On Community, Social Media, and the Failed Third Space

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France and Belgium have recently banned children and teenagers younger than 15 from joining social media. To me this illustrates that my desire for social media to be social networks that were feature rich is dead and buried. In effect it has been dead and buried since Lockdown got normal people to join social media, including Whatscrapp. (Intentional spelling)

The issue, which I highlighted back in 2008 or so is that social media has always been seen as a tool for marketers, advertisers, PR teams and utilitarian people. For me social networks, and social media, when they came of age, should have been about providing an online third space for communities to come together, meet chat, and then with familiarity and friendship meet in the physical world, rather than just intellectual plain.

Initially Twitter was a third space for “brain farts” as some called them. With time it became more and more feature rich. It became more like Jaiku, a mobile phone based web forum.

Facebook was the online space for university students. It allowed everyone from a specific college or university to connect, find events and more. Over time the walls were ripped down, and with the arrival of Zynga conversation died within months.

Seesmic was great for community, because it was video instant messaging. When I looked at TikTok I found that it wasn’t that. It was a talent show for those that wanted to be like others. Same dance, same lip sync, same actions.

It’s interesting to think about antisocial media and what it has become. In the good old days social networks were the third space where we came to hang out with people in different parts of the world and we knew each other, or at least we knew what people chose to share.

Yesterday I was in such a third space on Whatscrapp, and for the second time someone shared conspiracy theories, one of which was via a CNN video. When I saw the sensationalist clickbait headline I was critical of that titling style but someone took it as a personal attack.

This illustrates the issue with modern social media. Through not chatting we don’t get to know each other, and through not getting to know each other we don’t know whether someone is being kind, mean, or other. Due to the lack of social context we jump to the wrong conclusions. What I wrote was about the current YouTube clickbait headline style. It was not a personal attack.

The fact that France and Belgium are banning people beneath 15 years of age from using social media, to me is both a comment on social media being out of date, as well as on society nailing the online conversation era as over.

Society, since the 90s has tried to discourage people from socialising on the web. Social networks were small, and immune, because they were specialist communities. MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, and other sites are global in reach, and they could have provided people with a global space.

Since people listened to the wrong people about how to use social media, the environment was allowed to become toxic, and when this was demonstrated people said “You see, social media is bad, and people online are fake”. That was engineered and by design to liberate social media owners from personal responsibility.

If we look at the details “The measures come in response to concerns over online bullying and coercion, exposure to extreme content, the threat of predators and potential harm to mental health.” Every one of these fears was around in the 90s, but because we were in small, humane communities, we had safety barriers that kept us, as online teenagers safe. Everyone of those dangers affects adults too, so to ban children rather than take measures to reduce all of these risks is short sighted.

Adults are just as vulnerable as children to all of these risks. It’s not by banning an entire portion of society that you make it safer. It’s through media literacy of parents, teachers, and then teenagers and children. This ban will, in effect mean that children will go from not using cell phones to being fully online the day of their birthday, and that’s a recipe for manipulation and extorsion. Media literacy is not learned by abstinence. Media literacy is learned through education, trial and error, and the right support.

That incident from yesterday proves that adults are vulnerable to disinformation and manipulation. That so many headlines are emotional clickbait is a very bad situation. “This will shock you” is leading people to think negatively. “This will surprise you” is also sensationalist.

One of the reasons I read less news, and stopped using YouTube is that clickbait, emotional headlines tell you how to feel, rather than give you information about the content.

In French language education you learn about the Déontologie des Médias, about the rules and regulations that govern television. In the IB system you learn Theory of Knowledge. The UN system, just today share a post about information. It looked at

– Who wrote it

– Why they wrote it

– When they wrote it

– What is their aim with what they wrote

– Where was it written.

It’s worth double checking that I remembered correctly.

And finally, if social media was used as a communal third space, rather than as a place for influencers to influence, then it would be self-policing, because the community would watch over children, and those that are more vulnerable to disinformation. Through the dismantling of social media as a network of friends of friends, and through algorithms choosing what we see on Threads, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube our communities are not there for moral guidance and support, so no one is there to flag or warn us about the dangers. We can’t safeguard friends, families, and colleagues, if we cannot see what they see, and warn them, or provide context.

The sooner we return to communal social networks, the better for everyone.