You know the feeling: you spend $44bn dollars on acquiring a new network of friends only to find out that most people there want nothing to do with you. Or you set up your own friend network for people who want a different space to hang out, only to find out that people there are happier when you’re not around. What is it with billionaires and social media? The answer is simpler than it looks: they will never find thriving social spaces where they can fit right in, because they’re not part of society.
Society evolves to protect itself – so does social media
That’s not entirely fair. There are one or two billionaires out there who do find themselves accepted socially and are able to fit in as they choose without having to build or buy anything, but in a society where the easiest way to the top is by climbing over other people, there will never be many of them. That’s because societies naturally evolve to drive out people who are exploitative or careless about the feelings of others. It’s not a conspiracy created by some nebulous left-wing entity – it’s such a deep rooted trait that it goes back to a time before we were even human. Pretty much all social animals function the same way. Yes, in some species ‘alpha males’ temporarily rule the roost, but if they overreach themselves then more often than not, others in the group get together and do very unpleasant things to them.
Social media doesn’t develop as it does because something about it is broken. It follows the same rules as any other social space. if somebody hurts you once, you might let it go. It could have been an accident, or they could just have been having a bad day. If they hurt you twice, you start avoiding them, and more likely than not you tell your friends about what happened. Not wanting to be hurt themselves, they start avoiding them too. This is ‘cancel culture’ – a natural and healthy response whereby society protects itself. it’s why people on social media platforms keep demanding better moderation tools and why, if not given them, they organise in other ways, from Usenet killfiles to early Bluesky’s culture of passing round block recommendations and acting on them pre-emptively.
Banning blocklists on social media is not the remedy
The response of most powerful platform owners to this has been the same: try to ban the blocklists, to work around the tricks that people use to keep their content out of sight of hostile individuals, and call out ordinary people publicly, calling them pathetic for wanting to live in an ‘echo chamber’. Of course it can be a bad idea to surround oneself with people who all think exactly the same way, but that’s not what most people are trying to do. There’s nothing at all unreasonable about blocking people who routinely espouse hatred or support for violence, or who engage in sexual harassment or bullying. It doesn’t really make a difference if they do it to you directly, if they target other people, if they rant as private individuals or if they rant in the pages of a national newspaper, for money. Most of us just don’t want that in our lives.
Free speech doesn’t include hate speech – society rejects it
Frequently raised up in opposition to this really quite reasonable tactic is the idol of free speech. If we lose that, we are warned, we will never get it back. But free speech was never intended to include hate speech. Like your right to swing your fist, it ends when you cause harm to other people. Persistent bullying and verbal abuse have been demonstrated to cause the same psychological damage as physical trauma, and there is no reason why anyone should feel obliged to put up with them. People don’t feel free to speak when they know that’s what they’re going to face in response, no matter how civil they are themselves. As a consequence, where the false free speech culture holds sway, whole groups of people are effectively silenced; whole conversations, which might otherwise be conducted civilly, go missing. This harms the natural functioning of society, and so society rejects it, with individuals doing everything in their power to find safer spaces.
The consequence of letting people preach hate in your town square is that people stop shopping there, and ultimately all you have left is a group of hateful people, who, in due course, turn one one another. They can exercise all the free speech they want but what they do not have and cannot effectively mandate, short of North Korean-style totalitarianism, is a right to be heard. Speech has consequences – otherwise we wouldn’t bother to use it – and the consequence of hateful speech is being shunned.
Social media can work, but respect needs to be earned
One thing that the various racist and eugenicist pundits in these spaces don’t get is that the single most valuable trait any special can have is genetic diversity – that’s what enables us to survive when our habitats change. That diversity also includes anti-social individuals, who probably would not still occur in significant numbers if they didn’t have an evolutionary role to play. That does not, however, grant them an automatic right to be part of society. Breaking the rules, no matter how exciting it may seem and no matter how sincerely you believe that it has never occurred to anyone before – does have consequences, and if you persistently harm others, they will not want you around anymore – no matter how much money you have, no matter how cool you think you are. The only people you will be able to impress are others who are further behind you in the process of figuring this out.
Social media can work – and does work – when it makes room for these natural social processes to occur and doesn’t try to force a different result. If you are inherently anti-social, though, it will never work for you. Cars, companies, even votes – all these things you may be able to buy, but respect is something you have to earn, and if you’re not ready to do that, any platform built around social participation will keep on evolving to be out of reach.
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