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Social media have taken a beating lately. The gloss has worn off the large companies that dominate the sector, and with it much of the internet. Facebook, Google, and Twitter, among others, have all been subjected to intense scrutiny because of the negative externalities that their services create. A focus of concern has been the abuse of social-media channels as part of efforts to influence the outcome of major political events, including the June 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the U.S. presidential election later that year. In both cases, studies and intelligence reports show, nation-states and nonstate actors alike exploited, manipulated, and abused social media as a tool of their "information operations." The role that social-media analytics firms played in these events was especially pronounced.1
The situation presents a striking contrast both to the ways in which social-media platforms present themselves, and to how they have been widely perceived in the digital age. Once it was conventional wisdom to assume that these platforms would enable greater access to information, facilitate collective organizing, and empower civil society. Now, they are increasingly seen as contributing to society's ills. Growing numbers of people are coming to believe that social media have too much influence on important social and political conversations.2 Others are beginning to notice that we are spending unhealthy amounts of time staring at our devices, "socializing" online while in fact cut off from one another and from nature.
As a result of this growing unease, there are pushes to regulate social-media companies in ways that will encourage them to be better stewards of their platforms, to respect privacy, and to acknowledge the role of human rights. A prerequisite of any such regulation, however, is a shared understanding of what is wrong in the first place.
Increasingly, scholars and the public at large are coming to agree about what I call "three painful truths" concerning social media: 1) that the social-media business model is based on deep and relentless surveillance of consumers' personal data in order to target advertisements; 2) that we permit this staggering level of surveillance willingly, if not altogether wittingly; and 3) that social media are far from incompatible with authoritarianism, and indeed are proving to be among its...