This week on The Disclaimer, WMSE's weekly half hour of conversation with Ryan Schleicher, Milwaukee Record co-founder Matt Wild and I, we're reconsidering some long-held assumptions about social media. In a recent piece for The Guardian, writer Lindy West explains her decision to leave Twitter, despite the considerable services it provides, because of its egregious troll problem—and a recent deluge of harassment by literal Nazis that the company has been reluctant to take seriously. That piece dovetails with the anxieties that writer Victor Luckerson explored in a piece for The Ringer about "the end of tech optimism," about Facebook's reluctance to take its fake news problem seriously and the gradual realization that large tech companies are not operating in the public good. Should we, as consumers, reconsider how we use social media—and even if we should be using social media? We explore the situation.
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