Are Moral Concerns Starting to Drive Our Digital Media Talk?

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We may be approaching a shift in the way we talk and think about our digital environment. While our society has long been enamored of the empowering possibilities of smartphones, Big Data, and social media platforms, signs are everywhere that our optimism may be giving way to more sobering calls to confront their more negative – even corrosive – effects. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg may have walked away from his recent congressional testimony with his platform’s status quo intact, but the fact that he felt compelled to elaborate on his earlier apologies (and was called by Congress to do so) is evidence of an ongoing shift – both among those in Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley circles and among Americans in general. Earlier this year, Dan McComas, the former product chief of Reddit, was moved to proclaim that, “I fundamentally believe that my time at Reddit made the world a worse place. That sucks. It sucks to have to say that about myself” (Kulwin, 2018). Surveying the growing chorus of concerns about the negative effects of social media use as well as the calls to more concretely address them, Heather Grabbe, director of the Open Society European Policy Institute, said, “We’re at an inflection point, when the great wave of optimism about tech is giving way to growing alarm” (Streitfeld et al., 2018).

That alarm is focused on several disparate areas: Big Data and questions of privacy and exploitation; the moral obligations of digital companies to ensure a healthy environment, and the high social costs of our ideology of individualism that drives so much of our behavior in the digital world. Taken together, they arguably point to a shift that calls for rethinking how our online systems might better create genuine conversations, engagement and connection – not just connectivity. While the very architecture of most social media privileges projection and proclamation (“Look at me!”), many critics say we need to find ways to privilege true exchange and emphasize the fact that participating in communities (real and virtual) means more than fake sharing and talking at each other. A good example is Noah Kulwin’s article, “The Internet Apologizes,” in New York magazine this past April:

There have always been outsiders who criticized the tech industry — even if their concerns have been drowned out by the oohs and aahs of consumers, investors, and journalists. But today, the most dire warnings are coming from the heart of Silicon Valley itself. The man who oversaw the creation of the original iPhone believes the device he helped build is too addictive. The inventor of the World Wide Web fears his creation is being “weaponized.” Even Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, has blasted social media as a dangerous form of psychological manipulation. ‘God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,’ he lamented recently (Kulwin, 2018).

These concerns can be viewed as reflecting three broad movements:

1. The abandonment of the “content-agnostic” platform model of social media. Platforms are no longer just platforms.

We know that their very design can shape how people use them and communicate with them. Companies are starting to recognize they have a moral stake in how people use their products.

2. The burgeoning recognition that media technology is value-laden, not value-neutral.

Academic theorists have been making this case for decades, but we now have countless examples of how design decisions have ideological assumptions baked into them, and how Big Data and widespread algorithms perpetuate our own biases.

3. The burgeoning recognition of the high social cost of our hyper-individualistic behavior online.

Research has compellingly documented the corrosive effects of filter bubbles and links between social media use, with negative traits such as low political knowledge and narcissistic tendencies.

Consider these developments:

• Zuckerberg himself has acknowledged his company’s culpability in the proliferation of fake news and has created an army of monitors that has shut down thousands of questionable pages.
• In May 2018, Twitter began a campaign to systematically suppress obnoxious tweets by “hiding” them from certain accounts in conversations and search results (Oremus, 2018). The new feature was implemented after testing resulted in a 4 percent drop in abuse reports in its search tool and an 8 percent drop in abuse reports in conversation threads. And even though Twitter announced the new feature will affect less than 1 percent of all accounts, it illustrates a trend of social media companies abandoning their conventional content-agnostic platform model.
• We have long known that Big Data algorithms often can perpetuate discriminatory behavior. Cathy O’Neil’s 2016 bestseller Weapons of Math Destruction detailed how this happens across industries. Now, research groups such as WebTAP at Princeton are “auditing” websites to hunt for biased algorithms by using bots that “act” as different types of people online.
• Silicon Valley designers and engineers – some of the very people who developed sites and tools that have prompted widespread alarm – have banded together to create the Center for Humane Technology, which has launched an anti-tech addiction lobbying effort and nationwide campaign to help educate children and parents about the negative effects of using social media and smart phones. “This is an opportunity for me to correct a wrong,” said one of the Center’s founders, who was an early investor in Facebook (Bowles, 2018).

Of course, there are all kinds of trends and developments that we might point to as counter-indications of any sort of community-focused turn in how we think about digital life. Facebook has recently reported a slackening of activity and engagement among its users, but the momentum of the #deleteFacebook movement seems to be subsiding. In a major reversal, the Federal Communications Commission dismantled net-neutrality policy. Barring any development that prompts widespread public outrage, we are unlikely to see any substantive effort to expand the regulatory system.

And yet, change seems to be afoot. We need to continue to illuminate ways in which online communication can escape digital media’s individualistic entrapments and help create a digital world that emphasizes the public good. The developments noted here may well not amount to any major transformation in the architecture of our digital lives. That may be too much to ask. But we are surely witnessing a mental pause, at the very least, that is placing moral concerns front and center in our conversations about media technology.