People who argue for its value mostly point to the fact that grandma can see pictures of the kids and other pedestrian examples of things that were just as feasible over email/instant chat before planetary scale social networks.

At this point it’s becoming pretty clear that open by default social networks à la Twitter/Facebook are generally a bad thing for our societies.

The real issue is human nature. Social media is just a new medium that facilitates instant (and optionally public) communication but its still the same people at the end of the day. Email, chat and phone calls still have have vast amounts of scammers and propaganda and that will continue into any new comms that people use. There's no magic solution for that and never will be.

So is theft, murder, and the intentional infliction of pain for amusement. You can't dodge responsibility that way.

You're also ignoring several aspects that makes FB different in kind than a lot of what came before it. As but one example, they are the world's largest blackmail machine. Maybe you trust Zuckerberg & pals now, what happens when they're gone? When FB goes in to decline? When an internal threat hacks them? When Singapore or Russia or worse approaches FB systems folks with carrots and sticks? Has that happened already? How would we know?

I'm personally of the opinion that it was a terrible idea to build it in the first place.

Likewise social media is not just Facebook but a tool for communicating, and any use for good or evil is up to the individual. Facebook is also just one company and has at least a dozen major competitors. The companies will come and go but the tech is here to stay.

Mark Zuckerberg has long held the belief that a more connected world is a better world - and 10 years ago, I was as optimistic as he was. Today, I know for a fact that connecting my grandpa to people in Russia paid a few hundred dollars a month by activists to spread FUD is a terrible idea.

Yes, email, chat, IMs, etc are also being abused - but they all have a certain amount of friction and properties that put them nowhere near the kind of scales that social networks enable.

You can only have one phone conversation at a time due to the nature of the medium, and when it’s over, it’s over - whereas partaking in a Facebook/Twitter thread will feed you an addictive slow drip of notifications over the next few days. People don’t really get their news (in the formal sense) by phone conversations, so media companies aren’t incentivized to flood you with phone conversations about increasingly controversial topics to keep you engaged to generate ad dollars. Because phone conversations are real time and decentralized, no entity can prevent anyone from saying a certain word or mentioning a certain event for instance, the way social networks can and have.

Email is an interesting one - sure there’s spams and scams, but it’s fairly non instantaneous, and the decentralized aspect means that no single entity can choose what emails people will see. Email users also don’t expect their email server to be injecting content in their email queue, or reordering their emails to try to get them to read things that will generate dollars for them. It has its flaws, but people just don’t feel manipulated by their email as a medium (although of course individual emails can manipulate people) .

Social media is just the perfect storm of tapping into human compulsions, a product controlled by a single company which seeks to derive profit above all else, misaligned free market incentives between platforms, advertisers and consumers, etc. This all makes for formidably harmful forces, and responding to the fact that these social networks have determining roles in genocides with vague platitudes such as “but they enable people to find loved ones and report crimes” comes across as a tad disconnected.

And avoiding censorship? Facebook, Twitter, etc cooperate with governments to enable censorship! If you want to avoid censorship, you are much better served by the broader, open, decentralized internet.

In case it isn’t clear, I’m a huge fan of the internet, email, instant messaging, message boards, and so on. Social networks in their current incarnation though are a very destructive virus for human culture.

There's no use in trying to argue why something shouldn't be done when it inevitably will be and already has, what we need is to think of ways we can adapt as a species and society to handle it with the proper care and concern.

If Facebook needs to enjoy an AT&T style monopoly on connecting people, they need to submit to being under a regulatory thumb.

Instant feed-based communications with varying levels of follower/friendship levels is a new technology provided by many organizations. Some are massive monopolies and others are indie apps, it doesn't matter but the tech is not going away so yes, we the people will need to learn how to deal with it.

Unrestricted broadcast access was understood as a problem with radio 100 years ago. Society controlled that with a regulatory stick and will likely do so again.

If you're comparing to radio then it's back to talking about the medium instead of a specific company and the same fundamental problems are inherent in all of them because of the social feed concept allowing for instant communications spread through a graph of connections. We've never had this same model before. Radio had interference and physical limitations but digital networks allow ideas to spread with infinite capacity and following 1:1 conversations until they reach everyone.

Sure Facebook has made their own tweaks like every other network, and maybe regulation can solve some of those issues and get everyone to the same base utility, but that's going to be a very hard battle that's limited to certain regions and doesn't affect anything about the underlying communications concept.

We still need to learn to live with social media regardless of who is providing and in what variation.

After all, don’t people get enough value out of cigarettes to smoke millions of them every day?

...No offense to anyone's democratic beliefs.