580335

research-article2015
SMSXXX10.1177/2056305115580335Social Media + SocietyNielsen

SI: Manifesto

Social Media + Society

Social Media and Bullshit

April-June 2015: 1­–3
© The Author(s) 2015
DOI: 10.1177/2056305115580335
sms.sagepub.com

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

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.

Keywords
social media, bullshit, epistemology, political economy, methods

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.
I use the term “bullshit” here in the technical sense of
statements about the world and how it works that are charac-
terized by indifference to how things are, and I am strictly
concerned with bullshit in an analytical sense here, not a nor-
mative one. The question is not whether and when bullshit is
good or bad, but what it means for social media and how we
understand social media. Bullshit, according to the philoso-
pher Harry Frankfurt (2005), can be differentiated both from
honest statements and from lies. Honest statements are
grounded in the belief that they are true, and lies statements
are grounded in the belief that they are not. Both hinge on a
conception of truth-value and implicitly or explicitly involve
justified beliefs. Bullshit, on the other hand, concerns state-
ments made with little or no concern for their truth-value.
Bullshit need not deceive us about the facts of a matter, and
bullshit is not the same as lying. It concerns more precisely
statements made with disregard to whether they are true or
not and with little or no justification. Bullshit is statements
about the world to which there is no sincere and satisfying
generally acceptable answer to the question “how do you
know?” Whether one is of a Platonic idealist or an Aristotelian
empiricist inclination and whether one subscribes to a strict
and narrow conception of what qualifies as knowledge (à la
W. K. Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief”) or a more permis-
sive one (as per William James’ “The Will to Believe”), it
seems clear that much in the world masquerading as knowl-
edge is, upon closer inspection, better conceived of as
bullshit.
Bullshit can be found across all the different forms of
knowledge (operational, representational, and explanatory)
and kinds of knowledge producers (lay, professional, and
academic) involved with social media. No one has a monop-
oly on bullshit. We all occasionally resort to it and act upon
it. This is precisely why it is important. It is hard to say with
any degree of precision how much there is (both numerator
and denominator are hard to quantify). But I will offer as a
hypothesis that bullshit is particularly common when it
comes to social media, for two reasons.
First, as Frankfurt (2005) notes, “bullshit is unavoidable
whenever circumstances require someone to talk without
knowing what he is talking about” (p. 15). Social media—as
an imprecise term referring loosely to a very large and diverse
set of relatively new technologies and practices with no natu-
ral edges that are evolving very rapidly, often intersect with
University of Oxford, UK
Corresponding Author:
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, University of Oxford, 13 Norham Gardens, Oxford
OX2 6PS, UK.
Email: rasmuskleisnielsen@gmail.com

