatever content you were being fed, something we still have to deal with for sure, but at least being slapped with propaganda from all sides is starting to make us suspicious of content in general.