The majesty of the law and the chaos of social media barely meet.
In the law, there are familiar rules and sanctions designed to lead players towards facts and truth: solicitors have a duty to the court, a duty to bring cases contrary to their client’s case to the court’s attention, to tell the truth to clients, to consider all sides of a client’s case, to advise the client of the consequences of not following advice, and so on.
I dipped my toe into social media last week.
Well, on the one hand we all had our faces dunked in it with endless reports of Brooklyn Beckham’s Instagram post about not wishing to reconcile with his family. He has 17 million followers and the post apparently ‘broke the internet’.
I keep off social media, but do post every few months on LinkedIn to my barely respectable figure of 1,000 connections (it is the number of connections which is not respectable, not the people themselves, you understand). Despite LinkedIn being placed at the vicar’s tea party end of social media, without much ranting behind anonymous accounts strewn with flag emojis, I still receive the occasional invitation from young ladies in Dublin or Paris asking whether I want to get to know them better.
My post took off, at least in my non-viral terms. To me, it was the equivalent of the response to Brooklyn’s statement that his mother had danced on him inappropriately at his wedding. Two schoolfriends from whom I had not heard since I left school made contact, along with several others from my past. I was sent a photo of myself in the rugby team, aged 12.
But it was my own response which is instructive. I became spellbound by the rising number of impressions, the rising number of comments and likes (which were well below what other people receive for just ordinary posts). I could not resist checking back from time to time to see what was new.
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It is similarly impossible to resist the question of why the post was successful, and whether it can be repeated. This is the fork in the road. The instinct to be yourself and to tell the truth can quickly become overwhelmed by the wish to experience once more the rush of popularity, and to twist self and truth to the achievement of more clicks.
Calm down, boomer – this is social media, not murder or riot. Yes, that’s true. It is also true that I receive more and more of my news from a small and carefully curated number of social media accounts of opposing political views, despite not posting myself. So some good emerges.
However, just as more research emerges about the effect of smartphone use on young minds, so are we all changed by mechanical algorithms over which we have no control (owned by a handful of billionaires who do not have our good in mind).
My relative whoosh of impressions was not caused by the brilliance of what I had written, but by mechanical judgements deciding first to expose my post, and then, equally unpredictably, to withdraw it from circulation.
This is not a hobby like playing football in the park, for which we have to leave the house and change our clothes. It is a compulsion we carry in our pockets, and can’t resist looking at for longer and longer. It must be having an impact on solicitor-brain.
There are various other dangers in social media.
There are the solicitors who post unsuitable things (the Solicitors Regulation Authority says that you must ensure ‘that the communications you send to others or post online do not contain statements which are derogatory, harassing, hurtful, puerile, plainly inappropriate or perceived to be threatening, causing the recipient alarm and distress’.
There are solicitors who boast about supporting their client’s cause in court (this practice is unpoliced, but it seems to me that it breaches the general rule not to identify the lawyer with the client, always terrible if the government does it to us, but apparently good PR if we do it to ourselves).
Yet it is the general qualities of social media which bother me more in the long-term. So many of us are doom-scrolling (affecting our mental health); succumbing to the addiction of one video magically following the other, each better matched to our previously expressed taste as the algorithm tracks our choices (wasting our time); and reading fewer real books (where wisdom and pleasure play out in something other than brief snippets).
But our solicitor values can be affected, too. If what we offer the world in terms of truth and justice doesn’t prove so popular, tweak it. Rage-posting pays, sweetness and light not so much.
Maybe this piece will prove more popular if I mention Brooklyn Beckham again? Registering Brand Goldsmith is definitely a step too far.
Jonathan Goldsmith is Law Society Council member for EU & International, chair of the Law Society’s Policy & Regulatory Affairs Committee and a member of its board. All views expressed are personal and are not made in his capacity as a Law Society Council member, nor on behalf of the Law Society
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