The New Information World Order

Meta has decided to launch its own social media app in a direct challenge to Twitter. The WSJ writes: “Let the battle begin. Facebook parent Meta Platforms on Wednesday announced the launch of Threads, a stand-alone microblogging app that takes direct aim at Twitter as user unrest in that platform has grown since Elon Musk took the company over in October.”

The rise of social media as a news source and opinion shaper is eating away at the influence of traditional media platforms. Fewer people, mostly oldsters, still watch TV. Already, “almost half of Americans use social media as a news source, according to the Pew Research Center.” With the 2024 elections right around the corner, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter cannot go unanswered.

But the phenomenon is larger than just confirming the increasing importance of social media for news. Many separate pieces are moving toward what might be called a new information system that will have far more potential impact than the old tube. Social media, AI and even crypto are converging in as yet poorly understood ways to comprise an emerging environment that will come to provide:

1. recommended content, as vetted by fact-checkers;
2. sentiment analysis, which identifies the emotional tone behind a body of text;
3. automated moderation, to create a safer online experience;
4. creation of filter bubbles, so individuals are grouped with users whose content aligns with positive beliefs and interests;
5. data capture as training material for machine content creation;
6. protection from misinformation and algorithmic bias;
7. virtual consensus.

Of course, it will all be tied together by artificial intelligence. It will be a whole new world and the big players know it. Meta’s entry into the fray only underscores how important it’s become.

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Musk’s much-criticized limits on “extreme data scraping” on Twitter can be seen as a defensive move to prevent bots from obtaining sentiment analysis and data capture by free-riding on his platform. Data scraping involves pulling information out of a website and into a data store. A dedicated data scraper analyzes information someone else has gathered, and Musk is unwilling to give it to his competitors for free.

But Elon will need more than defense. In the coming contest, Zuckerberg may have one key advantage if his artificial intelligence investments prove able to create a social media metaverse. “One way to think about the metaverse is as an amalgamation of gaming, productivity tools, e-commerce, and extended reality (XR) – which includes both virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (ARAR 0.0%) and, of course, social media.” One way to appreciate the difference is that while an older generation watched TV, the plan is for you to live in Threads.

In a way, the Twitter vs Threads development is good news. It’s an Alien vs Predator universe. The founders knew it and hence relied on checks and balances. “In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects. The degree of security in both cases will depend on the number of interests and sects.”

Checks and balances mean conflict and only provide the possibility of freedom, not its assurance. Today there are two kinds of people. Those who say, “I give up because life is absurd and meaningless and there’s no fighting Skynet,” and those who say, “Lord, if my time has come, let me die in a pile of empty digital brass.” And so it has ever been.