‘I didn’t do it to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity.” Elon Musk in his own words on buying Twitter. He follows in the footsteps of fellow multibillionaire Mark Zuckerberg, who in 2017 published a “manifesto” for Facebook, setting out how he wanted it to help save humanity from itself.
Delusions of grandeur in wildly rich men aren’t unusual, so it’s tempting to scoff, then move on. But they are right to claim that their ownership of huge social media platforms confers significant power – in their heads, to do good, but, for the rest of us, to create harms spanning mental health to child safety to health misinformation. Zuckerberg’s manifesto didn’t stop Facebook helping stoke violence against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar or in the Tigray conflict in Ethiopia.
Musk’s first actions as the new owner of Twitter have been to sack the whole board, dramatically cut its headcount and get rid of its human rights team. Twitter’s moderation policies have always been highly opaque, taking a permissive approach to racist abuse while kicking off individuals who don’t subscribe to dogmas held dear by Silicon Valley. But things could get much worse if they become subject to Musk’s idiosyncratic whims.
Big platforms have minimal incentives to reduce these harms, because of the profits they generate and much has been written about the confounding problem of how governments should regulate them. But Twitter, Facebook and TikTok also have impacts that go beyond the sharply quantifiable, like self-harm in children or vaccine takeup rates: consequences that stem from their power as gatekeepers not just of what we talk about and how, but with respect to the books, music and fashion we consume.
Musk’s vision of Twitter is as a “digital town square”: a democratising force that takes power away from the editors who filter stories and opinions through their own worldviews and hands it back to the people. What this underplays, however, is how much of the content we see is pushed to us by algorithms whose success is measured purely by user-engagement.
The most engaging material is that which triggers emotional reactions; on Twitter, this means stuff that prompts outrage and anger or strong feelings of belonging. This is why so much of its content is about signalling virtue to like-minded followers and picking bad-faith fights, rather than information exchange or open-minded discourse. This is how to go viral; it’s what the algorithms push, and hence encourage.
Twitter’s reach isn’t anywhere close to that of Facebook or TikTok. But because so many journalists, politicians and social campaigners are on it, it has a disproportionate impact on political discourse. Narcissists are particularly drawn to its outrage/ingroup dynamic, because it feeds their sense of superiority. Research suggests that people with narcissistic traits are more likely to become addicted to social media and to engage in online bullying. It is no coincidence that politics and civil society movements now feel dominated by the cult of the individual and them-and-us mentalities, rather than building diverse alliances and winning the hearts and minds of those whose values don’t perfectly map on to yours.
It’s not just the world of politics and campaigning where algorithms have exerted their opaque pull. I met a musician last week who told me he doesn’t think we yet understand how a platform like TikTok is affecting our music tastes. With more than a billion global users, TikTok is the fastest growing social media platform. Young people aged 15 to 24 spend an average of 57 minutes a day on the app.
In TikTok, the algorithm reigns even more supreme than in Facebook, Twitter or Instagram; even if you don’t follow any other users, you are fed a stream of short video clips via the “For You Page” users see when they open the app. The FYP algorithm learns from the way you engage with and interact with clips to feed you a progressively – some would say, scarily – tailored stream of video content, designed to maximise the time you spend on the app.
TikTok views are increasingly affecting chart success in the music industry. The musician I spoke to said it’s getting harder to be signed by a label without first having gone viral on TikTok. Big-name artists such as Becky Hill have talked about the pressure to produce content that will spread like wildfire on the platform. TikTok’s algorithm doesn’t just yield power over who gets signed, its emphasis on short, snappy video clips sends signals to artists about what to produce and ultimately what we all end up consuming. TikTok is similarly influencing which books are commissioned in young adult publishing, with some first-time authors being given six-figure deals after going viral.
To assume that there have ever been benign gatekeepers of politics and culture would be to romanticise. Newspaper editors have always been swayed by what sells copies and what we want to read has never been perfectly aligned with what might be considered in the public interest to print. What publishers and record labels choose to platform has always been driven not just by commercial interests but their own tastes and prejudices. There are some who might argue that TikTok’s FYP algorithm simply reflects back to us what we collectively want better than any human could.
But these algorithms are the platforms’ most jealously guarded commercial secrets. No one really knows how they work and the rise of TikTok – and signs that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is increasingly looking to emulate the way TikTok operates – suggests that the primacy of the algorithm is only going to grow. To what extent do the algorithms feed us what we really want or what we are manipulated to want? And what consequences might this have for political communication and our cultural preferences? Like them or not, they will probably be near impossible to unpick.
• Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist
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