Andrew Marantz:

Yes, that's not a good party. You want to sort of let everything fly.

And you also want to be pure and ideologically consistent as the host of a party. And the easiest way to be consistent is to basically do nothing. And so a lot of these platforms started out as techno-libertarian, techno-utopian, sort of just saying, we're not going to police anything anybody does.

If we get told of specific lawbreaking, then maybe we will take that under control, but anything else, we're just sort of going to let it ride.

And the reason that I call them techno-utopians is, there was this built-in assumption, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, that that would ultimately redound to the good, that the arc of history would naturally automatically bend toward justice, the more speech, the better.

And in some cases, that was true. There were lots of useful social movements that were sparked and helped along by social media. But there was also an antisocial side, to quote the title, along with the pro-social side.

And there was just this halo effect where, for the first 10 years or so, people didn't seem to talk about the antisocial side of the social media atmosphere very much.