“We Live in a Society”: Hannah Arendt, Political Speech, and Social Media

Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter/X are widely blamed for the spread of mis- and disinformation, surveillance capitalism, thought manipulation, and the decay of critical discourse, leading critics to argue vociferously for regulation. This essay argues that Hannah Arendt’s conception of “the social” realm reframes the problem of social media not as a contest between free speech and regulation but as a problem of conformism, the dominant mode of discourse in the social. We look to the field of persuasive technology in computer science as illustrative, showing how conformism was merely reverse engineered from society into the platforms themselves. If, as Arendt describes, the social is “a world where speech has lost its power,” then social media is where it has lost its power precisely because the technology engineers speech so exquisitely, makes it so effortlessly consumable, that we fail to perceive we have stopped speaking altogether.