Raise a Glass to Freedom
13 min read
An indictment of the “Wild West” atmosphere of social media and the price we all pay for it.
Is American society today performing a reenactment of the Tower of Babel story from Genesis? According to Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University Stern School of Business, the answer is yes. In a powerful essay in The Atlantic provocatively titled, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” Haidt indicts the “Wild West” atmosphere of social media for a multitude of sins, including what he characterizes as our growing stupidity on a societal level, reflected in our major institutions and government.
Haidt opens his nearly 8,300-word essay quoting from Genesis about God’s amused reaction to the building of the Tower of Babel:
Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.
The builders of the biblical tower tried to scale Godly heights, just as modern titans of Big Tech have tried to create new, digital worlds where they are the masters and kings. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg predicted that his new platform would create a “tipping point” in society that would “rewire the way people spread and consume information” and therefore “transform many of our core institutions and industries.” Zuckerberg’s predictions came true, but at an enormous cost that we may be paying for permanently. Today our language is confused, and often redefined according to new rules decided by the few and the woke. Social media has in many ways skewed our thinking and even our emotions.
“We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth.”
The bitter side effects of social media have been proven through numerous studies. These costs include an alarming rise in depression and anxiety among young people; growing extremism and intolerance for opposing views; outsized influence of selected social media posts through viral algorithms; the creation of ideological echo chambers that leech into our nation’s institutions, where new orthodoxies become entrenched almost overnight and dissent is severely and swiftly punished. We have lost trust in our institutions, in one another, and in the shared cultural narratives that had previously held us together. It’s a heavy indictment.
The result of all this? “We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past,” Haidt observes.
At first, social media platforms seemed to promise uncensored communication and an exchange of ideas that would promote democracy. The Google translate feature launched during the Arab Spring of 2011 was an innovation that was cheered: no dictator could prevail when tens of millions of citizens could express themselves freely online.
But the Babel-like confusion and disorientation gained momentum beginning in 2009 with the introduction of Facebook’s “like” and “share” and Twitter’s “retweet” buttons. These unleashed the power of viral algorithms to promote and endorse selected posts. Facebook then began feeding users the kinds of posts that “engaged” them most through “likes” or “shares.” But the posts most likely to be shared were ones that triggered emotions—particularly anger at other groups.
”The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.”
By 2013 you could become “internet famous” for a few days through a post that had been engineered to go viral. But “if you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. . . This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics. . . The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking,” Haidt writes.
Years later, there is still no accountability system for bullies and vigilantes: “A successful attack attracts a barrage of likes and follow-on strikes. Enhanced-virality platforms thereby facilitate massive collective punishment for small or imagined offenses, with real-world consequences, including people losing their jobs or shamed into suicide. When our public square is governed by mob dynamics unrestrained by due process, we don’t get justice and inclusion; we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth.”
In the week following the George Floyd killing by a Minneapolis police officer, a progressive analyst named David Shor, then employed by Civics Analytics, responded to the protests taking place across the country, many of which turned violent. He tweeted a link to a study showing that violent protests back in the 1960s led to electoral setbacks for the Democrats in nearby counties. His progressive bona fides did him no good. Accused of “anti-Blackness,” he lost his job.
The country’s Founding Fathers not only understood but predicted the tendency toward divisiveness and factionalism, including over trivial matters, Haidt observes. James Madison wrote that even “where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”
Studies confirm that social media has corroded trust in government, news media, and other institutions. This lack of trust in key institutions and authorities, whether in law enforcement, government and its agencies, and universities, further tears the societal fabric. “Every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side,” Haidt observes.
In the Internet, everyone gets to have their own truth.
And when we no longer trust our institutions, “we lose trust in the stories told by those institutions.” This explains the uproar and controversies over everything from how we teach history, public health advice on vaccines and masks, the viability of election results, and other issues. In the Internet, everyone gets to have their own truth.
Nowhere has the damage of social media been felt more keenly than among our nation’s youth. The more kids marinate in the world of social media, the more their emotional health suffers. Not only adults, but kids use their social media pages as opportunities for personal branding or “performances,” often posting intimate information. Girls in particular get swept up in the tyranny of looking at other girls’ photos, comparing their own looks unfavorably and often becoming despondent.
In an interview on Amanpour & Co, Haidt said that “Kids were the canaries in the coal mine” about social media’s dangers. “Something fundamentally changed in the universe in the early 2010’s and things got weird. When kids got smart phones, girls went straight for the visual platforms such as Instagram and Tumblr, boys went for You Tube and video games. After holding steady for many years, rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide nearly doubled after 2012.”
Unsplash.com, Florian Schmetz
Facebook’s own study corroborated this terrible fact. And while Haidt admits that previous panics over new technology often proved unwarranted, “this is different. There’s never been such a sudden upturn in social problems, and the kids themselves say it’s Facebook and Instagram making them anxious. This is a national emergency.”
What can be done? Haidt urges parents to encourage more unstructured play for younger children, where they can learn cooperation, compromise, conflict resolution, learning to accept defeat, and other vital skills. (They will also learn to use their own imaginations to entertain themselves.) These skills will better equip them to resist the coarsening of social interactions that encourage conflict that is fostered on social media.
He also recommends that Congress update the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act to prevent companies from collecting information from children without parental consent until they are 16 (they can now collect it at 13) and hold companies responsible for enforcing it.
Depression and anxiety make people shrink from engaging with new people, ideas, and experiences they feel are threatening. This may explain why over the last decade—when the first generation of kids to grow up with social media went to college—we have seen college students throw tantrums and try to “cancel” invited speakers whose views they reject. These students insist that talks by such people are more than unwelcome but are in fact “dangerous, emotionally devastating, a form of violence.” Spineless administrators too often have bowed to this hyper- fragility, feeding the beast.
