Jonathan Haidt opines in The Atlantic why The Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.

Seeing a fractured socio-political landscape, he blames this unintended consequence squarely on Facebook and social media in general:

“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.”

He says the Like, Share and Retweet buttons and the algorithms capitalizing on these behaviours allowed posts to go viral for the first time in history:

“This new game encouraged dishonesty 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. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.””

Jonathan says that, effectively, “from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly 1 billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.” Lamentably, “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.”

“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.”

His conclusion? “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.”

His prescription? “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.”

Other takeaways:

• Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous.
• Social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.
• 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.
• Nothing really means anything anymore––at least not in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree.
• America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society.
• Thanks to enhanced-virality social media, dissent is punished within many of our institutions, which means that bad ideas get elevated into official policy.
• America’s tech companies have rewired the world and created products that now appear to be corrosive to democracy, obstacles to shared understanding.

My take: I noticed this change at Facebook. Once upon a time, it was a great, fun place to stay in touch with people and build community over shared interests. Then the news feed and group pages changed. It’s so much harder now to actually communicate with your friends. I wonder if “fragmenting” myself into multiple accounts might help?