Are We Uniquely Stupid?

What I read: Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid by Jonathan Haidt. Published April 11, 2022.

I read this article because it was all over social media, widely posted and shared. I know why. It resonates with truth. It’s one of those articles you read and you’re unconsciously nodding your head in agreement as you scan down the page.

A few days after reading Jonathan Haidt’s article, I stumbled on him being interviewed on Amanpour & Co. It was interesting to watch him further explain some of his thoughts expressed in the article.

Haidt’s article is a long one. I recommend reading it, but the video is a nice summation of the article’s content too.

Using the metaphor of the Biblical story of Babel, Haidt begins his article with this observation and concern.

The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. 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.

To anyone paying attention, it’s obvious our country is divided. There is the increasingly wide red and blue chasm, but there is also fragmentation occurring throughout American society. Think about what’s happening with the schism within the left and within the right. As pointed out in the article, this fragmentation is also happening in companies, universities, families, and elsewhere. It feels like the entire country and its subset components are fracturing as an unprecedented speed.

Haidt points the finger of primary blame directly at social media. From the early days of internet chat rooms and message boards to the later iterations of platforms like Myspace, Friendster, and the now dominant Facebook, the assumption had been that these free spaces in which people could engage in discourse and communication would, like many past technologies, lead to beneficial outcomes for everyone. It was assumed that such social media platforms would be a boon to democracy. When the vast citizenry of a country could communicate and share ideas ubiquitously, it was thought it would serve as a buffer from a rogue political regime that might try to impose its will on the people.

The tipping point Haidt identifies is 2012 when Facebook went public.

In February 2012, as he prepared to take Facebook public, Mark Zuckerberg reflected on those extraordinary times and set forth his plans. “Today, our society has reached another tipping point,” he wrote in a letter to investors. Facebook hoped “to rewire the way people spread and consume information.” By giving them “the power to share,” it would help them to “once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.”

In the 10 years since then, Zuckerberg did exactly what he said he would do. He did rewire the way we spread and consume information; he did transform our institutions, and he pushed us past the tipping point. It has not worked out as he expected.

While Haight points out that civilizations have historically relied on shard blood, gods, and enemies to remain stable as they grow, social scientists have identified three forces that keep successful democracies together: social capital; strong institutions; and shared stories. Haight contends that social media has weakened all three.

When I read the following, it gave me pause. I’m probably guilty of this very thing, fostering my “brand” through my social media presentation. I’d like to claim I don’t do this, but I think most of us do, at least to some extent. How we are perceived by others has too often become more important than the truthfulness or usefulness of what we share. I also fear I’ve contributed to the uptick in viral dynamics.

But gradually, social-media users became more comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations. As I wrote in a 2019 Atlantic article with Tobias Rose-Stockwell, they 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.

Around 2009, the social media experiment began to take a turn for the worse with the introduction of being able to easily like and share posted content, functionality that began to appear on all the platforms.

Once the people behind social media technology realized that all the likes produced data about what its users liked most, algorithms were developed to present each user with content that was most likely to spark a like or some other type of engagement.

The following seems to encapsulate the heart of why things went so wrong and why these developments are chipping away at our democracy.

Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.

I succumbed as many have to the allure of my posts and tweets getting lots of likes and shares. I wasn’t alone. The gold standard of social media virality to make all of us internet famous for a few blinks of an eye became a major driver of user activity online.

This new game of likes and shares encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics. No longer guided by our true preferences, we were nudged to behaviors we would not otherwise have displayed. We liked and shared ourselves into a quagmire of algorithmic predetermination that presented to us as free choice, but it wasn’t really. The algorithmic technological gods ended up fostering a ramped-up level of online outrage.

The founders of our country realized that democracy would only thrive in an atmosphere that encouraged reasoned, thoughtful, and slowly developed opinions. Social media shattered that protective bulwark. We began to split ourselves into increasingly outraged factions.

The tech companies that enhanced virality from 2009 to 2012 brought us deep into Madison’s [James Madison] nightmare. Many authors quote his comments in “Federalist No. 10” on the innate human proclivity toward “faction,” by which he meant our tendency to divide ourselves into teams or parties that are so inflamed with “mutual animosity” that they are “much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.”

But that essay continues on to a less quoted yet equally important insight, about democracy’s vulnerability to triviality. 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.”

Think of all the ridiculous things that have spawned outrage among some. From the mere mention of systemic racism or the acknowledgement that LGBTQ people exist to the hyper trivial of a dress worn to an event, the online outrage seems to deal most often in the trivial while ignoring the truly important issues and facts.

