Indispensable. Insufferable.
Lifelines. Killers.
All of these words apply to Facebook and Twitter, the two most important social networks we have.
But Facebook is driving people away. Privacy concerns are one factor because Facebook accumulates a lot of data over which many a marketer drools. Older generations have found it’s a wonderful way to keep in touch with all the people we met over the years, only to see their kids and grandkids get frustrated and move on to simpler social networks like Instagram.
To some extent, clever philosophical thinkpieces on bureaucracy and humanity notwithstanding, Facebook’s problems are the Internet’s problems. Bump the purveyors of ignorance and hate off of Facebook, and they’ll just congregate elsewhere.
Like Twitter, which is now in the news because it’s wrestling with the question of whether a sitting president is exempt from policies designed to prevent harassment and disinformation. Twitter is reluctantly dealing with the issue now, while Facebook is similarly reticent.
Twitter’s openness is both its strength and its undoing. Users are free to make connections and share things that go beyond their circles of friends. They’re also free to engage in misguided public shaming efforts and harass people.
Just ask female journalists, whose horrible treatment online was brought to light in this brilliant, heartbreaking video in which men read tweets face to face with sports reporters Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro. The men in the video, obviously men of better conscience than the people who wrote the tweets, can barely get through the vile language and sentiments.
Granted, all of these disgusting words could’ve been directed to Spain and DiCaro some other way. Even in the days before email, newspapers used to get interesting letters.
But the public nature of Twitter encourages people to ratchet up the verbal violence. Online trolling offers a vicarious thrill than an email doesn’t generate. The harasser might get the satisfaction of striking a nerve or find kindred hateful spirits.
I can’t speak for Spain, DiCaro or women who bear the brunt of such assaults in ways that men do not. I have, though, been the subject of a couple of campaigns of torches and pitchforks, and they were far nastier on Twitter than they were on email.
When I called out Manchester United for touring the United States without playing Major League Soccer teams, as other big European soccer clubs had done, I got a few hundred emails. The tone changed over the course of each day — the overnight mail from England was witty, while the American Man U fans who wrote later in the day used less refined language. On a message board for Man U fans, I was given credit for engaging with my critics, even if I “failed quite miserably.”
I responded to almost all of the emails, taking it all in good humor. My new virtual penpals were usually impressed that I responded and even a little chagrined upon the realization that a real human being read what they had written in anger.
Those exchanges aren’t the norm on Twitter, as I saw when I made an admittedly flip comment about U.S. women’s national team players demanding “Jordan rules”-style favoritism from refs in the new National Women’s Soccer League in 2013.
By 9 p.m. that evening, I knew I was in for it.
I don’t remember any good conversations stemming from that response. Some people just wanted to make sure I got the point.
I mentioned a book I was writing on women’s soccer, and someone said she would buy it just so she could hit me in the face with it. (Sadly, the tweet is no longer available.)
My favorite was the guy who said he’d kill me twice.
I did have fun responding.
Pick your favorites from the long list of replies.
But my “fun” is white male privilege. It’s not fun for Spain or DiCaro. Even in this conversation that ran roughly 20 to 1 against me, a few people harassed Morgan. And it’s not “fun” to see armies of bots and hatemongers spewing garbage.
So Facebook and Twitter have issues. Can we just unplug?
Well … not really. Not without alternatives that don’t exist.
Twitter can be ignored, depending on your job. I’m a journalist, and I need to disseminate my own writing and read a handful of useful sources. If you made a better career choice, you might be able to get by without it.
Facebook is virtually inescapable, particularly if you’re part of any group that needs to communicate. If you think Facebook is clumsy, try email lists.
But let’s dream here. Let’s pretend we have a pile of venture capital to create a robust collection of servers, create relationships and advertise our new meeting place. Let’s pretend we can somehow scale up quickly.
What would we want from our new network?
First, a few things Facebook and Twitter do well:
- Instant sharing of links.
- Facebook groups, often a means of communication for real-life groups like PTAs and student organizations.
