#readwise # Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid  ## Metadata - Author: [[Jonathan Haidt]] - Full Title: Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid - URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/ ## Summary Haidt claims that social media has weakened all three principal building blocks of a healthy democracy: high levels of trust in social structures (friendships, family ties, community organizations, etc.), strong institutions, and shared stories. By amplifying polarization and extreme view points, social media has promoted the 'us-versus-them' mentality, where every election becomes a question of life-or-death. This caused the erosion of trust in social structures: people don't talk about politics anymore, and don't consider the other viewpoint simply because it belongs to the other side. ^kaqpux By promoting fake news, trust in institutions practically evaporated (especially if those institutions are controlled by 'them'). Lastly, we stopped identifying as members of a nation and instead identify as members of a much smaller political tribe. This leads to being locked into our own echo chambers and prevents us from discovering our mistakes (think [[On Liberty]]). ## Highlights **The high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011**, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the global Occupy movement. That is also when **Google Translate became available** on virtually all smartphones, so you could say that 2011 was the year that **humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel. We were closer than we had ever been to being “one people,” and we had effectively overcome the curse of division by language.** For techno-democratic optimists, it seemed to be only the beginning of what humanity could do. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt3tw837fgcck1es7qgc6a23)) --- **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==.** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt3sknqp56j7051k7wbw3r72)) --- 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. **Later research showed that [posts that trigger emotions](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1618923114)––especially [anger at out-groups](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2024292118)––are the most likely to be shared.** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt3sqq6kwjb7142df3ey5tcf)) --- By 2013, **social media had become a new game**, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous” for a few days. **If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in ==hateful comments==**. ... **This new game ==encouraged [dishonesty](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap9559) and mob dynamics==: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action** --- An autocracy can deploy propaganda or use fear to motivate the behaviors it desires, but a democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions. Blind and irrevocable trust in any particular individual or organization is never warranted. But **==when citizens lose trust in elected leaders==**, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then **every decision becomes contested; ==every election becomes a life-and-death struggle== to save the country from the other side** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt3t18kjb49akr44hwg6wgzq)) --- 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](https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/p3z9v/) 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 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](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/the-internet-doesnt-have-to-be-awful/618079/)==.** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt3t3dtcccn9a50radznhr35)) ^hkmian --- **==When people lose trust in institutions, they lose trust in the stories told by those institutions==. That’s particularly true of the institutions entrusted with the education of children.** History curricula have often caused political controversy, but Facebook and Twitter make it possible for [parents to become outraged every day](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/05/gops-critical-race-theory-fixation-explained/618828/) 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.** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt3t4mz46vhce204vfkwds8s)) --- **==By rewiring everything in a headlong rush for growth==—with a naive conception of human psychology, little understanding of the intricacy of institutions, and [no concern for external costs imposed on society](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/facebook-papers-democracy-election-zuckerberg/620478/)—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==.** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt3t8g71f47jqtcm7ebvvn9q)) --- Trump did not destroy the tower; he merely exploited its fall. 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt3takar8dmk36skmgdfbc4n)) --- “Politics is the art of the possible,” the German statesman Otto von Bismarck said in 1867. In a post-Babel democracy, not much may be possible. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt3tc63zaqt1fc3hb7vnndgp)) --- Social media has given voice to some people who had little previously, and it has made it easier to hold powerful people accountable for their misdeeds ... However, the **==warped “accountability” of social media has also brought injustice—and political dysfunction—in three ways==.** - **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](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-puritans-mob-justice-canceled/619818/)==. Platforms like Twitter devolve into the Wild West, with no accountability for 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 [innocent people losing their jobs](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/) and being [shamed into suicide](https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-suicide-by-facebook-shaming-1.5366184). 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. ^yk0psw --- The most pervasive obstacle to good thinking is [confirmation bias](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/cognitive-bias/565775/), 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](https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/301367349.pdf) confirmation bias, making it far easier for people to find evidence for absurd beliefs and conspiracy theories ... **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. --- In his book [*The Constitution of Knowledge*](https://bookshop.org/a/12476/9780815738862), Jonathan Rauch describes the historical breakthrough in which Western societies developed an “epistemic operating system”—that is, a set of institutions for generating knowledge from the interactions of biased and cognitively flawed individuals ... **Part of America’s greatness in the 20th century came from having developed the most capable, vibrant, and productive network of knowledge-producing institutions in all of human history**, linking together the world’s best universities, private companies that turned scientific advances into life-changing consumer products, and government agencies that supported scientific research and led the collaboration that put people on the moon. But this arrangement, Rauch notes, “is not self-maintaining; it relies on an array of sometimes delicate social settings and understandings, and those need to be understood, affirmed, and protected.” **So what happens when an institution is not well maintained and internal disagreement ceases, either because its people have become ideologically uniform or because they have become afraid to dissent?