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Recent debates about social media’s dangers are important, but they miss the most important thing: that around twenty years ago societies delegated to business the design of the spaces where human beings are social. This fundamental error has put our politics and societies at huge risk: the pursuit of profit and social design do not mix well.

Today much of people’s experience of the online world is channelled through social media platforms, designed for one end: to generate attention which can be sold to advertisers. Inevitably the wider internet contains material that is harmful. But instead of building platforms that mitigated the risk of harmful material circulating, we did the opposite: platforms pursued business models that exploited our attention by allowing content to circulate, regardless of quality, and generated platform activity, whether polarising or not.

As a result, our commercial platforms have become polarisation machines, perfect vehicles for the industrialisation of gossip on a global scale. By default, we have allowed Big Tech to build our space of the world: that is, the space of all possible spaces where we are social. No emperor in history ever had that power, but the possibility of that power emerged with the internet and World Wide Web. The tragedy is that then we have built the wrong space of the world, a space that is now constitutionally toxic.

The consequences for the quality of our politics – particularly for us building a politics to address the existential risk of climate change – are dire.

In my new book The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What if it Can’t? I argue that humanity needs to rebuild social media so that solidarity can grow, not be undermined.

Ways forward to better social media exist, but they will require major redesign. My books outlines what this might mean.

By Nick Couldry
Professor of Media Communications and Social Theory

Nick Couldry’s latest book The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What if it Can’t? is available to purchase now!

About Nick

Nick Couldry is a sociologist of media and culture. He is Professor of Media Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and since 2017 a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He is the author or editor of seventeen books including Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back (Penguin/W. H. Allen 2024, with Ulises Mejias). His latest books is The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What if it Can’t?  (Polity, October 2024)

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