Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Opinion columnist

Is social media a threat, or a menace? That seems to be the question many are asking today. Where just a few years ago, companies like Facebook or Google were seen as white knights of progress, now there seems to be a lot more skepticism about their effects and their intentions.

I saw this firsthand last week when I spoke at a conference on free speech and social media at Stanford Law School, where I talked about my new book, "The Social Media Upheaval." As I discuss in my book, the rise of social media has brought about a lot of change, and much of it isn’t appreciated.

In the book, I note that although our society generally supports free speech quite strongly, we do regulate speech that is too dangerous — like incitement to riot — or speech that is false and defamatory, and we often regulate things that are addictive, or invasions of privacy. Social media tends to have all of those characteristics to varying degrees. Some of that is because of how it is structured.

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In the days of the old blogosphere, when people expressed views on their own personal blogs, scattered across many different servers and platforms, other blogs might pick them up. But each time that happened, it took a conscious decision, and at least some degree of thought, to compose and publish a blog post, and bloggers who published links to stories or posts found elsewhere often encouraged readers to “read the whole thing.” On social media, a “share” or “retweet” takes but a second, and research indicates that most people never read anything but the headline before sharing. This facilitates the rapid spread of outrage mobs, conspiracy theories and hysteria.

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Things are made worse by the fact that social media sites operate under algorithms that promote “engagement,” which generally means emotion. And because, as tech visionary Jaron Lanier has written, the easiest emotions to engage are the negative emotions, the effect of social media platforms’ algorithms is to amplify negative feelings. The more you use them, the angrier and sadder you’re likely to become. (And they’re quite consciously designed to be addictive.)

At the same time, unlike the old blogosphere with its many independent platforms, social media sites have a common platform. Censoring the old blogosphere was impossible; censoring social media is possible, which means that social media companies face demands to do so.

Thus today’s social media world tends to give us the worst possible outcome: lots of angry, ill-informed speech, coupled with censorship of things that the platform owners don’t like or are pressured into killing. Add to that a tremendous loss of privacy as platforms monetize people’s personal data, and it’s easy to see why the tech giants aren’t as popular as they once were.

In fact if I were Facebook, et al., I’d be particularly worried by something I noticed at the conference: Both left- and right-leaning speakers don’t like them and want them brought under control.

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The most popular solution on both the left and the right is using antitrust law to break them up. In a recent book on antitrust law, "The Curse of Bigness," Columbia Law professor Tim Wu also argues for this response to Big Tech. When President Teddy Roosevelt tackled behemoths like Standard Oil, he dealt with companies that became huge and rich in business, and then used their wealth to purchase political influence. Today’s Big Tech has more power than that, because its monopolies stand astride political discourse: Companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter control the very channels through which people get their news and organize to act politically. That’s more of a threat to democracy than anything John D. Rockefeller possessed.

As Wu writes: “Big tech is ubiquitous, seems to know too much about us, and seems to have too much power over what we see, hear, do and even feel. It has reignited debates over who really rules, when the decisions of just a few people have great influence over everyone.”

Judging by what I saw at Stanford last week, the debate is widening and more people are unhappy. Big Tech should be worried.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of "The Social Media Upheaval," is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.