Will Abuse Destroy Social Media?

I don’t know that Twitter is dying exactly and certainly social media as a whole isn’t dying. But the inability and utter unwillingness of the designers of social media or executives of social media companies to take abuse and cyberbullying seriously–or to take actual human emotion and desire seriously in many cases–certainly challenges the viability of some of these companies because people will stop using products they find unpleasant. The obvious answer is for Twitter and other tech companies to hire people who work on these issues. Google already hires psychologists to understand its audiences for instance; hiring similar experts on abuse issues would do social media companies a lot of good. But the culture of these companies is very much not set up to care about these issues, preferring to isolate these issues while focusing on business models that don’t have to take people seriously.

As we host one of the only good commenting communities left on the internet, I feel like we are a last bastion of conversation. But given the overall tone of comment sections, what Michelle Malkin’s flying monkeys do on Twitter, all the MRA and Gamergate stuff, etc., that most of us would be better off personally shutting off social media entirely. That would be too bad I think but it would certainly make some rational sense to isolate yourself from awful people.