Everything, everywhere that is terrible is social media’s fault. Hate, disinformation, depression, political polarisation, the decline of trust, and of course, Donald Trump. Social media gets blamed for a lot. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter should carry health warnings, some insist. Perhaps one of those unsmiling photos of Mark Zuckerberg looking like he has just instructed his men—”Kill everyone in the village.”
Yes, social media intensifies and amplifies awful behaviour and conspiracies. Rates of social media use have climbed alongside depression and anxiety, political polarisation, and institutional distrust, according to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.
Being at the receiving end of a social media mob is no fun. I have been trolled by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Right, the Left, sitting MPs and former ones have all had a go, along with some mean people. Someone made a Tik Tok of my husband and I looking sinister. It had 50,000 views in the first 12 hours.
There are nasty dark corners in social media where isolated people find each other and peddle falsehoods, and frustrated people in emotional pain project their suffering onto others.
Social media provides a challenging platform, but it is not the cause of bad behaviour, just as the printing press did not cause the 30 Years’ War, even if it accelerated it. TV did not make us stupid, although it helped. In all these cases, when it came to bad behaviour, we humans did most of the heavy lifting ourselves, using the tools at hand.
Pearl clutching always follows new technology.
The Athenian philosopher Plato disapproved of the big innovation of ancient times: the written word. Writing things down, he complained, will “implant forgetfulness in men’s souls.” To be fair, he was right about that. Who among us knows all the words to the national anthem? (Really? Including the fifth English verse, with the line about ‘working out thy glorious plan’, perhaps in some celestial gym?)
Samuel Pepys, the 17th-century diary keeper, wrote that he felt addicted to his watch and had stopped wearing it because he couldn’t help but frequently check the time.
In 1982, US reporter Dan Rather reported on an epidemic of arcade machines. Oh, for those days of innocently inserting a coin in the slot for electronic entertainment. So extreme was the threat, Rather reported, senior citizens could not go into a laundromat without encountering a group of kids playing PAC-MAN. The horror!
In his 1963 book Passion and Social Constraint, Dutch-American sociologist Ernest van den Haag worried about the portable radio, “which was taken everywhere—from seashore to mountaintop—and everywhere it isolates the bearer from his surroundings.” I remember the same being said of the Walkman when I was a teenager, and then the iPod when it made white headphones ubiquitous.
If the fear wasn’t speed, excess of information, bad health and a threat to civilisation, it was the loss of manners, skills, and knowledge.
Cities, print, the novel, steamships, trains, telephones, magazines, talk back radio; All have triggered the same backlash; that the young and impressionable will be ruined.
Even Pope Francis has worried about social media. “Digital media can also expose people to the risk of addiction, isolation and a gradual loss of contact with concrete reality, blocking the development of authentic interpersonal relationships,” he wrote. He has a point.
About the only thing older than new technology is complaining about it.
We should be vigilant against the temptations of nostalgia and a yearning for life before social media. If only our past memories were a reliable reflection of how things were. Instead, they dress our pre-social media childhoods in a sunlit haze. We see our young selves roam the streets and gather at the park bench. The place we know to meet, no pre-arranged time or iphones needed.
A fragment remembered like a glossy ad—”Back for dinner,” I shout breathlessly over a shoulder as we head to the river on our BMX bikes. Gone for the day. No phones.
But nostalgia isn’t what it used to be (cough).
Nostalgia comes from two ancient Greek words. Nostos is the word for “return.” Algos means “suffering.” “Nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return,” wrote author Milan Kundera.
A return to something that probably didn’t exist how you remember it.
On average, kids today are healthier, safer, wealthier, and more educated. Our lives were not better without social media. My father lived 8000 miles away from me in America. Our only contact between visits was tissue-thin aerogramme letters (Google it, kids), out of date by the time they arrived.
It would take us school kids a week to discover when the printing press was invented. You had to find a library, ask a teacher, or make friends with someone whose parents owned the Encyclopaedia Britannica—none of which we ever did.
Today, my kids have knowledge at their fingertips. They find out facts in seconds, even as Plato warned, they don’t remember anything. Th ey use social media to keep friendships and family connections alive online wherever they are in the world. My daughter has gone to live in New York for a year. I have seen what she’s wearing today.
We have buyers’ remorse that we ate of the Social Media Apple and brought the sins of online hate and Twitter trolls into the world. Or as Elon would have us say – ‘X-Trolls. But we should not forget the joy and hope of the first wave of social media.
It was welcomed as a boost for democracy, a tool to connect people across the world at a scale never seen. Making facts more available was meant to make politics more honest and accountable.
The year 2011 began with the Arab Spring and ended with the global Occupy movement. Populists marched for more democracy and human rights, not to smash the windows of the US Capitol, burn cities, and bring democracy to its knees. In the same year, Google Translate became available. We could talk to each other across language barriers and borders.
