Social Media Musical Chairs - and Karl Marx

When does the music stop? (Source: here)

I just left Threads. I left Twitter some months ago. Now I am on Bluesky. Both Twitter and Threads manipulate and misinform in the service of the Far-Right. I will remain on Bluesky as long as the platform remains manipulation-free.

As a former economic and political analyst, I am a huge fan of social media. Not the kind, where you post pictures of what you eat for lunch or submit clips of your latest dance moves (although I am told my dance moves are glorious). Rather, I relish social media news feeds, because they allow me to keep track of everything happening in the world extremely efficiently. I can choose my news outlets, be they newspapers, TV stations, press agencies or other feeds. I have access to media from all over the world. And it is free. I can also follow pundits, whose views I find enlightening. I can even take delight in spilling my own brand of bile (love) whenever I find something worth of derision (praise).

Why, then, the social media musical chairs? Why not just keep all of the platforms open and widen my sources as much as possible?

Sadly, it is not as simple as that. Many of the best-known media platforms are now grossly manipulated, meaning they control what we see and what gets shown. This runs counter to the original idea behind social media that it should be a place, where everyone can air their views unimpeded. They still can, in a sense, but algorithms buried within some of the platforms now filter the messages to as to assign priority to some messages over others. What we see on the platforms are not the fair and unbiased views of The Great Unwashed, but rather what the owners of the platforms want us to see, and in which order.

Elon Musk is the greatest and most gratuitous manipulator of them all. And all his manipulation is done in the service of a Far-Right political agenda. After he bought Twitter (now X), Elon Musk deliberately set out to turn X into a platform for spreading disinformation and promoting Far-Right politicians (like Trump). He has also allowed countless Far-Right bots to populate the platform in order to swarm-like attack free thinkers whenever they dare to utter opinions contrary to Musk's own fascist views.

It was for these reasons I left X some months ago and headed over to Threads. Threads is a social media platform similar to X, which is owned and operated by Instagram, which is part of Zuckerberg's Meta monopoly.

Unfortunately, it is now clear that Threads has also become heavily manipulated. As this article from The Guardian explains, Meta has introduced filters within Threads, which automatically downgrade stories with negative views about Trump and give lower prominence to threads that encourage, say, voting in elections (knowing this will help to discourage voting among the young, who are less inclined to support the Far Right).

I shut my Threads account this morning. There is no way that I am going to support a platform that expressly manipulates in the interest of the Far Right. My new social media home, for now, is Bluesky, where my handle is @jandehn.bsky.social.

Bluesky was set up by Jack Dorsey, the former boss of Twitter, who designed Bluesky to be a decentralised, open-source alternative to the big social media platforms. Unfortunately, Dorsey soon turned to the Dark Side, but thankfully he left Bluesky, which is now run by Jay Garber. Garber, a woman, happens to be a specialist in decentralised technologies, alternative banking, and digital currencies. She is a vocal opponent of Big Tech. This all sounds absolutely fine to me. Let us hope she does not turn to the Dark Side as well.

Call me naive, but I believe there will always be a market for platforms, which do not manipulate members' messages. A lot of people seem to be willing to move when they develop misgivings about a platform. Bluesky currently has over 22.1 million users, having gained more than 5 million since the US presidential election. People, such as undersigned, may have to continue to do the musical chairs thing, but as long as we can get information in one platform or another we will be OK.

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Let me finish this post with some broader context to underline the importance of what is happening on the social media platforms. Bear with me, because we need to go all the way back to Karl Marx!

As an economist, I was never a great fan of Marx. While I characterise myself as Left-leaning - with an anarchistic twist - I have always had great faith in markets, despite their many imperfections. Competition, combined with effective government regulation, should, surely, be sufficient safeguard against Marx's most unsettling prediction that the end-stage of capitalism is monopoly.

For many years, I felt vindicated in being sceptical about Marx, because the mixed economies of Europe and the United States delivered great advances for workers in the post-World War II era, including higher wages, rising levels of education, and gains in productivity. These developments run directly counter to Marx's prediction of ever-worsening impoverishment for workers.

Yet, in the last decade or so there have been worrying signs that Marx may have been onto something after all.

For one, income inequality has sky-rocketed in Western economies. Not only have the poor been getting poorer, the rich have also been getting richer, much richer. And with their increase in wealth, the rich have gained political influence.

There are two reasons for rising inequality in Western economies, which I have written about extensively in my blogs. The first is the Faustian Bargain that was struck between the middle class and Western governments, which led to erosion in public services (in exchange for middle class tax cuts). The erosion of public services disproportionately hurt the poorest groups, causing them to fall behind.

The second factor that contributed to rising inequality was the utter failure of regulators to apply anti-trust legislation to an increasingly monopolistic digital industry. This failure is the reason we now have super-powerful global-scale monopolists like Zuckerberg at Meta, Bezos at Amazon, and Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors. Google and Apple have also been allowed to grow into monster-companies, whose influences are far greater than what is healthy, not least because they stifle all competition. The owners of these monopolies are grotesque rich; the top 1% of earners in the world today own 43% of all wealth.

What I find particularly concerning is that the monopolists are now so wealthy and powerful that they are making incursions into the heart of politics, either directly as Elon Musk has done, or indirectly like Mark Zuckerberg, who permits his social media platforms to be used by politicians. The big risk here is 'state capture', which is where rich and powerful interest groups gain control of - and use for their own ends - state power. If and when this happens, it is difficult to see how anything other than a violent revolution can undo the damage.

Just as Karl Marx said.

The End