Gideon Lewis-Kraus: How Harmful Is Social Media?

By Dilip -

In April, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published an essay in The Atlantic in which he sought to explain, as the piece’s title had it, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Anyone familiar with Haidt’s work in the past half decade could have anticipated his answer: social media. Although Haidt concedes that political polarization and factional enmity long predate the rise of the platforms, and that there are plenty of other factors involved, he believes that the tools of virality—Facebook’s Like and Share buttons, Twitter’s Retweet function—have algorithmically and irrevocably corroded public life. He has determined that a great historical discontinuity can be dated with some precision to the period between 2010 and 2014, when these features became widely available on phones.

“What changed in the 2010s?” Haidt asks, reminding his audience that a former Twitter developer had once compared the Retweet button to the provision of a four-year-old with a loaded weapon. “A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities.

Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly a billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.” While the right has thrived on conspiracy-mongering and misinformation, the left has turned punitive: “When everyone was issued a dart gun in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in the brain. And, unfortunately, those were the brains that inform, instruct, and entertain most of the country.” Haidt’s prevailing metaphor of thoroughgoing fragmentation is the story of the Tower of Babel: the rise of social media has “unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.”

These are, needless to say, common concerns. Chief among Haidt’s worries is that use of social media has left us particularly vulnerable to confirmation bias, or the propensity to fix upon evidence that shores up our prior beliefs...

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/we-know-less-about-social-media-than-we-think


Marina Hyde: The question every politician should be asking is, what does Mark Zuckerberg want with us?


Musk & Twitter: the first lab rat to take over the laboratory


Elon Musk is the king of trolls in an age of troll politics / What better owner for Twitter than master of the ill-advised tweet?


 KATIE KADUE - Twitter as Suspended Hell


Facebook has just suffered its most devastating PR catastrophe yet / Jonathan Freedland: Is Facebook the tobacco industry of the 21st century?


‘It is obscene’: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie pens blistering essay against social media sanctimony


How the Facebook-Reliance combine and the farm laws pave the way for digital colonisation


‘Moral bankruptcy’: whistleblower offers scathing assessment of Facebook


Book review: The revolution will not be tweeted / Jeffrey Lawrence: Who Owns Your Academic Community?

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