A few days back Jonathan Haidt wrote what he calls his most important essay in The Atlantic. It's a must read in terms of a compelling diagnosis of several disturbing symptoms arising from the pervasiveness of social media that we see in societies across the world. See also his interview in FT here.
He says that while its initial days appeared promising in terms of strengthening social connections, since 2009 or so, social media has changed for the worse. The important thing is that only the baser and negative emotions can be effectively channeled by social media, but not anything constructive and co-operative. They can spread outrage but not channel similar public energies into constructive purposes.
His argument is that the features of social media which allowed information to go viral helped channel the baser and negative emotions of human beings into creating social/political factions among the population whose outrage gradually eroded the public trust and credibility of social and political institutions, thereby fraying the social and political contracts.
He describes how the virality of social media has weakened democracy,
Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three... became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand—activities that might impress others but that do not deepen friendships in the way that a private phone conversation will. Once social-media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics.... in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own “Share” button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. “Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms. Shortly after its “Like” button began to produce data about what best “engaged” its users, Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a “like” or some other interaction, eventually including the “share” as well...The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking... James Madison notes that people are so prone to factionalism that “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.” Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous.
Recent academic studies suggest that social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general. A working paper that offers the most comprehensive review of the research, led by the social scientists Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, concludes that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy.”... the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation. When people lose trust in institutions, they lose trust in the stories told by those institutions... Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.
This is a good example of how such virality leads to bad social outcomes
History curricula have often caused political controversy, but Facebook and Twitter make it possible for parents to become outraged every day over a new snippet from their children’s history lessons––and math lessons and literature selections, and any new pedagogical shifts anywhere in the country. The motives of teachers and administrators come into question, and overreaching laws or curricular reforms sometimes follow, dumbing down education and reducing trust in it further. One result is that young people educated in the post-Babel era are less likely to arrive at a coherent story of who we are as a people, and less likely to share any such story with those who attended different schools or who were educated in a different decade.
Haidt points to three stages through in which the social media has contributed to the erosion of the social contracts
First, the dart guns of social media give more power to trolls and provocateurs while silencing good citizens... Second, the dart guns of social media give more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority... Finally, by giving everyone a dart gun, social media deputizes everyone to administer justice with no due process. Platforms like Twitter devolve into the Wild West, with no accountability for vigilantes.
This about political polarisation in the US is brilliantly illustrative,
The “Hidden Tribes” study, by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. The one furthest to the right, known as the “devoted conservatives,” comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population. The group furthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent. These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society. What’s more, they are the two groups that show the greatest homogeneity in their moral and political attitudes. This uniformity of opinion, the study’s authors speculate, is likely a result of thought-policing on social media: “Those who express sympathy for the views of opposing groups may experience backlash from their own cohort.” In other words, political extremists don’t just shoot darts at their enemies; they spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team. In this way, social media makes a political system based on compromise grind to a halt.
The virality feature of social media allows the outrage-fuelled voices of a loud few to silence the nuanced views of the quieter moderate and balanced many. In fact, the extremists end up spending as much time throwing dart guns at their own moderates as at their opponents in the other camp. The the more damaging consequence of the social media virality may therefore be the marginalisation and silencing of moderates on all sides. The result is that the extremists on both sides easily silence their own moderates.
The most pervasive obstacle to good thinking is confirmation bias, which refers to the human tendency to search only for evidence that confirms our preferred beliefs. Even before the advent of social media, search engines were supercharging confirmation bias... But social media made things much worse. The most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction with people who don’t share your beliefs. They confront you with counterevidence and counterargument. John Stuart Mill said, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that,” and he urged us to seek out conflicting views “from persons who actually believe them.” 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, almost as if they are shooting darts into their own brain.
... many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s... got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted. The shift was most pronounced in universities, scholarly associations, creative industries, and political organizations at every level (national, state, and local), and it was so pervasive that it established new behavioral norms backed by new policies seemingly overnight. The new omnipresence of enhanced-virality social media meant that a single word uttered by a professor, leader, or journalist, even if spoken with positive intent, could lead to a social-media firestorm, triggering an immediate dismissal or a drawn-out investigation by the institution. Participants in our key institutions began self-censoring to an unhealthy degree, holding back critiques of policies and ideas—even those presented in class by their students—that they believed to be ill-supported or wrong.
... when the newly viralized social-media platforms gave everyone a dart gun, it was younger progressive activists who did the most shooting, and they aimed a disproportionate number of their darts at these older liberal leaders. Confused and fearful, the leaders rarely challenged the activists or their nonliberal narrative in which life at every institution is an eternal battle among identity groups over a zero-sum pie, and the people on top got there by oppressing the people on the bottom... The punishment that feels right for such crimes is not execution; it is public shaming and social death... Thanks to enhanced-virality social media, dissent is punished within many of our institutions, which means that bad ideas get elevated into official policy.
What can be done to salvage liberal democracy from this abyss? Haidt suggests three reforms to redesign democracy for the digital age,
We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.
This on the more general negative impact of social media on the lives of adolescents, the Gen Z,
And while social media has eroded the art of association throughout society, it may be leaving its deepest and most enduring marks on adolescents. A surge in rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among American teens began suddenly in the early 2010s. (The same thing happened to Canadian and British teens, at the same time.) The cause is not known, but the timing points to social media as a substantial contributor—the surge began just as the large majority of American teens became daily users of the major platforms. Correlational and experimental studies back up the connection to depression and anxiety, as do reports from young people themselves, and from Facebook’s own research, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. Depression makes people less likely to want to engage with new people, ideas, and experiences. Anxiety makes new things seem more threatening... Because rates of teen depression and anxiety have continued to rise into the 2020s, we should expect these views to continue in the generations to follow, and indeed to become more severe.
I am reminded of earlier blog post on the work of John Gray who makes the distinction between progress in the material realm and in cultural, ethical, and political realms. Unlike the former, there is nothing sacrosanct about progress in the latter,
At a scientific level, human societies progress in a monotonic manner, moving further up the chain of scientific development over time. This knowledge is never unlearnt but is accretive or monotonically increasing. Two, at an ethical or political level, human societies adapt to the emerging contexts and manifest as the prevailing norms and culture. But this is not accretive, and there is nothing called progress. What was repugnant a few generations back can become acceptable and then relapse back to being repugnant, and then back as acceptable over time. So there is nothing permanent about socio-political or socio-economic organisations like liberal democracy or free market system. The gains in science and technology are a cumulative advance. These realised gains are not lost, and they are the basis for further gains. We often see accelerating and exponential gains. However, in ethics and politics, what is gained is very quickly, often invisibly, lost. The upward arc that is a feature of science and technology does not exist for ethics and politics.
It would be interesting for a social scientist to similarly examine the impact of social media in Indian society and politics. There are certain important differences in the context from that in the US, though its impacts are likely just as dismal and disturbing, perhaps even more so given the several absent mitigating factors and present amplifying factors (compared to the US).
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