We're getting the social media crisis wrong

Misinformation is "a problem, but not the most important one. The fundamental problem... is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings".

while democracy "is a profoundly collective enterprise", we see it as the sum of individuals' knowledge and decisions. And individuals are flawed.

However, "people can actually think much better collectively than individually". Democracy is a "collective means of problem solving", but there's "no way to directly see what all the citizens want and believe, or to make full sense of it."

So we use voting, opinion polls, etc. But these "are not just passive measures of public opinion but active forces that rework it... Publics are evoked, even shaped, by [the] techniques that represent them", as humans "have specialized subsystems in our brain for understanding what the group politics are... [so] the technologies through which we see the public shape what we think the public is". And then we either believe it, or do not publicly disagree with what we believe most people believe... leading others to believe that it is more popular than it is.

I think this is known as, or related to, pluralistic ignorance.

" Twitter/X, Facebook, and other social media services are just such technologies for shaping publics. Many of the problems that we are going to face over the next many years will stem from publics that have been deranged and distorted by social media."

The key here is that social media algorithms do not present what the public thinks, although they are supposed to. They present a distorted view... but then that view influences us "through a mixture of reflective beliefs, conformity with shibboleths, and revised understandings of coalitional politics... changing our beliefs about what other people think...

"the ‘voice of the people;’ is actually in private hands... Can democracy work, if a couple of highly atypical men exercise effective control over large swathes of the public space?