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2 Social Media + Society
each other and many other phenomena in complex ways, and
are embedded in many very different settings—seem to invite
this kind of talk. Furthermore, our relative ignorance of the
total population and the universe of cases (let alone their
properties) undermines our ability to rely on conventional
methods of analytic and statistical generalization, even when
we have very robust knowledge of particular phenomena. So,
social media are epistemologically exposed to bullshit
because it is hard to understand social media if by “under-
stand” one means knowing something about it with a degree
of reliability and validity on the basis of agreed-upon termi-
nology and forms of justification.
Second, the “circumstances” that Frankfurt refers to are
not simply a relative dearth of justified knowledge about
social media. It also involves the high demand for knowl-
edge, or at least statements that may pass for knowledge,
about social media. The demand comes both from legacy
organizations of various sort (governments, businesses,
media, social movements, etc.), individuals in their capacity
as lay people (parents thinking about their children, people
looking for a date, activists trying to change the world, etc.),
and, of course, the companies operating and developing
social media. Many actors, some of them powerful, feel
impelled to act upon, engage with, and have views of social
media, even though they may know little about them. This
demand underpins a highly generative political economy for
the production of statements about social media. In a situa-
tion characterized by the epistemic problems briefly outlined
above is likely to also produce a lot of bullshit.
In summary, social media seem to be accompanied by a
lot of bullshit because we know so little and because there is
a lot at stake. The gulf between the supply of justified beliefs
and the demand for much more, and more detailed and exten-
sive, and for various interests and in various ways instrumen-
tally useful, knowledge about social media creates space for
bullshit. (More space than in some other areas of human
activity, such as mathematics.) This situation is both intel-
lectually interesting and a real analytical challenge for those
trying to understand social media.
Intellectually, bullshit is interesting because it connects
directly with a broader set of questions concerning the rela-
tionship between what we might in lack of a better term call
ideas (beliefs, knowledge, and some definitions of culture)
and technology. Analyzing the particular role of bullshit when
it comes to the development, use, and implications of social
media falls clearly within a wider interest in discursive forma-
tions, ideology (whether sincerely believed or cynically held),
and other systems of thought that have the power to objectify
that of which we speak and transform the world when we act
upon our beliefs. These are concerns that have long been cen-
tral to many parts of the humanities and the social sciences and
come accompanied by a whole range of questions concerning
the “double hermeneutic” (Giddens, 1984) relationship
between academic inquiry and other areas of human activity,
between “folk theories” and other kinds of theories (Bourdieu,
1989), and the balance between engaging with other forms of
knowledge versus objectifying it as an object of analysis
(when do we aim to challenge claims made by prominent
futurists, and when analyze what those claims come to mean?).
Analytically, bullshit is a real challenge. Although many
who talk frequently, with confidence, and often consequen-
tially about social media and their role in society are proba-
bly aware that they are occasionally bullshitting (or at least
regurgitating things they suspect may be bullshit), they are
unlikely to simply admit this if asked in, say, an interview.
(There is also the further problem of unintended bullshit,
which may even take the form of false consciousness.) One
approach would be “breaching experiments,” modeled on the
sociological work done by Harold Garfinkel (1967) to make
commonly accepted social rules and norms visible and ame-
nable to analysis by breaking them—in this case, the interac-
tional norm that we typically at least pretend to accept
statements made by other people at face value. Basically, I
like to imagine a project where field researchers systemati-
cally identify knowledge-claims about the role of social
media in society and asked those making the claim “how do
you know?” pushing this line of inquiry as far as possible
whether in everyday conversations about social media among
lay people, in Q & As after presentations at industry confer-
ences, or in academic settings when research problems are
framed and results generalized as wider statements. The pur-
pose would be to uncover what, if any, forms of justification
these claims rest upon (or can be put to rest upon).
What does the future hold for social media and bullshit?
We can imagine a range of scenarios on the basis of the epis-
temological and political–economic factors outlined above.
Epistemologically, hopefully, we will overcome some of
the challenges we currently face in terms of understanding
social media (others will continue to dog us, new will appear).
Ideally, we will improve our theoretical, methodological, and
substantial understanding and accumulate new insights about
a wide variety of important cases and contexts. In practice,
however, the intellectual challenges of understanding social
media and the increasing ubiquity and ever-evolving nature of
the object of analysis means we are likely to always fall short.
In terms of the political economy animating large parts of
the production of knowledge and knowledge-like statements
about social media much depends on how effectively the mar-
ketplace of ideas works (in the academy but more importantly
beyond). This raises the usual questions about the relationship
between power and knowledge, about the relationship between
folk theories, professional forms of knowledge, and various
kinds of science, as well as the interests involved and who
bears the consequences of acting upon or espousing bullshit.
One thing I think we can say (and this essay outlines my
justifications for that claim) is that bullshit is here to stay and
will continue to play an important role for how we under-
stand social media, how they are used, and for what they
mean. Therefore, we need to take bullshit seriously as an
intellectual and analytical problem.
Nielsen 3
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to
the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.
References
Bourdieu, P. (1989). Social space and symbolic power. Sociological
Theory, 7, 14-25. doi:10.2307/202060.
Frankfurt, H. G. (2005). On bullshit. Princeton, NJ; Oxford, UK:
Princeton University Press.
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the the-
ory of structuration. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Author Biography
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (PhD, Columbia University) is director of
Research at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University
of Oxford. His research interests include political communication,
news media, and the role of digital technologies in both areas.