Is social media doing more harm than good to democracy?

How much should a news outlet or even regular users be worried about the ownership of a social media platform in deciding where to post and where to consume news?

Alan Rusbridger: It is a real dilemma because Twitter (now X) was for many years a really wonderful place for posting news, finding audiences, finding out news, and building relationships. In normal circumstances, who owns a media platform shouldn’t worry us too much. But Elon Musk has so dominated Twitter, the platform that he bought, and insisted that people follow him, that it is difficult to ignore the question of ownership.

Pratik Sinha: We should be worried. One should think of online spaces just the way we think of offline spaces. Offline, we try to quit toxic spaces and some people have the privilege of being able to do so. When you are able to quit a toxic relationship, typically it is because you are financially independent. The Guardian is such a huge organisation that even if it doesn’t have traffic from X, it is okay for the newspaper. X is probably just a little more toxic than other platforms. So, it is a privilege that one is able to quit a more toxic platform and focus on others.

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It is important to know who owns media organisations, but it is not the only factor. One also has to look at day-to-day reportage. Had Mr. Musk bought X and not used it as a political tool, it would have been a different matter. But not only did he buy it; he uses it as a personal tool and not just a political tool. The algorithm has been tweaked to ensure that everyone on X sees his posts. That is where the problem lies.

How important is social media to disseminate content?

Pratik Sinha: Very important, unfortunately. Our primary sources of information have become social media platforms which are controlled by multi-billion dollar companies. We have to use these platforms because, how else do we reach out to people? And that also makes censorship easy because the government only has to have a relationship with these two or three platforms, the kind of relationships that governments typically have with monopolies, to ensure that the information that should reach citizens is censored. We are in a tricky space because we have no free platforms where information can reach citizens without many layers of filters.

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Alan Rusbridger: It used to be really important. There are about 350 million people on X, so that is a considerable audience. In the digital world, for a long time, it was really important to be able to amplify journalism through that platform. But people who analyse these things say that the number of referrals from social media, and to some extent from search engines, has declined.

Are some platforms worse than others?

Alan Rusbridger: I think the problem is that there is a huge mismatch between the editorial standards and values that the best news organisations represent and the editorial standards of Mr. Musk. He has none. He has abandoned all the trust and safety teams. He doesn’t believe in content moderation; he sees it as censorship. The attempts by regulators and advertisers to try and clean up X have been met with the most foul-mouthed rejection. He also holds contempt for the free press. He is constantly telling people that they shouldn’t believe anything on the legacy media and that the only place you can find the truth nowadays is X. So it is an act of peculiar masochism to keep appearing on his platform when he despises us. That is why people are thinking, well, let’s go somewhere where we are valued and where facts and truth and journalism still count for something.

What alternatives do you think are better?

Alan Rusbridger: There is Mastodon, which everyone found extremely hard to use, so it has not really worked. There is Threads, which has become quite popular quite quickly. And there is Bluesky, which a lot of journalists are now fleeing to. There is a view that you shouldn’t moderate anything. That is not a view that has widely brought favour in the world apart from the U.S. under Donald Trump. Most people feel that there is a lot of illegal, harmful content which should be moderated in some way.

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Pratik Sinha: The problem is centralisation of information. What I consider as true alternatives are decentralised systems. Mastodon and Bluesky have been designed to be decentralised. I don’t consider Threads as an alternative because it is just another product by a monopoly which is not decentralised, though it is attempting to include some decentralisation features. Alternatives will not be as convenient to use and we should be okay with that because it is the only way that these platforms will have the opportunity to improve.

Misinformation is platform-agnostic. Quantitatively, it is very difficult to say whether there is more on one platform, because it also depends on usage. For instance, in India, there is more misinformation on WhatsApp simply because the usage of WhatsApp is high in India. What is different is the amount of hate speech that is being put out on different platforms. All platforms have a policy vis-a-vis hate speech, but the question is whether these policies are being implemented or not. I don’t think there is a single X employee dedicated to moderating Indian content on the platform. Everyone was fired. So, maybe in that particular aspect, Facebook might be slightly better than X because people are moderating content there.

What kind of checks should platforms be putting in place to reduce such toxicity?

Pratik Sinha: They need to invest money in people to moderate content. When riots had happened in Sri Lanka, Facebook did not have a single moderator in Sri Lanka. There were a few sitting in an office in Hyderabad. When the Rohingya exodus happened, there was no moderator in a local language. If you look at the number of moderators per million of population, India would be one of the lowest in the world. In India, there are many languages and nuance. Dog whistling is different in every language. None of these platforms are able to do that because they don’t want to invest the money.

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Alan Rusbridger: The best platforms are developing systems and it is bound to involve a lot of AI to try and identify people who are trying to cause real harm. During the recent Southport riots in England, Mr. Musk himself was re-posting really dangerous stuff. You can’t have social media being used to organise murder. That should be obvious. So, whether it is human fact-checkers and moderators or AI systems and content management moderation systems, most people think that you have got to have some systems to catch the worst behaviour. Otherwise, this technology can be used to cause immense harm.

What role do you think social media can play in building democracy?

Pratik Sinha: We confuse a communication system with a communication system controlled by monopolies. Any communication system which works well is great for citizens and for democracy; it will be used by people to put their voice out. We know what is happening in Palestine because it is being broadcast. The number of people who died in the Iraq war was much higher than the number of people who have died in Palestine. But Iraq happened when there was no social media. But when that same communication system is subsumed by the system committing the atrocity, it is a problem.

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Alan Rusbridger: Social media at its best is marvellous. On a platform like Facebook, there are, I think, three billion people who have the ability to publish and connect with each other. They are mostly using it for good purposes to organise, or for innocent purposes. So, it would be terrible to blacken all social media, abandon it or clamp down on it. But I think it is possible to stamp out the dangerous way of using social media.

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We [news outlets] need to start by choosing a platform which is run on ethical lines and recreate the kind of reasonably civilised discourse which was good for journalism. From what I have seen of Bluesky, people are rejoicing in the fact that it feels purer.

Pratik Sinha: We have to have media and information literacy classes in schools where children learn how to look at different sources of information and process them. We need to think about decentralised communication systems. There will be challenges, but those aren’t insurmountable.

Listen to the conversation in The Hindu Parley podcast