The perception that social media does more harm than good is starting to become mainstream, meaning that many people don’t think it’s that bad if a judge, president or government decides to ban or restrict access to it.
This week, with the Twitter ban in Brazil, I remembered the longest period I have spent without using Twitter since it existed: the ten days I spent in December 2019 in the Falkland Islands, with a small group of journalists. I still have much to think and write about that place and that time, but I remember that what surprised me most about life in the Malvinas was that at a time when my world and I already lived completely connected, there was no Wifi or 4G, only a very weak and very expensive satellite Internet that was used to check emails once a day and that was never enough, for example, to watch a YouTube video or even to download a meme that someone sent you on WhatsApp. A friend told me “like in a village”, but I have many friends from the village and the reality is that today, in small towns, young people spend a lot of time on the Internet. Maybe even more than people spend in big cities, depending on the person, because in many cases (I think of my gay friends, for example), the Internet is what connects you to life and to the people you are with.
My travel companions in the Malvinas, I remember, were hated. I, who in real life was probably the most addicted to social networks, was fascinated. I was writing a play and I quickly detected that after two or three days without social networks, the space in your brain that allowed you to read when you were younger returns. War and Peace or study for a final in political philosophy. What I could write in Buenos Aires in a week, in the Malvinas I could solve in two days. I, who have always been (and still am) very much in favor of not flogging oneself for spending a lot of time on the Internet, understood on that trip that it was true that the 21st century brain gives you and takes away from you. I also remember what it took from me. Part of being a person who grew up writing in that era is being used to solving any question on the spot. In the Malvinas, on the other hand, you had to write down the word or fact you wanted to look up, save the question for another time, and move on.
Of course, voluntarily leaving a social network, or leaving it because the technical resources that would allow you to use it do not exist where you are, has nothing to do with being banned. I am not an expert, but from what I have read from people who know, the feeling is that the Brazilian judge went too far and that we clearly need to think about finding ways to sanction the owner of a platform like X without it being to the detriment of its users. If I think about it again, it is because lately I have read and listened to a lot of discussions about the “total jump” of social media, and I think that the perceptions that circulate on this subject have an effect on the positions that people adopt. have on regulation. In other words: the perception that social networks do more harm than good (that they ruin our minds and those of children, that they amplify aggression, that they put verifiable and well-produced information on an equal footing with clearly false information) is beginning to emerge. to be a majority opinion; and it is this, more than an intrinsic “love of authoritarianism”, that makes it so that for many people, it is not so bad to be a judge, president, government or whoever decides to ban them or restrict their access.
Some of the conversations that matter most to me in this world are those that deal with philosophy and literature and, in part, if I am interested in the issue of regulating social networks, it is not only because the Internet is my country, but also because I am interested (it seduces me) that there are no good analogies to think about social networks, the absence of perfect metaphors: it fascinates me like untranslatable sentences or problems that cannot be solved with money. Closing Twitter is not like closing a newspaper. Nor is it like sanctioning a company. It is clear that its value since Elon bought it and changed its name) but clearly also for a political agenda, with a series of debates that he wants to give and a set of forces (right-wing in general) that he wants to support. In this, he therefore resembles a media entrepreneur of all times; but it has no media, it does not employ journalists and it is not subject to the journalistic standards to which, on the other hand, today in general, even historical newspapers do not adhere. Even if we said that it was the case, it would be difficult to think how it could be applied; it is not as automatic, at least, as in a newspaper. Elon Musk, in one sense, decides what is published in X, but not in another. He does not decide as an editor does. The nature of a social network is its decentralization, and therefore one has the feeling that Elon Musk is responsible for what happens there (the hate speech and fake news that spread there, the way advertising circulates or the way our data is treated) but not the same responsibility as an editor or a journalist. We are looking for a new vocabulary.
I also think, in relation to these new concepts that we need, how unique it is to be a user of a social network: a social network is not just a newspaper that you read, it is also a space in which you express yourself, that we feel ours, even if it is as private and foreign as a television channel. In fact, we continue to call it Twitter, as if we were the ones who decide the name of things, as happens with streets that change their name, but they are our streets, and then the grandmothers will continue to call Scalabrini Ortiz Canning because that is what they call them. They remember having accompanied them. I look for metaphors to think about the streets that were taken from Brazilians, because that is the feeling, even if the metaphor is imperfect, it is bad. The feeling that they have taken away a corridor for listening and discussing, a corridor full of good and bad news, of relevant and irrelevant gossip, of knife fights like the ones I used to hear at night, in my twenties, from my apartment in the Abasto neighborhood, a dirty, disorderly and noisy alley like all the alleys of democracy.
