Katherine Cross on Why Social Media is Anti-Political

Social Media's Anti-Political Nature

• 💡 Social media is not a substitute for the hard work of politics and community building; it demobilizes and scatters the polity, making change harder.
• 🎭 It tricks users into thinking they are engaged in collective action, creating a public square where voices are heard but little changes.
• 💬 Platforms are designed to incentivize quick reactions and strong opinions, making it difficult to express nuance or admit a lack of knowledge.

The Illusion of Online Community

• 🌐 While social media can help people find others with shared interests, it is not a true community and can be detrimental if issues arise.
• 🏠 Users often turn to social media as a substitute for real-world community organizations and activist groups.
• 😔 This dependency can lead individuals to retroactively justify their online investment, sometimes imbuing their actions with a sense of righteous fury.

Harassment and Third-Order Discourse

• ⚠️ Harassment campaigns on social media have three orders: direct threats (first order), online insults (second order), and indirect discourse that justifies targeting (third order).
• 🗣️ Third-order harassment involves public discussions about a target that create a moral substrate, legitimizing further abuse even without direct engagement.
• 🌶️ Even well-intentioned actions or neutral discussions can inadvertently fuel harassment by drawing more attention to the target, as seen in the 'chili woman' and 'couch guy' examples.

Affordances and Structural Change

• 🚪 Affordances are features of designed objects that suggest how to use them; social media platforms have affordances that shape user behavior.
• 🛣️ Similar to how road design influences driving behavior (e.g., raised crosswalks), social media design incentivizes certain actions like clicking on provocative headlines.
• 🏊‍♂️ Resisting these ingrained patterns is difficult, as individuals are channeled into structures that encourage specific behaviors, requiring conscious effort to swim upstream.

Effective Engagement and Real-World Action

• 🎯 Social media can be used effectively as an index or phone book to find people, but not as a community center.
• ✍️ For meaningful impact, engagement should be longer-form, critical, and goal-oriented, asking what is being achieved and if social media is the best tool.
• 🤝 While social media can amplify efforts, genuine political work and community building often require in-person interactions and a willingness to engage in complex, nuanced conversations.