“‘He who only knows his side of the case knows little of that.’ We need different views to push against each other.”
Around 2014, Haidt saw that when professors questioned a study result in a way that bucked the new leftist morality, “huge social sanctions rained down on you on social media,” he said in the same interview. “But when people feel intimidated even a little, they go silent. And when people go silent, people get stupid,” he added. Quoting John Stuart Mill, Haidt said, “‘He who only knows his side of the case knows little of that.’ We need different views to push against each other.”
With the Twitter or Facebook mob ready to attack at any instant, it’s no wonder that people in all walks of life and who work for companies and organizations large and small now refuse to speak their minds in the workplace or at school. In the process, they rob their institutions of healthy discussion, the kind of discussion that ideally promotes critical thinking skills and encourages tolerance for diverse views. But as Haidt writes, “when an institution punishes internal dissent, it shoots darts into its own brain.”
This helps explain why so many companies and other institutions went “woke” in rapid succession in 2020 and 2021. At the New York Times and other newspapers, several editors resigned after publishing guest opinion essays that offended the fragile staffers. (How ironic that “journalists” whose careers should be built on intellectual curiosity and a quest for truth prove to have no curiosity outside their own narrow views.)
Medical associations also “advised medical professionals to refer to neighborhoods and communities as ‘oppressed’ or ‘systematically divested’ instead of ‘vulnerable’ or ‘poor.’” Expensive private schools suddenly rewrote their curricula to please the woke. “Progressive parents who argued against school closures were frequently savaged on social media and met with the ubiquitous leftist accusations of racism and white supremacy. Others in blue cities learned to keep quiet,” Haidt writes.
Social media didn’t create political and social polarization, but it has made it infinitely worse. While the “red state” and “blue state” divide was already widening before 2010, “the enhanced virality of social media thereafter made it more hazardous to be seen fraternizing with the enemy or even failing to attack the enemy with sufficient vigor.”
A small minority of angry people dominate discussion forums and alienate more rational, calm, and moderate voices who withdraw from discussions.
Social media has its benefits, the author acknowledges. It “gives voice to some people who had little previously, and it has made it easier to hold powerful people accountable for their misdeeds, not just in politics but in business, the arts, academia, and elsewhere… However, the warped ‘accountability’ of social media has also brought injustice—and political dysfunction.”
It has given more power to “trolls and provocateurs,” for example. While people don’t become hostile because they go online, a small minority of angry people do become virtual attack dogs and dominate discussion forums. This alienates more rational, calm, and moderate voices who withdraw from discussions.
And this minority really is a minority. A survey of 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 by the group More in Common found that “progressive activists” comprised 8 percent of the population but were the most prolific group on social media, with 70 percent sharing political content over the previous year. The “devoted conservatives” comprised six percent of the population but were the next most prolific online, with 56 percent sharing content.
And so, while the Earth is not flat and the U.S. government did not stage the 9/11 attacks, the architecture of social media has been engineered in a way that urges people to burrow into their little ideological tunnels, creating space for conspiracy theories to flourish and hardening other entrenched views.
We can slow the slide into stupidity when we purposefully engage with other views. “People who think differently and are willing to speak up if they disagree with you make you smarter, almost as if they are extensions of your own brain. People who try to silence or intimidate their critics make themselves stupider.”
The structural power and creativity of 20th century America was made possible by the “capable, vibrant, and productive network of knowledge-producing institutions” that included the world’s best universities, companies that turned scientific advances into life-changing consumer products, and government agencies that supported scientific research.” But this momentum is slowing down because of ideological rigidity and an inability to manage internal disagreement within these institutions.
Unfortunately, Haidt predicts things will get worse as artificial intelligence is already capable of spreading highly believable disinformation through polished essays that have “perfect grammar and a surprising level of coherence.” As AI becomes more sophisticated, “state actors, terrorists, and ideological extremists [will] leverage the social infrastructure underpinning everyday life to sow discord and erode shared reality,” he predicts. This is mind-numbingly scary.
We cannot turn back the clock or stuff the Frankenstein genie back in the bottle. Despite all the damage that social media has wreaked, Haidt believes we can take steps to reverse course. Simple changes to the architecture of social media platforms can mitigate the influence of the “fake and outrage-inducing content.” For example, requiring people to copy and paste content into a new post instead of just pressing the “share” button won’t censor anyone but will slow the spread of content that is likely to be untrue.
He also recommends that platforms institute user verification. This alone would “wipe out most of the hundreds of millions of bots and fake accounts that currently pollute the major platforms” and “likely reduce the frequency of death threats, rape threats, racist nastiness, and trolling more generally,” he writes. Such behavior is far more likely when the source is untraceable.
“We cannot expect Congress and the tech companies to save us. We must change ourselves and our communities.”
The landscape seems more hopeful, Haidt observes, “when we look away from our dysfunctional federal government, disconnect from social media, and talk with our neighbors directly.” The author sees an “exhausted majority” out there that is hungry for traditional give-and-take and is impatient with the angry, extremist, my-way-or-the-highway club—crowded as it is. Most Americans are tired of the fighting, recognize the damage wrought by social media, and are now far more aware of the toll it is taking on children.
In fact, the author points to “hundreds of groups” launched in recent years that are “dedicated to building trust and friendship across the political divide.” These include Braver Angels, where Haidt is a board member, and many others listed at BridgeAlliance.us.
“We cannot expect Congress and the tech companies to save us. We must change ourselves and our communities.” The days after the Tower of Babel was destroyed were “a time of confusion and loss. But it [was] also a time to reflect, listen, and build.”
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