April’s Fools Day seemed to come early this year, as the annual gathering of Bond villains in the ski resort of Davos proffered the announcement that the EU is planning to launch its own competitor to X (formerly Twitter), imaginatively entitled W. Naming your social media platform after the letter that comes immediately before X in the alphabet, as if that would automatically make it better, is one of those bountiful acts of stupidity that seem to infest the corporate management of social media, rather like creating your own personal social media platform where you can mouth off in SHOUTY ALL CAPS without getting banned.
The announcement of W has barely been reported in the news—a rare case of contemporary journalists showing good judgement. W is designed to provide Europeans a terrible alternative to other terrible forms of social media. With the EU flirting with banning X outright, since they don’t like the mean (and occasionally factual) things that are posted there, W provides them with an alternative platform, just as Trump’s Truth Social also offered a stupidly named alternative to X’s predecessor, Twitter, although in both cases with even less appeal than Twitter/X.
With the EU flirting with banning X outright, since they don’t like the mean (and occasionally factual) things that are posted there, W provides them with an alternative platform.
W’s CEO Anna Zeiter (formerly of eBay) hilariously announced that “there is an urgent need for a new social media platform built, governed, and hosted in Europe. With human verification, free speech, and data privacy at its core”—as if the EU had any concept of free speech worth defending! I won’t recite anecdotes about, for instance, the marvellous freedom of expression enjoyed in Germany right now, where posting wrongthink online—even in private message channels—will get you a visit from the wrongthink police for “hate speech”. It’s perfectly clear already that EU “free speech” describes that set of statements left over after all “hate speech” is removed, while “hate speech” is defined as “anything we don’t want to hear”, which is shading towards being just about everything.
Surely anybody reading about the new platform’s “stricter privacy and data protection standards” assumes that the EU intends to ban (and quite possibly prosecute) anybody who posts scandalous statements of the kind that would have also earned you a ban on pre-Musk Twitter. And who wouldn’t be thrilled at the opportunity to produce a photo ID in order to register to post on the platform?—nothing says privacy like providing a paper trail to your front door so the Wrongthink Police know exactly where to find you. Why, I’m sure people will be queuing up to exercise the kind of free speech the EU is imagining will take place on W!
Surely anybody reading about the new platform’s “stricter privacy and data protection standards” assumes that the EU intends to ban (and quite possibly prosecute) anybody who posts scandalous statements of the kind that would have also earned you a ban on pre-Musk Twitter.
Zeiter’s remark that “across Europe and beyond, systemic disinformation is eroding public trust and weakening democratic decision-making” hit the nail rather too amusingly on the head. But you’d have to be a mooncalf not to think that the chief problem in this regard wasn’t the European Union itself. To take one small example, consider the European Medical Agency’s page on the failed SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidates, which opens with the ludicrous suggestion that “COVID-19 vaccines work and they are safe” (Well, I suppose it’s nice to see a paraphrase of “safe and effective” once in a while). This is one of those claims that is certainly true only if you ignore all the evidence, such as the recent meta-analysis linking these failed vaccines to increased rates of cancer, or the German study suggesting these biologics reduced protection from SARS-CoV-2 infections while increasing the rate of dying from this virus, and let’s not forget the dead children, as a leaked memo from the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) in the US recently drew attention to, while being roundly dismissed for all sorts of reasons all of which boil down to “nyar nyar nyar not listening”.
It’s becoming passé to evoke Hannah Arendt these days, but it’s hard to escape her relevance to the situations we are now facing internationally. It’s often forgotten that when she talked about “mass society”, this was not an inherently totalitarian phenomenon. Rather mass society represents for Arendt a stepping stone towards a totalitarian regime. Her concerns revolved around the replacement of the common world of political equals with the equality of mere conformism. Society was here a substitute for political discourse, a “conformism which allows for only one interest and one opinion”, enforcing norms and opinions upon everyone who belongs to (or is trapped inside) that social space. Its scaled-up version imposes the restrictions of societal norms on an ever greater numbers of people. In the case of the EU, 450 million of them. Arendt wrote in 1948:
“With the emergence of mass society, the realm of the social has finally, after several centuries of development, reached the point where it embraces and controls all members of a given community equally and with equal strength. But society equalizes under all circumstances, and the victory of equality in the modern world is only the political and legal recognition of the fact that society has conquered the public realm, and that distinction and difference have become private matters of the individual.”
What obfuscates the rise of mass society is the framework that pulls it all together. Chantal Mouffe’s “paradox of democracy” foregrounded the fact that “liberal democracy” is an oxymoron. The liberal tradition is allied to the universality of the human, and hence the now-corrupted logic of “human rights”, that—like so many things that started out with Kant’s astute insights and ideals—gradually devolved into oppression dressed up as righteousness.
However, converse to the universality of “liberal”, the concept of democracy (as both Arendt and Mouffe understood) is wed to a particular set of people to whom its decisions and principles are to be applied. Once you think that “our democracy” describes the rules which humans must obey, and not the process by which a group of people decide how to live together, you’re well onto the route towards a tyrannical mass society that is helpfully concealed under its “kindness” (that is, the resolute “hatred of haters”), no matter how draconian its edicts happen to become.
Once you think that “our democracy” describes the rules which humans must obey, and not the process by which a group of people decide how to live together, you’re well onto the route towards a tyrannical mass society that is helpfully concealed under its “kindness” (that is, the resolute “hatred of haters”), no matter how draconian its edicts happen to become.
Liberalism versus democracy is a stellar way of understanding the current battleground between so-called “populists”, who have a sense of a nation that they wish to “preserve” (a rather ghoulish term: one thinks of pickling in formaldehyde rather than sustaining traditions) and the ever-more-transnational mythology of “our democracy”, which might be better referred to as “our technocracy” (Arendt might have said “our bureaucracy”), since “democratic” in this context means solely “enforcing what we know is true and right”. The mass society of “humanity” becomes the grim alternative to good ol’ “blood and soil” nation-states. As Arendt warned: “large numbers of people, crowded together, develop an almost irresistible inclination toward despotism, be this the despotism of a person or of majority rule”. None of this is to knock either the liberal tradition or democracy, both of which I greatly value – it is merely to point out that the collision of these two traditions creates an inescapable conflict, which we are now seeing played out in ways that are neither liberal nor democratic.
I shall not be signing up to join W, any more than I was champing at the bit to join the daily struggle session that is BlueSky, or for that matter Facebook, which has always terrified me. It’s bad enough that I visit X once a month. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that these allegedly “social” media technologies have provided an all too effective means of cultivating Arendt’s mass society, a space of non-discourse where, by banning those who disagree (or in the case of new X, tucking away into a quiet corner those miscreants who say things that are “lawful but awful”), one creates a glorious but entirely disingenuous impression of uniformity of opinion. Indeed from the moment social media corporations decided to algorithmically curate who gets attention, it became problematic to suggest these platforms could constitute the “public square”. All this grimly echoes Arendt’s repeated concerns about the erosion of the public sphere, where people can speak and act as equals, a concern which predates the internet by decades.
The sad truth of the matter is that democracy, much like the sciences, requires disagreement to function. If we cannot air our disagreements, we shall never understand who we are living with, much less resolve our differences amicably. There’s no doubt that the EU is extremely keen to maintain its control over speech, because nasty folks who say mean things about politicians, rapists and murderers aren’t fit to belong to the kind society. Predicting the failure of W is all too easy. The harder challenge is appreciating why global-scale communications systems cannot possibly provide adequate public squares for any kind of democracy worth having.