** 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. ^i4fvv3 --- The new omnipresence of enhanced-virality social media meant that a single word uttered by a [professor](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/08/professor-suspended-saying-chinese-word-sounds-english-slur), [leader](https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/true-diversity-requires-generosity-of-spirit/), or [journalist](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/02/12/donald-mcneil-new-york-times-fallout/), 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](https://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid) by their students—that they believed to be ill-supported or wrong. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt3w02g1w0vqstm62ye36sj0)) --- In the Democratic Party, the struggle between the progressive wing and the more moderate factions is open and ongoing, and often the moderates win. The problem is that the left controls the commanding heights of the culture: universities, news organizations, Hollywood, art museums, advertising, much of Silicon Valley, and the teachers’ unions and teaching colleges that shape K–12 education. And in many of those institutions, dissent *has* been stifled: 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt3w7adsvh90qnytd03nt0jm)) --- We can never return to the way things were in the pre-digital age. The norms, institutions, and forms of political participation that developed during the long era of mass communication are not going to work well now that technology has made everything so much faster and more multidirectional, and when bypassing professional gatekeepers is so easy. And yet **American democracy is now operating outside the bounds of sustainability. If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse** during the next major war, pandemic, financial meltdown, or constitutional crisis. What changes are needed? Redesigning democracy for the digital age is far beyond my abilities, but **I can suggest three categories of reforms––three goals that must be achieved if democracy is to remain viable in the post-Babel era. ==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==.** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt3wssmktx7fm1brqr3vhvwc)) --- Political polarization is likely to increase for the foreseeable future. Thus, whatever else we do, **we must reform key institutions so that they can continue to function even if levels of anger, misinformation, and violence increase** far above those we have today. ... **Reforms should reduce the outsize influence of angry extremists and make legislators more responsive to the average voter** in their district. One example of such a reform is to **end closed party primaries, replacing them with a single, nonpartisan, open primary from which the top several candidates advance to a general election that also uses ranked-choice voting.** A version of this voting system has already been implemented in Alaska, and it seems to have given Senator Lisa Murkowski more latitude to oppose former President Trump, whose favored candidate would be a threat to Murkowski in a closed Republican primary but is not in an open one. --- **A second way to harden democratic institutions is to reduce the power of either political party to game the system in its favor**, for example by drawing its preferred electoral districts or selecting the officials who will supervise elections. These jobs should all be done in a nonpartisan way. Research on procedural justice shows that when people perceive that a process is fair, they are more likely to accept the legitimacy of a decision that goes against their interests. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt3wzkec9p9xrgqyk45k288w)) --- A democracy cannot survive if its public squares are places where people fear speaking up and where no stable consensus can be reached. **Social media’s** empowerment of the far left, the far right, domestic trolls, and foreign agents is **creating a system that looks less like democracy and more like rule by the most aggressive.** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt3x08bd4n2mekwx9dps84v6)) --- **Those who oppose regulation of social media generally focus on the legitimate concern that government-mandated content restrictions will, in practice, devolve into censorship. But the main problem with social media is not that some people *post* fake or toxic stuff; it’s that fake and outrage-inducing content can now *attain a level of reach and influence* that was not possible before** 2009. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt3x1v0yr2c0ec9caxhxtyzs)) --- The Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen advocates for simple changes to the architecture of the platforms, rather than for massive and ultimately futile efforts to police all content. For example, [she has suggested modifying the “Share” function on Facebook](https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/42-a-conversation-with-facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen) so that after any 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. Reforms like this are not censorship; they are viewpoint-neutral and content-neutral, and they work equally well in all languages. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt3x4r6xw3mj03ds9w6cnaeq)) --- **Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification as a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers**. Banks and other industries have “know your customer” rules so that they can’t do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same. That does not mean users would have to post under their real names; they could still use a pseudonym. It just means that before a platform spreads your words to millions of people, it has an obligation to verify (perhaps through a third party or nonprofit) that you are a real human being, in a particular country, and are old enough to be using the platform. This one change would wipe out most of the hundreds of millions of bots and fake accounts that currently pollute the major platforms. It would also likely reduce the frequency of death threats, rape threats, racist nastiness, and trolling more generally. **Research shows that antisocial behavior becomes more common online when people feel that their identity is unknown and untraceable.** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt3x6rkmjsh7k9r2mg68smje)) --- Depression makes people less likely to want to engage with new people, ideas, and experiences. Anxiety makes new things seem more threatening. As these conditions have risen and as the lessons on nuanced social behavior learned through free play have been delayed, tolerance for diverse viewpoints and the ability to work out disputes have diminished among many young people. For example, university communities that could tolerate a range of speakers as recently as 2010 arguably began to lose that ability in subsequent years, as Gen Z began to arrive on campus. [Attempts to disinvite visiting speakers rose](https://www.thefire.org/research/disinvitation-database/). Students did not just say that they disagreed with visiting speakers; some said that those lectures would be dangerous, emotionally devastating, a form of violence. Because rates of teen depression and anxiety have [continued to rise into the 2020s](https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-youth-mental-health-advisory.pdf), we should expect these views to continue in the generations to follow, and indeed to become more severe. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt3xc79q3xjmmcte8qz5d9rx))