Frank is going to say something that will make people on both sides uncomfortable, which Frank has found is usually a sign he is onto something.
Social media did not do this to us. We did this to us. Social media just handed us the shovel and we dug enthusiastically.
Frank has watched the debate about social media for fifteen years. He has watched politicians who cannot figure out how to attach a PDF to an email hold hearings about algorithm transparency. He has watched people blame platforms for content that real human beings created, shared, liked, and spread to their own networks voluntarily. He has watched an entire culture decide that the solution to people saying things they disagree with is to make it harder for people to say things, and Frank has some thoughts about where that road goes because the Founders already mapped it out and it does not end well.
What social media actually did.
Social media did not make people hateful. It made hate more visible and more efficient.
Social media did not make people tribal. It made tribes easier to find and harder to leave.
Social media did not shorten attention spans. Television was already doing that. Social media just finished the job.
What social media actually did, the thing Frank thinks about, is remove the friction from communication. And friction, it turns out, was doing a lot of work we did not appreciate until it was gone.
When you had to write a letter, address it, stamp it, and mail it, you had time to reconsider. When you had to call someone on the phone you had to hear their voice and they had to hear yours and something about that humanized the exchange. When you had to say something to someone's face you had to live with the immediate consequence of their reaction.
None of that friction exists anymore. You can be as cruel as you want to as many people as you want from the safety of a screen and the worst that happens is a reply you can mute. Frank does not think this has made us better at communicating. Frank thinks it has made us worse at being humans.
The algorithm is not your friend.
Frank wants to be specific about something because it matters and most people do not understand it.
The algorithm is not showing you what is true. The algorithm is not showing you what is important. The algorithm is showing you what will keep you on the platform the longest because the longer you stay the more ads you see and the more money the platform makes.
What keeps you on the platform the longest is not information. It is emotion. Specifically it is outrage, fear, and the intoxicating feeling of being right while watching someone else be wrong.
So the algorithm feeds you outrage. It feeds you fear. It curates a version of reality specifically designed to make you feel that things are worse than they are and that the people on the other side are stupider and more dangerous than they are. Because that keeps you scrolling. That keeps you engaged. That keeps you generating revenue for a company that has no interest in your emotional wellbeing or your accurate understanding of the world.
Frank is not saying delete everything. Frank is saying understand what you are dealing with before you let it tell you what to think about your country and your neighbors.
The First Amendment question nobody wants to answer honestly.
Frank believes in the First Amendment. Not the bumper sticker version. The actual amendment, which protects speech from government suppression specifically because the Founders understood that governments always want to control what people say and democracies die when they succeed.
Private companies are not the government. They can set their own rules. Frank understands this.
What Frank finds interesting is watching politicians from both parties decide that the solution to speech they dislike is to pressure private companies to suppress it, which accomplishes the same result as government censorship while maintaining technical plausibility that it is not.
Frank finds this creative. Frank does not find it constitutional in spirit. Frank thinks the Founders would have had some words about it, and those words would not have been suitable for a family publication.
What Frank actually does.
Frank uses social media. Frank is not a hypocrite about this. Frank posts things and people respond and sometimes the responses are interesting and sometimes they are evidence of everything Frank is talking about.
What Frank does not do is let it be his primary source of information about the world. What Frank does not do is mistake volume for truth or engagement for importance. What Frank does not do is assume that the people who disagree with him are evil rather than wrong.
Wrong Frank can work with. Wrong Frank can have a conversation about. Evil ends the conversation before it starts and the algorithm loves ending conversations before they start because a conversation that reaches a conclusion stops generating engagement.
Frank wants more conversations that reach conclusions. That is why Frank built this site instead of just posting on a platform that profits from the conversation never ending.
Read the document. Then come back and talk to Frank about it.
— Frank