Part One: Getting on the Same Page
Last week, the Atlantic published an article by Jonathan Haidt about the fracturing of our social order. Haidt has become one of the world’s experts on social media merely by paying attention. He’s not in the tech space where they’re too busy disrupting to worry about the consequences, but a professor of psychology at NYU. More importantly, he’s a master articulator; his arguments are persuasive because everyone already believed in them, but lacked the words. His latest piece is something of a summary of his work over the last 5 years and his message is simple: this isn’t working. Social media has ruined everything. It has ruined our attention, our mental health, and our politics. Our trust in institutions continues to plummet and polarization drives us farther apart.
Social media has not acted alone. It is part of the internet, the culmination of the technological trend of democratizing information, which goes back before cable or radio, all the way to the printing press. The internet is often compared to the printing press and rarely has historical analogies fitted so well. The printing press broke the monopoly of information controlled by the Catholic Church and led to a proliferation of new ideas and faiths across Europe. Many neglect to mention the printing press also led to one of the most violent conflicts in history, ] the 30 Years War, and centuries of sectional violence between Protestants and Catholics.
Just like the printing press, social media is an accelerant rather than a cause of problems. The printing press didn’t cause Martin Luther to have 95 problems with the Church and Twitter didn’t start debates about acceptable speech and the left-right mutual contempt, but they sure made those problems worse. You can tell a story of the last five years that leaves out social media. Donald Trump spoke to many Americans’ concerns about illegal immigration, political correctness, and hatred of the costal elite. These Americans didn’t trust the media, the academy, and the CDC, because they felt these institutions were staffed by people contemptful of them, who lost their trust over and over again. Our congress is dysfunctional without a broad national consensus, as our citizens and elected bodies have become more ideologically polarized over the last 50 years.
That story is incomplete without social media. As Haidt so well explained, it has supercharged every debate between and within groups. Superonline aggressive accounts harass opponents and keep their side in check. They are the footsoldiers of cancel culture, directed and not controlled by “influencers” who wield only that. No one is in charge and things just deteriorate.
This article doesn’t exist to claim social media can be bad, a fact every sane person should understand. It instead seeks to develop a shared understanding of how it works and offer a new framework for how to deal with it. Claiming inevitability or putting the responsibility on individuals sidestep the hard challenges of creating this new information world. The first step is to understand we’re doing a terrible job.
Part 2: A Case Study in Terribleness
Parents have always tried to pass on their values to their children, but culture always gets in the way. Religious identification and church attendance have declined. Social values around sexuality change. Conservatism has always been about fighting these trends, keeping the children safe from anti-American and anti-Christian values. That job has gotten so much harder. Kids these days each have multiple devices with access to the entire internet. They’re on Instagram, Tik Tok, and Youtube free to consume any content and if male they probably consume some pornography. Many parents feel they have lost control in schools and at home. They’ve activated in Red states to push for trangender laws, preventing gender transition for children and in Florida banning the discussion of “sexual” topics in schools (same sex relationships are often seen as automatically sexual, where oppisite sex are just normal). These laws are a backlash to the rise in trans youth and the feeling of helplessness of parents to do anything about it. Whether Tiktok turns kids trans doesn’t change the fact parents feel like it does.
Enter Libs of Tik Tok, an anonymous twitter account which reveals the dark rainbow underside of social media and our school system. The account reposts cringy clips from Tik Tok featuring LGBTQ people talking about gender theory alongside captions like “look at this groomer” or “this is what’s being fed to our children.” This style of right wing content is nothing new, with compilations of cringe Social Justice Warriors a staple of 2016 Youtube. The account has amassed over 800k subscribers, making getting featured a guarantee of online harassment. The harassment is implicitly justified through the use of “predator” and “groomer.” As a person on the center left, Libs of Tik Tok repulses me, but I see it as a symptom of our culture war instead of an individual. Taylor Lorenz, on the other hand, set out to find that individual.
Lorenz is a prominent culture and technology reporter working at the Washington Post. She has devoted a good portion of her career to outing online extremism, reporting the hidden radicalizing elements online. Lorenz is the left-wing counterpart of Libs of Tik Tok, concerned with online right wing instead of left wing indoctrination. In a recent Washington Post article, she outed the user behind Libs of Tik Tok. The entire Right rallied to defense of the account, posting their outrage at a reporter inciting “cancelation” and personal harassment.
I’m sure this has been difficult for everyone involved. No matter the magnitude of one's following, prestige, and wealth, online harassment can damage one's mental health. Neither JK Rowlings’ millions of followers or billions of dollars keep her from reading mean tweets late into the night. No doubt Libs of Tik Tok will receive blowback online and in her personal life. Even once she monetizes the outrage, as she is doing with a new substack, the experience is not pleasant. Lorenz will also receive blowback and based on how she’s handled it in the past it will not be fun.
The ethics of Lorenz’s move are questionable. Revealing to a large following the identity of an anonymous account can be akin to doxing, but are large anonymous accounts really a good idea? Shouldn’t someone with that large of a platform have some responsibility?
This story demonstrates many of social media’s terrible impacts: anonymous accounts, doxxing, mainstream stories sourced from Twitter, and a paranoia about online indoctrination particularly of youths. The left and the right have always had conflicting values, but the debates stayed smaller scale. The beautiful thing about America is the internal diversity based on internal distance. The gun nuts in Mississippi and the vegan nuts in Portland never need to meet. But on social media conflict over values abound between and within tribes. The stakes of everything are raised, while nothing is ever actually resolved.
Part 3: The Metric For Improvement
There have been many solutions proposed to solve the problems of social media, such as breaking up big tech, more moderation to reduce disinformation, user verifications to prevent trolling, elimination of the quote tweet and other outrage incentivizing functions, and vague gestures at the need to regulate Big Tech. Some of these are good ideas. But none really get at the underlying problem, which is that the incentives for political speech on social media are fundamentally harmful to our society. I’m not so naive to think we can revert to 2005, but we’re not confined to the inevitability of social media dominance. To assess a social media policy, the heuristic should be “does this policy increase or reduce the frequency or intensity of political speech on social media?” If a policy passes this heuristic, it is most likely good. User verification? Fantastic. Breakup social media companies? Why not? Repeal section 230? Go for it! Not all of these will work, but we need experimentation to get a better world. Limiting the influence of social media will not magically solve our problems. But it will reduce the temperature and forge an environment where we can think, converse, and act clearer.