@JenniferSlack It does not. A tool is animated by the user's intentions. tools function within contexts and contexts are supplied by the cultures that produced them.

We disavow social media platforms as public squares because the implications of such a view are not great. I've spoken of this elsewhere, but a similar phenomena happens with treating social media as the source of our contemporary social ills: it literally elides the fact that we've been living in a dream world.

By this I mean, we assumed that we were a civil society with mutual respect, but what social media has revealed is that this is not the case, that this is far from the case.

And so treating social media as causal, or the reason why there is much social unrest or discord allows us to conveniently forget that there are monsters among us who would gleefully do us harm, strip us of our rights, if they had the opportunity.

Sure, social media might radicalize some people, but realistically what it does is provide a means for a convenient oppressive narrative to take root in someone looking to make sense of the world.

Social media didn't cause this: it was USED as a tool to circulate a narrative. Persons caused this.

That's what I mean by people treating social media as if it has agency. And I swear, if someone quotes McLuhan's "medium is the message" at me ONE MORE TIME.

Whole bunch of people in my mentions upset about me pushing back on social media "causing" something to happen.

Y'all are missing the point.

It is the attribution of agency to social media that I'm worried about. This isn't something that is unique to my undergrads, but runs through Congressional hearings on social media.

Whenever someone says "social media" is ruining something, this elides that people are using social media TO DO something, rather than social media acting independently.

Now, there might be an argument that people are using "social media" in an aggregate sense, to refer to a phenomena, much in the same way that we use "the people" to refer to an aggregate phenomena. I'd take this argument if and only if the public discourse about social media tends to treat it as ontologically separate from the humans that use it, whose aims it amplifies, and whose agendas it aligns with.

Put another way, when I describe students are treating social media as "causal," I'm describing a phenomena where students REMOVE or IGNORE the role the user plays in how social media effects society. That is, they refuse to acknowledge the continuity of user and platform.

I'm describing a phenomena where social media is the culprit in our social ills, a malicious phenomena that has made possible a variety of crises, rather than persons making possible a crisis through the platform.

Analogously: it would be as if we blamed cars for impaired driving, rather than blaming the driver.

This is the phenomena I'm trying to head off in my courses, and this is the phenomena that I am pointing to as a part of our public discourse about social media platforms. this phenomena is coextensive with the discourse of social media as "public square," which everyone disavows.

Which is important.