A hard task to make social media less anti-social

Mark Zuckerberg’s pledge to focus Facebook more on friendship deserves praise, but it is only a start

Let us recall how a decade ago people known to be investment bankers started to introduce themselves at dinner parties as “financial executives”, “compliance officers” or even “accountants”, to avoid the inevitable loathing and obloquy that would come were the truth to be known. Mark Zuckerberg, the man who is Facebook, may be taking the same route.

Aware, perhaps, of the true cost of his billions – a cost measured not least in the extent of the human frailty that his immensely successful business has exploited – he is altering his medium’s news feed to include more information about a user’s friends and family, and less about the great issues of the day. This will, he says, make his users happier, even if it loses him money. Yet it might also, even now, prevent him from becoming one of the great civilisation-wreckers of history, a type of digital Genghis Khan.

One should declare an interest. As I noted in these pages last month, Facebook’s relentless appropriation of the journalism of others – including those of us who write for this newspaper – has not only verged on the plagiaristic but has also seduced advertisers away from traditional media to platforms such as Mr Zuckerberg’s, where the rewards pile up for comparatively little effort or ingenuity.

If what he has just said makes his clientele rediscover traditional media, then three cheers for him. Otherwise, media such as his are driving a process by which freedom of speech and the accountability of the powerful are eroded simply to make him and his shareholders a big profit.

But there are other, more philosophical concerns. Social media, like all such pools, is one where the scum floats to the surface. For every harmless individual who uses Facebook to talk about meeting old friends at a reunion, or Twitter to promote a charity flag-day, or Instagram to share a picture of a particularly successful cheese soufflé, there seem to be countless others who use these tools to spread hatred, bile, ignorance and cruelty (such as “revenge porn”) in a near sadistic fashion, content only when they have destroyed. They facilitate mob rule, and, as we saw again last week, there is no escape.

The world social media has created relishes humiliation and dismisses the prospect of forgiveness, as we saw with Toby Young, forced off the board of the Office for Students for thoughts he shared years ago with the Twittersphere. Imagine if Twitter had existed when Churchill foolishly went in his silk hat to try to direct operations at the siege of Sidney Street, or screwed up the Dardanelles, or (worst of all) called Gandhi “a semi-naked fakir”. We’d have had Lord Halifax in 1940 and might now, if fortunate, be a semi-autonomous German colony. Perhaps Jesus could have tweeted about who was or was not fit to cast the first stone, although one can assume he would have been instantly trolled.

Centuries of Christian teaching

– that there is such a thing as forgiveness, especially for social rather than criminal misdemeanours – is being driven out of the consciousness of a generation. The ruthless exploitation of social media to rub the noses of harmless narcissists in their past stupidities undermines normal social relations and the warp and woof of our civilisation.

Those who use it for these manipulative purposes do so often for political reasons (though some of those who pursue Mr Young deftly ignore the repulsive comments of many leftists about women, Jews, capitalists and others), or because of their own personal inadequacies, or because they have some form of mental illness. These are all relics of a way of life we thought, thank God, we had left at the foot of the pillory in the 18th century.

Some users of social media have an addiction that is subversive of normal social behaviour. “Interaction” – a word much beloved of Mr Zuckerberg and his myrmidons – is one thing; obsession quite another. For some of us, happily, the novelty never wore on; for others it seems at last to be wearing off.

The weaknesses these media especially exploit are the desire some people have to be considered important, and the fear others have of not being left out. If Mr Zuckerberg, by turning the spotlight back on the closest human relationships in his recalibration of Facebook, manages to play less to those, then all the world will benefit, and the trolls and the haters will simply have to turn in on themselves. What he should not do, however, is think what he has done is anything more than just a start.