The feed is the content

Nicholas Carr writes:

 … the essen­tial con­tent of social media is now the feeds pro­duced by the plat­forms, not the indi­vidual mes­sages posted by users. Go to Insta­gram and scroll through your feed. It’s obvious that what you’re expe­ri­encing is not dis­crete bits of user-generated con­tent. It’s an elaborate, finely tuned media pro­duc­tion man­u­fac­tured by Insta­gram for an audi­ence of one: you. The same goes for YouTube, X, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Sub­stack Notes, and, with a few exceptions, all the rest.

The feed is the con­tent, and the social media com­pany is its publisher. Period.

The ques­tion of whether social media com­pa­nies should be held liable for harming people is a legally com­plex one, which would best be answered through courts of law. And that’s what should happen. Let the plain­tiffs make their case, and let the defen­dants defend themselves. Sec­tion 230’s safe harbor doesn’t apply. Social media com­pa­nies are, like other media com­pa­nies, in the con­tent-pro­duc­tion business, and they’re respon­sible for their programming.

I totally agree.

The capa­bil­i­ties of “mere conduit” dig­ital infra­struc­ture remain prac­tical and useful; ver­sions of this include, e.g., domain reg­is­trars and com­pute providers. Snag a domain on Gandi, spin up a worker on Cloudflare, and nobody will ever know about it unless you take some other action, under your own steam, to cir­cu­late what you’d made.

As Nick says, the big plat­forms are totally different: way beyond infra­struc­ture.

Like I wrote in my most recent newsletter:

It’s only with abstrac­tion that the trouble begins; only when con­nec­tions become imper­sonal and automatic; when the owners and oper­a­tors of internet sys­tems reject the respon­si­bility of standing behind the mate­rial they transmit and, especially, promote.