Look around, at our own country and elsewhere, and you can see the rise of autocracies or the full-on embracing of autocratic tendencies. Our former President is a stark example of elevating someone who did not deserve our country’s highest leadership position but who gained it utilizing the trivial to enrage his base. I’m sure I’ll take some heat for that statement, but it’s what I believe. It’s tempting to lump all Republicans into the same camp, but I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt that they’re better than their former leader even if right now too many still seem to coddle him and play to his lemming base.

That’s not to take Democrats and others on the left off the hook. Much like the right, the left often attaches to the trivial to bolster the outrage on their side of the political spectrum and that’s not particularly useful or healthy either. I’ve been guilty of this.

Ultimately, the devolving of social media into a place not truly representative of the population using it resulted in our collective trust being diminished. Once trust in people or institutions is questionable, autocracies can rise on the back of propaganda that preys on the distrust that develops on social media.

The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but 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.

Haidt includes a quote from former CIA analyst and author, Martin Gurri, that seems to me like it summarizes the mess we’re in rather succinctly.

The digital revolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those broken pieces of glass. So the public isn’t one thing; it’s highly fragmented, and it’s basically mutually hostile. It’s mostly people yelling at each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another.

Despite what I want to believe were best intentions, the major social media platforms unwittingly weakened trust in people, institutions, and shared stories, those things that typically hold large, secular democracies together.

Although Trump wasn’t the initial impetus for this collapse of trust due to social media’s curated influence, he exploited it for his own gain.

He was the first politician to master the new dynamics of the post-Babel era, in which outrage is the key to virality, stage performance crushes competence, Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country, and stories cannot be shared (or at least trusted) across more than a few adjacent fragments—so truth cannot achieve widespread adherence.

Whether it’s the right side of the political divide ostracizing any voice that wants to engage in reasoned discourse or the left engaging in rampant callout culture, it all contributed to the situation in which we now find ourselves.

Social media has elevated previously small voices beyond their true proportional weight. These are the trolls who chip away at decency and reason with their vicious attacks. These trolls use intense aggression, name calling, and hostile interactions that do nothing do foster discourse but do a lot to enrage and rally the masses.

Across eight studies, Bor [Alexander Bor] and Petersen [Michael Bang Petersen] found that being online did not make most people more aggressive or hostile; rather, it allowed a small number of aggressive people to attack a much larger set of victims. Even a small number of jerks were able to dominate discussion forums, Bor and Petersen found, because nonjerks are easily turned off from online discussions of politics. Additional research finds that women and Black people are harassed disproportionately, so the digital public square is less welcoming to their voices.

Haidt talks about the platforms giving more power to the extreme voices while squelching the moderate majority. This in particular jumps out at me.

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.

I experienced this when those of us on the Democratic side in the 2016 election often tore each other apart. I think it hurt us in the general election terribly, but that opinion will forever be but one among many on my left/moderate-leaning side of the American political equation.

Lastly, Haidt contends that by giving everyone an equal voice it essentially deputizes everyone to administer justice with no due process. Online vigilantism is definitely a thing I’ve witnessed on both the broader national scale and within my own smaller communities.

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.

I’m going to let you dive into the article itself or watch the related video to let Haidt explain more about the impacts of social media.

Let me offer you this because I think it’s important.

The most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction with people who don’t share your beliefs. They confront you with counterevidence and counterargument.

I like people to argue with me. Well, most of the time. Sometimes the tenor of the arguments are so vicious and filled with vitriol that I won’t tolerate them. But if an argument is delivered with sincerity and civility, I’ll listen. I still might not agree, but I’ll listen.

Honestly, I believe that if we could magically put every left and right and middle person in our country together for one-on-one or small group conversations, the heat of our collective disagreement would lessen considerably.

The crux of Haidt’s argument on the stupidization of America is this.

This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They 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.

I think I’ve highlighted enough of the content to hopefully raise some alarm bells inside your brain that perhaps we’ve gone down a dark path embracing social media in its current form. I encourage you to read the article in its entirety. This is a really important piece of writing that needs to be shared, discussed, and acted upon or our democracy and society may crumble beyond recognition or repair.

In the accompanying video, Haidt He points out something I've advocated for a while as a needed change to social media. Social media companies must be able to authenticate a member upon opening an account. They should be able to verify (1) they’re a real person and not a bot or foreign agent, (2) that they live in a specific country, and (3) that they are old enough to use the platform. People can still post under pseudonyms if they want, but the companies should require authentication of their users.

Maybe I’m dreaming, but I’d love to see those three things happen. In the meantime, discuss this article with your friends. Let’s see if we can start enough of a discussion about the negative ramifications of social media that we figure out ways to blunt its impacts on social discourse and reasoned thinking.

Now I’m laughing at myself because I realize my articles here all close with the link below to, among other things, all my social media platforms. So, I want you to join me there, but let’s do so realizing we’re all jumping into a pit of vipers together and need to protect each other as best we can.

You can use this link to access all my writings and social media and ways to support my work.