Is social media good or bad for us? Yes.

Each new communications medium — writing, newspapers, radio, television — has both created essential progress and posed new and potentially harmful challenges to society.

The fundamental lesson we need to learn from our history is not that we should halt or reverse innovation, but rather that we need to evolve new technology and its interface with society. Each time in the past that we have invented such technology, we have found new and unique solutions to manage that emerging communications medium to help us create a stronger, better society.

The Challenge of Social Media

Today, that emerging communications medium is social media. Social media connects us, and that has both positive and negative consequences. It surfaces our conflicts and allegiances — both for better and worse. In order to achieve positive progress, we need to shape the evolution of the technology and how we use it rather than simply attempting to restrict it with broad regulation.

For example, in the past few years since Brexit, the US election, and other world-shaping events, people have argued that tech platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube contribute to political turmoil throughout the world. In the United States, progressives argue that a reality television star wouldn't have been elected president without Russian interference on those platforms, stoking calls for antitrust action to break them up. One intelligent call that I disagree with is Tim Wu and his new book “Curse of Bigness.” Conservatives counter that these same social platforms are silencing conservative voices and call for government regulation to ensure that their opinions are heard. Caught in between, social media companies try to constructively engage with both the “right” and the “left” domestically while rooting out foreign influences from antagonistic nations like Russia and Iran. Both of the political perspectives above overlook the underlying problem: We haven't agreed on a set of goals for how social media should impact civil society.

Our polarized environment encourages — and amplifies — partisan conflicts, and this inhibits social progress. We need to collectively debate and then decide how the concepts of free speech and dialogue should evolve and adapt to new technologies like social media. For example, how do we distinguish between opinions that we disagree with, and factually false statements? Simply treating every contrary opinion as “fake news” is a denial of reality, and prevents any possibilities of mutual discovery of truth and agreement. Thus, broad use of the label “fake news” prevents any progress in our discourse. On the other hand, making a false statement usually isn't deemed a crime, which means that we have to make cultural and societal decisions about how to deal with such actions. To do this, we need dialog and reasoning rather than simply shouting into the Twitter void. Until we collectively reconcile these fundamental issues, calling for hasty action is just political posturing to score #trending points or clickbait to drive pageviews. What these flames of outrage generally accomplish is setting our own house on fire.

In my new book, Blitzscaling, I describe the process by which the fastest-moving, most adaptive startups grow into enduring market leaders, and argue for the economic and social benefits of rapid scaling. Scale has trade-offs and negatives, but these are generally heavily outweighed by its benefits and positives, such as innovative products, lower costs, jobs in new industries and — with regard to social media specifically — massively increased communications and information sharing across society. Simply arguing that “big is bad” and “small is good” is catchy but unhelpful. Critics of scale should point to specific problems and solutions, while supporters of scale should point to specific benefits.

While blitzscaling as a strategy is relevant across industries and geographies, it's hard to talk about blitzscaling without also talking about about the current state of social tech companies like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. For example, some have argued that successful blitzscaling has made Facebook too big, and that we would be better off if the company were broken up into multiple companies, or if the social media landscape had evolved to feature a larger number of smaller social networks instead.

This argument comes in response to real world problems. In the past few years, we have seen antagonistic nation states abuse these platforms to interfere with US and other democratic elections. Domestically, everyone from passionate activists to partisan fame seekers have used these platforms to rally one group, attack another, or both, often with little regard for civility. We are still living with the consequences of this abuse today.

But there are a couple of serious problems with this argument. First, it's not Facebook's size that caused the issues. Size makes a platform attractive to hackers, but it also gives that platform more resources to defend itself. If there were, say, five smaller social networks in place of Facebook, that would probably make the situation far worse, because each would be more vulnerable to attack, and when serious problems arose, it would be harder to track down the bad behavior and figure out how to thwart it. During the past few years, significant political manipulation by foreign operatives occurred in smaller networks like 4Chan as well. Bigness didn't cause that manipulation, and reducing bigness wouldn't have prevented it. Also, it still wouldn't solve the problem of providing a space where people with different opinions could constructively debate various points of view.

Furthermore, restricting the growth of US companies will not and does not restrict the growth of companies in other nations. Consider what would have happened if the leading social network in the United States was the China-based WeChat instead of US-based Facebook or Twitter. Investigating and responding to foreign manipulation would be much more difficult — if not impossible — if the platform in question wasn't operated by an American company. It is substantially more difficult to enforce American laws and cultural norms when a company's primary operations are an ocean away.

