Social Media and Bullshit

Abstract

To understand the role of social media in society, we have to understand how social media are understood. We need to analyze how different actors and organizations see and think about technology, the forms of knowledge that people draw on as they make sense of, develop, and use social media. Central among these is bullshit. This short essay discusses bullshit as defined by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt as statements made with little or no concern for their truth-value or justification and argues that social media are accompanied by unusually large amounts of bullshit for two reasons. First, they confront us with epistemological problems and are hard to understand. Second, there is a large demand for knowledge about what they mean, a powerful political economy that generates a lot of statements about social media, including substantial amounts of bullshit. Given the rapid development of social media and their growing importance, this is unlikely to change in the near future. Bullshit is here to stay, and we need to take it seriously intellectually and analytically to understand social media.