We believed that good had won the battle against evil, and we would never go to war again. Progress was an upward curve on a graph. It was the end of History.
But in 2014, Nato noticed that Russia was stirring up controversy over fracking to advantage its own gas over European energy alternatives.
Putin occupied Crimea, and his trolling network went to work with the lessons they had learned. The “like”, “share”, and “retweet” buttons were introduced. Hate was amplified, and anxiety increased. Russia used them to mess with our democracy.
It is easy to blame social media for breaking our politics but to do so avoids a day of reckoning with the deeper causes and lets the real villains off the hook too lightly. Voters were losing trust in institutions and politicians before Twitter, sorry ‘X’.
Donald Trump’s supporters knew he lied. According to David Runciman in his book Political Hypocrisy, they didn’t care. They liked him because he lied authentically, compared to Hillary Clinton, whose truth-telling sounded fake. She was “just another professional politician”, politely hedging answers to questions and not saying what she really thought. Until she did and said: “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the Basket of Deplorables.” That is voters, who also happened to be roughly half the population.
Decline in trust in politicians and institutions, including mainstream media, is much more due to something happening in those institutions than social media.
If you want to see why trust is declining, start with our parliament. Over 90% of MPs have a degree, compared to 25% of Kiwis. 95% of MPs own property. By contrast, just 49% of the general population are homeowners.
Our parliament is more diverse when it comes to gender and ethnicity, which is a good thing, but if diversity is good, then diversity of class is also good. Today, the priorities and values of working people are not adequately represented.
According to the latest Edelman Trust Barometer, “a lack of faith in societal institutions” is triggered by “economic anxiety, disinformation, class divide and a failure of leadership.”
Class divisions and a sense that we are not all getting the same chances at a good life are more to blame for our fragmented communities than social media.
History has returned with a thud, and our hopeful bubble has burst. We have a hot war in Ukraine, the return of a Cold War, this time between the US and China, and the rise of what Jonathan Haidt calls “the anxious generation.”
We need to deal with these problems directly at the source and work out better ways of co-existing with social media rather than thinking we can put the genie back in the bottle.
Instead of censoring content, where we put our trust in politicians or judges to determine what is and what is not offensive or harmful speech, we should focus on changing the architecture to remove the rewards for being nasty.
Here are some ideas.
“Authenticate all real humans,” said Elon Musk recently. Make it compulsory to register and prove you are a real person over 16 years old. Only then should you have an anonymous handle. This one change would wipe out hundreds of millions of bots and fake accounts polluting major platforms. “I believe in freedom of speech,” said Jonathan Haidt, “but not for bots.”
There is nothing unacceptable about this. Legislation demands that banks know their customers and verify identities to prevent money laundering. Fakeness on social media platforms can cause damage too.
Jonathan Haidt suggests a “Geneva Convention” for the culture wars by making it harder for hateful and angry messages to gain large audiences. Introduce rankings where, if you are abusive, you get a lower ranking. Users can choose not to hear from anyone with a rank lower than 4. The more you troll, the smaller your audience gets. People are rewarded for nuance, or lose audience for lack of it.
Break up the big companies. Companies like Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, are too powerful. Competition would bring new disrupters into the market and give us more choices. Innovation will provide us with more ways to avoid nastiness. Digital chats are curated by the private companies that host them, but power cannot be exercised safely unless it is dispersed in a competitive marketplace, says historian Francis Fukuyama.
Slow the spread of hate speech by modifying the “Share” function. After content has been shared twice, the third person in the chain must take the time to copy and paste the content into a new post, suggests Frances Hogan, a specialist in algorithmic product management. Reforms like this are content-neutral and work in all languages. They don’t stop anyone from saying anything; they just slow the spread of content that is, on average, less likely to be true.
Social media platforms are protected from lawsuits if people post illegal or harmful content. This privilege should come with a responsibility to build an architecture that prevents as much of the illegal, harmful content as possible. They thrived by destroying many quality jobs as content moderators in “old media.” Moderating any content before it spreads is possible; it just costs them more. Time to bring those jobs back for “new media.”
If we really want to get to the source of our fragmented and polarised politics, we must prove that democracy works better than the alternatives. Get the basics right, and social media will be a much nicer place to hang out.
Social media isn’t real life, but it is undeniably influencing it and changing our world, just as earlier media like the printing press, the telegraph, the phone, the radio and the TV changed our world. But change is not synonymous with worse. People do not use new media if they do not get value from them. Unless you define the problem precisely, you are not going to fix it. The problem is not social media; it is some of the undesirable features of it and the ease with which people can use them to cause harm. Fix those features, and maybe the hope of the early days of social media will lift us up again. History might not be over, but tomorrow can be better.