There are certainly situations when big is bad. The AT&T monopoly on telephony hampered technological innovation for decades. Without a breakup, we might still be paying $1 per minute to make long-distance calls on our landline phones, rather than connecting with anyone in the world, anytime, using iPhones or Android devices. And growing big does create a greater moral obligation to consider the consequences of a company's behavior; massive scale increases potential negative and positive impact. It's precisely this reason that social media companies should have taken the threat of political manipulation more seriously, more quickly. But I believe that the instances of “big is bad” are substantially outweighed by the instances of “big is good”. The key objective is limiting the problems that come with scale while accelerating the benefits.

Evolving Our Norms, Institutions and Rules

A step change in technology requires a step change in our approach to managing its effects. Instead of proposing to restrict company size or slow feature development, we need to ask, “How do we allow companies to operate a viable business, protect the privacy and personal data of consumers, and make social media a more welcoming place for different opinions and constructive debate?” As we think of potential solutions, we can enter into dialogue with companies like Facebook and Twitter to run experiments and refine those fixes. For example, if we set out to make social media a more welcoming place for different opinions, what would the dashboard for that intervention look like? Would it measure the prevalence of different voices? Would it provide a fact-checking index or score for every news source or article? Those are the kinds of decisions that should be openly discussed and debated. Facebook and others have experimented with early versions of these, and I believe that further iteration and improvement is important. Once the key attributes of a dashboard are agreed upon — through dialogue that represents the breadth and diversity of our society — then questions like “does this require regulation?” can be addressed.

We can never completely eliminate all harm — a rhetorical and useless goal — but we can work with social media companies to both minimize the harm from these attacks and maximize the benefits of this new medium, to create a strong net positive. Together, as a country, we have decided to adopt laws to discourage libel and hate speech. These don’t tell us what to say, but they do inform the words we choose. We set up intelligence agencies to monitor the activities of unfriendly nations, and to defend our infrastructure, including social media companies, against their attacks.

We now need to figure out how to evolve our norms, institutions, and rules for the new media. Market forces do help with this task, as companies in competitive environments respond to customer preferences over time. There will be some new challenges in scale companies with network effects. For example, if a small number of tech companies provide the primary medium of communication and information exchange, then how does the public establish trust with the governance and leadership of that company? Some react immediately to suggest government regulators — but I think that intentional transparency and dialog can establish much better trust both now and in the future than new government bureaucracies. Put another way: would you rather have congress legislating the future shape of technology implemented by an agency, or market forces together with public transparency and discussion?

Social networks, like all new communications mediums, have tremendous potential for good. We shouldn't forget how much these platforms have enriched our lives by allowing us to stay in touch with or reconnect with family and friends. They have also become a powerful platform for connecting with strangers to make an impact in the world. As one example amongst millions, in May of this year, an ordinary couple, Charlotte and Dave Willner, launched a Facebook crowdfunding campaign that raised over $20 million to help the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) to help reunite families being separated at the US-Mexico border. Or consider how Facebook has helped build communities for groups like cancer survivors or parents of autistic children to support each other.

No question, foreign hacking of social media is objectively bad. Yes, isolating ourselves in groups where we only talk with the like-minded is damaging for democracy — but note significantly that this “filter bubble” is not unique to social media: consider talk radio, cable news, and local media monopolies like Sinclair Communications. Yes, sharing information without some reasonable commitments to truth creates many problems. But the solution to these challenges isn't to shut down or dramatically slow the development of the medium. Both individual citizens and their elected representatives should be part of a dialogue about these issues and agree on a set of goals and how to measure our progress towards them. Only then should we discuss how we implement those goals with mechanisms that could range on a continuum from self-regulation and voluntary action, to new federal regulation, to new laws.

Fulfilling the Original Promise of Social Media

Let's remember the original vision of social media: An open society where people are more connected, and where diverse voices can be heard. Early social media was like this: suddenly many people were finding a space to speak in a new open land. Now that land has become a massive city, and so realizing that vision will take more hard work. We will need to make conscious, long-term decisions about how we — individually and collectively — ask the technology companies that operate our social media platforms to encourage truth and civil engagement, while defending us against foreign interference and domestic trolling. This will be a long and never-ending process; Americans have been wrestling with the role of various forms of media since the days we were a British colony. We have successfully integrated each previous example of “new media” into our civil society. While individuals, organizations, and governments still find fault with newspapers, radio, and television, they have long functioned as an integral part of American life — because they improve it. Social media is no different, and I believe that the increased connection and freedom of expression it ultimately brings will be worth the cost and messiness of devising new norms and policies.