Social Media

Social media are networked platforms on which users publish to an audience assembled by algorithm rather than by acquaintance. In two decades they have absorbed a large share of the functions once performed by the newspaper, the parish notice board, the pub argument, and the family dinner table, and they have done so under the ownership of a handful of firms whose revenue depends on the quantity of attention they capture.

The conservative assessment is divided in a way worth stating plainly. On the one hand these platforms broke a media monopoly that had excluded conservative opinion from national conversation for fifty years. On the other they corrode the settled loyalties, local attachments, and inherited manners that conservatism exists to defend. Both observations are correct, and the resulting argument on the right — between those who want the platforms treated as common carriers and those who want no state involvement at all — has yet to resolve.

Key Takeaways

• The commercial form dates from Six Degrees in 1997, Friendster in 2002, MySpace in 2003, Facebook in February 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, Instagram in 2010, and TikTok’s international launch in 2017.
• Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 shields platforms from liability for user content while permitting them to moderate, and this asymmetry is the central object of conservative legislative interest.
• Jonathan Haidt’s research programme attributes a sharp deterioration in adolescent mental health after 2012 to the arrival of the smartphone-based social platform.³
• In Moody v. NetChoice the United States Supreme Court vacated and remanded challenges to the Texas and Florida platform laws on 1 July 2024, while indicating that content moderation carries First Amendment protection.⁴
• The conservative critique predates the technology: Neil Postman argued in 1985 that a medium organised around entertainment reshapes public discourse regardless of what is said on it.¹

History And Context

The founding sequence is compressed. Six Degrees launched in 1997 with profiles and friend lists and closed in 2000. Friendster followed in 2002, MySpace in 2003. Facebook opened at Harvard in February 2004, spread through American universities, and admitted the general public in September 2006. YouTube launched in 2005 and Google bought it the following year. Twitter began in 2006 and established the short public broadcast as a political form. Instagram, founded in 2010, moved the centre of gravity to images. ByteDance released Douyin in China in 2016, launched TikTok internationally in 2017, and folded in Musical.ly in August 2018, bringing algorithmic recommendation without a social graph into the mainstream.

The legal architecture came first. Section 230, enacted in 1996 in response to a New York case that had penalised an online service for moderating at all, granted platforms immunity from liability for what users post while preserving their freedom to remove material in good faith. Written to protect a nascent industry from ruinous litigation, it now underwrites firms with the reach of national broadcasters and none of the corresponding duties.

The conservative complaint sharpened after 2016. Content moderation policy expanded from spam and pornography into contested empirical and political territory, most visibly during the 2020 pandemic and election. The suspension of a sitting American president from Twitter on 8 January 2021 and from Facebook the previous day converted an argument about private terms of service into a constitutional question about who governs public speech. Texas and Florida legislated against viewpoint-based moderation in 2021; the Supreme Court sent both laws back to the lower courts in July 2024 without settling the underlying question.

Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985 about television, supplied the analysis before the technology existed: the form of a medium constrains what can be said on it, and a medium built for diversion will render serious subjects as entertainment.

The Conservative Position

The first argument concerns the destruction of the local. Burke’s little platoons and Robert Nisbet’s intermediate associations describe attachments formed by proximity, repetition, and consequence — the neighbour one meets again, the congregation that notices an absence.² Platform association is the opposite: frictionless, global, anonymous where it wants to be, and free of consequence. It supplies the sensation of belonging while dissolving the memberships that carry actual obligation. Roger Scruton’s account of attachment to a particular place and its people identifies exactly what the medium cannot supply.

The second argument concerns the young. Haidt’s case is that the rewiring of childhood after 2010 — a phone-based, supervised, indoor adolescence replacing an unsupervised outdoor one — coincides with sharp increases in adolescent anxiety, depression, and self-harm across the Anglosphere, and that girls bear the heaviest cost. The evidence on causation is contested by researchers who read the same data as showing small effects. Conservatives note that a precautionary posture toward a novel and untested influence on children is the traditionally prudent one, and that the burden of proof belongs with the party conducting the experiment. Australia legislated a minimum age of sixteen in December 2024, with obligations on platforms commencing a year later.

The third argument concerns speech and concentration. A handful of firms now control the practical conditions of public argument, and their moderation decisions have removed lawful opinion from circulation. One conservative response applies common-carrier reasoning: a platform that holds itself out to the general public should not exclude on the basis of viewpoint. Another, held by conservatives with a stronger commitment to property rights, answers that compelling a private firm to host speech is itself a violation of the First Amendment and that the remedy for a bad platform is a competitor. This dispute is unresolved and it is the most consequential internal argument on the right about technology.

Differing Positions

Platform defenders argue that social media democratised publication, ending an era in which a few editors decided what a nation heard, and that the conservative complaint amounts to objecting when the same freedom is used by opponents. On this account moderation of demonstrable falsehood about elections or vaccines is editorial judgement, not censorship, and the alternative is a public square in which the loudest fabrication wins.

A second position holds that the harms attributed to social media belong to earlier causes — economic insecurity, declining religious practice, the collapse of local newspapers — and that the platform is a symptom mistaken for a source. Researchers including Candice Odgers have argued that the correlations in the adolescent data are small and the causal direction unproven.

A third, argued from the left, holds that the true problem is the advertising business model rather than moderation policy, and that regulating surveillance-based targeting would address more of the harm than any rule about who gets banned.

References

1. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Viking, 1985).
2. Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community (Oxford University Press, 1953).
3. Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation (Penguin Press, 2024).
4. Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, 603 U.S. 707 (2024).