Friend group
After the 2016 U.S. election, amid accusations that social media had abetted foreign interference and the spread of "fake news," Facebook decided to pivot to "groups": "Our next focus will be developing the social infrastructure for community — for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all," the company announced in a February 2017 post signed by Mark Zuckerberg.
Presumably the rationale for this was to combat the isolating and decontextualizing tendencies of social media use; in practice, it meant recalibrating the platform so that users would be pressured to post in new ways, with more urgent and precise collective stakes than "What's on your mind?" Facebook systematically gave group content more reach and used algorithmic tools to herd people into groups of which 70% were ultimately deemed "nonrecommendable" by the company's own standards. In this Wall Street Journal report, Jeff Horowitz details how Facebook knew that its tools helped drive much of the growth in extremist groups and that groups amplified the spread of disinformation and generated "enthusiastic calls for violence everyday."
Facebook groups indeed became "social infrastructure for community" and encouraged "civic engagement" of a sort, with mostly antisocial results. The "community" it produced was not some simulacrum of romanticized small-town or neighborhood life but a kind of solidarity that knows itself mainly through intolerant zealotry.
Zuckerberg's 2017 post is full of examples that suggest that groups on Facebook would be drawn from or modeled after groups that already existed and were developed outside social media networks: "We can strengthen existing physical communities by helping people come together online as well as offline." But the pivot to groups meant emphasizing the formation of groups that were native to Facebook — that drafted on its affordances and adopted its incentives. It wasn't a matter of giving already existing groups from the world a Facebook equivalent and hub; it was a matter of generating groups that had explosive growth potential. And that potential could be found in positioning new groups against existing institutions, rejecting the compromises inherent in already developed communities, which wouldn't persist without them.
These groups born in and for social media then began to reshape the other, more conventional groups along the same lines, as though they too should be held together algorithmically, driven by engagement metrics rather than other forms of purpose. (Why make a nice comment that is ignored and won't be surfaced in other people's feeds, when you can make an outrageous comment that will garner lots of reach?) So rather than a diverse set of groups to meet a variety of social needs, Facebook drove the production of a single kind of group, committed to engagement at any cost.
This type of group has many faces: QAnon, Bitcoin hodl-ers, anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, militant fans of bands or video games or sports teams, or other media products, literal militias of white supremacists, Gamestop investors, and so on. What unites them is the recipe for engagement: an us-vs.-them mentality plus a high-stakes LARP narrative that requires constant posting, commenting, reacting, and upping the ante rhetorically and emotionally. The groups are brought into definition through sensationalism and reaction — all participation must be felt to be urgent, otherwise why bother — and then held together with ongoing loyalty tests and the invocation of powerful enemies. (Carl Schmitt could have been a social media manager.)
Those are likely the "values of social media" that Eric Levitz, in this postmortem on Gamestop and "meme populism," has in mind here:
If the left can benefit from engaging trending news stories, so as to remake them in its own image, there is also a risk that chronic immersion in such stories will have the opposite effect: Instead of imbuing social-media uproars with the values of the left, the left may find itself imbued with the values of social media.
That warning may hold true not just for leftist groups but any group, no matter how benign or apolitical they might set out to be.
Facebook and other platforms are now promising to stop recommending "political" groups to users, as if there were some hard and fast way of determining what is and isn't political, as if groups don't become more explicitly political over time or aren't riven by their own specific internal politics. Moreover, everything is already political when you are instigated to compete for the limited resource of other people's attention and recognition. The politics isn't just in the content of groups; it's in the way platforms are designed to function.
Social media don't have to be structured as an attention competition. The "values of social media" could be as varied as the many different ways people choose to associate. But the values of commercial, ad-driven social media will always tend to be the same. Their values (growth, engagement) get translated at the level of individual groups into a relentless drive to recruit more people, which is why many groups eventually assume the form of multi-level marketing. This has been most explicit in the pump-and-dump Ponzi schemes revolving around junk stocks and cryptocurrencies — "I need you to think this is valuable so that its value becomes real for me" — but it also holds true for other forms of commitment. "I need you to buy in and believe, so I don't feel bad or stupid or evil for already believing myself" has become a more palpable form of solidarity across many "communities"; the more extreme or alienating the belief is to others, the more this effect feeds back into itself. It spirals all the way down the drain.