- Twitter lists, a means of following reliable sources in particular fields.
- On Facebook: Determining which people can see what you’re sharing.
- On Facebook: Charitable donations. You can do fundraisers seamlessly, and if you do one for your birthday, your friends will see it.
- Direct messaging.
- “Sign in with Facebook,” streamlining the process of going to various online stores and sites.
- Virtual “yard sales” / marketplaces.
- Targeted ads, which have pros (awareness of things we want to know about) and cons (how did Facebook know I was looking for new glasses?).
So we want to keep those. But what can we do better?
- More control over what we see and share. Facebook makes it too difficult to make lists and adjust our “news feed.” I moderate a group in which it’s next to impossible to keep track of everything that’s posted. They used to have a nice “smart list” feature in which I could easily share things with friends who live in my town or went to my school, but they took it away for some reason.
- Better customization of “Pages” for those of us who are trying to build brands. I have a page for my writing, and I’m prompted to enter my hours of operation.
- Give readers easier tools for flagging misinformation, and beef up the staff that checks it out.
And perhaps we can take it into new realms.
Content that lasts: Ally with Medium (no, I’m not just bribing the curators here) to let users turn their pages into blogs. I love the blogs I’ve run because I can go back and look at old content. I’m still getting page views on things I wrote years ago because they pop up on searches. That doesn’t work on Facebook, where everything is in a walled garden — not to the extreme of 1990s AOL and Prodigy, where you literally couldn’t see the content unless you were in the AOL or Prodigy network, but certainly not easy to find by any search, even within Facebook itself. Twitter has an advanced search feature that’s good but not great.
That’ll help individual writers who are just out to reach as wide an audience as possible. But we can go further than that and help solve a bigger problem …
Create universal subscriptions for news sites: We can already sign in to so many sites through Facebook. Suppose we were able to use that sign in to pay a small amount for the content we see?
I so often run into content I can’t read because I’ve used my “three free stories” at the site in question — the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Philadelphia Inquirer, etc. I can’t possibly justify subscribing to all of these out-of-town newspapers for the 1–2 stories I want to read each month. I’d be happy to pay a la carte, or better yet, buy packages that let me subscribe to multiple online publications — the old cable TV model that we’re now seeing on YouTube TV, Sling or Hulu.
Speaking of subscription, suppose we gave readers another tool that helps them pick their level of engagement?
Premium payments and privacy: These sites would lose a lot of their functionality if they went behind a paywall, but they’re ideally suited to give premium memberships that let people eliminate some of their concerns.
Users could pay nothing and let the site generate money off their data as social networks currently do. Or they could pay $5/month or so to get greater control over what they share. Maybe even $10/month for an ad-free experience.
Twitter has a narrower focus than Facebook, so it can’t make a lot of the changes here. Getting rid of bots would be the biggest step forward, and any other tool they can use against disinformation would help. Other than that, Twitter is what we make of it. Personally, I’m trimming things down to smaller and smaller lists — on a typical day, I may only check out a list that has 35 people who are vital to my work or real-life friends. My DMs are still open so people can send me news tips or alert me to an interesting conversation. Avoiding the rest of the nonsense on Twitter is basically an exercise in self-discipline.
Facebook could easily do the things suggested here. They can afford the tools (check out the AI being integrated through the work of the Reporters Lab at my alma mater, Duke) to fight misinformation. They can tweak their user interface. They can build upon things they aren’t currently doing.
But they might not do so unless they’re responding to competition. Google Plus was a half-hearted effort, and Google’s “Groups” are anemic in comparison to what Facebook offers.
We might not want to have dozens of social networks because we’d have trouble connecting with the masses as we do. You might have a circle of 20 close friends on 10 different social networks.
All we really need is one solid, well-funded competitor that does much of the good Facebook does while dropping the bad. We’re not going to be able to hold Mark Zuckerberg and company accountable any other way.
So … who has some money?
Mostly Modern Media 