Social Media’s Big Tobacco Moment — with Yaël Eisenstat

So I want to ask a question now more about the features that lead to that kind of outcome socially.

Because in my conversation with experts and critics and technologists about the design and architecture of platforms, I sort of have the experience of... having my interlocutors divided between two different competing positions about platform accountability and a larger disagreement among the people in those two camps about whether social media can actually be repaired at all.

One view, and I'm just going to give the most extreme version of it, holds that the architecture itself, which involves mass participation at an enormous scale, algorithm of mediation, frictionless sharing, and the collapse of social context, is inherently conductive to tribalism, political division, and violence.

The other camp largely holds that these outcomes arise not from the architecture itself or from the concept of a social media platform itself, but from very specific design and business choices such as engagement optimization, virality mechanics, and targeted amplification, which could be changed without abandoning the platform model altogether.

Where do you fall in that debate? Are we trying to redesign a fundamentally salvageable system? Or are we trying to mitigate harms that are sort of intrinsic to what the platforms are? Yes, it's the business model.

Without a question, the business model as currently operating for the biggest social media companies is the problem.

But let's be clear.

Some of the things that you listed, like let's say frictionless sharing, for example, That actually does stem from the business model.

Meaning, am I 100% certain that if we had a totally different kind of business model, that some of the same design things like frictionless sharing would be as dangerous? I don't know.

I can't because we don't actually have that world to analyze right now.

I just, I'm trying to say, I'm not sure I even agree with this binary.

I understand the question, but it's...

It's not an either or.

At the core right now of so many of the problems that we are seeing, whether it is problems that actually cross into illegal issues or whether it is just problems that I might believe are societal issues, but perhaps not illegal, for example.

the sort of normalization of more and more, whether it is racist, homophobic, antisemitic speech, whether it is the mainstreaming of more and more extremist ideology, whether it is the intentional divisiveness of the way our online platforms are currently incentivized.

None of those things are necessarily illegal, but they are all still highly problematic.

And then, of course, the courts have already decided more recently what some of the illegal issues are.

All of those are products of the incentive structure that the current business model of hoovering up all our data to keep us on their platform, to personalize our experience, all in the service of selling us ads and all of the harms that come from that, that so many people have discussed a million times.

That is the challenge that so many of us have been trying to address.

You know, the other issue, though, part of why I say I'm not sure it's this much of a binary, yes, if I had to choose between the two, it's the business model.

That said, like, even if you have a different business model, part of the question is, what are you designing your product for? Like, I'm going to say something that's going to maybe make some of your listeners upset at me, but I'm used to that at this point.

Blue sky.

I mean, I use blue sky.

I like blue sky, but blue sky is very intentionally and clearly feeding a lot of like confirmation bias inducing material to people.

I mean, that was a complicated sentence, but it is intentionally creating an environment where people are engaging with like-minded people.

So I want to ask a question now more about the features that lead to that kind of outcome socially.

Because in my conversation with experts and critics and technologists about the design and architecture of platforms, I sort of have the experience of... having my interlocutors divided between two different competing positions about platform accountability and a larger disagreement among the people in those two camps about whether social media can actually be repaired at all.

One view, and I'm just going to give the most extreme version of it, holds that the architecture itself, which involves mass participation at an enormous scale, algorithm of mediation, frictionless sharing, and the collapse of social context, is inherently conductive to tribalism, political division, and violence.

The other camp largely holds that these outcomes arise not from the architecture itself or from the concept of a social media platform itself, but from very specific design and business choices such as engagement optimization, virality mechanics, and targeted amplification, which could be changed without abandoning the platform model altogether.

Where do you fall in that debate? Are we trying to redesign a fundamentally salvageable system? Or are we trying to mitigate harms that are sort of intrinsic to what the platforms are? Yes, it's the business model.

Without a question, the business model as currently operating for the biggest social media companies is the problem.

But let's be clear.

Some of the things that you listed, like let's say frictionless sharing, for example, That actually does stem from the business model.

Meaning, am I 100% certain that if we had a totally different kind of business model, that some of the same design things like frictionless sharing would be as dangerous? I don't know.

I can't because we don't actually have that world to analyze right now.

I just, I'm trying to say, I'm not sure I even agree with this binary.

I understand the question, but it's...

It's not an either or.

At the core right now of so many of the problems that we are seeing, whether it is problems that actually cross into illegal issues or whether it is just problems that I might believe are societal issues, but perhaps not illegal, for example.

the sort of normalization of more and more, whether it is racist, homophobic, antisemitic speech, whether it is the mainstreaming of more and more extremist ideology, whether it is the intentional divisiveness of the way our online platforms are currently incentivized.

None of those things are necessarily illegal, but they are all still highly problematic.

And then, of course, the courts have already decided more recently what some of the illegal issues are.

All of those are products of the incentive structure that the current business model of hoovering up all our data to keep us on their platform, to personalize our experience, all in the service of selling us ads and all of the harms that come from that, that so many people have discussed a million times.

That is the challenge that so many of us have been trying to address.

You know, the other issue, though, part of why I say I'm not sure it's this much of a binary, yes, if I had to choose between the two, it's the business model.

That said, like, even if you have a different business model, part of the question is, what are you designing your product for? Like, I'm going to say something that's going to maybe make some of your listeners upset at me, but I'm used to that at this point.

Blue sky.

I mean, I use blue sky.

I like blue sky, but blue sky is very intentionally and clearly feeding a lot of like confirmation bias inducing material to people.

I mean, that was a complicated sentence, but it is intentionally creating an environment where people are engaging with like-minded people.