Reconstructing the web: Towards a diagnosis of the moral pathologies of platforms

Abstract

Influential reconstructions of moral communication rarely take new forms of technological mediation into account. This paper does so, considering how the practical pressures that shape moral communication on social media differ from those that often shape it offline in order to develop a set of novel theoretical explanations of the moral pathologies of social media. First, because moral communication on social media is often at considerable remove from action situations and concrete communities and so from the need to coordinate successfully and maintain healthy relationships, it selects for moral communication that is more critical than coordinative, and criticism that is untempered. Second, because social media facilitates witnessing wrongs more than it does wronging, it selects for expressions of indignation, but it also frustrates the conversational practices by which we work through the reactive attitudes. We should anticipate all this to have important consequences for moral language, understanding, and socialization.