I know that it’s tempting to blame what happened on Tuesday night — the re-election of a former game-show host and inveterate liar with 34 felony counts and two impeachments as president of the United States — on social media in one form or another. Maybe you think that Musk used Twitter to platform white supremacists and swing voters to Trump, or that Facebook promoted Russian troll accounts posting AI-generated deepfakes of Kamala Harris eating cats and dogs, or that TikTok polarized voters using a combination of soft-core porn and Chinese-style indoctrination videos to change minds — and so on.
In the end, that is too simple an explanation, just as blaming the New York Times’ coverage of the race is too simple, or accusing more than half of the American electorate of being too stupid to see Trump for what he really is. They saw it, and they voted for him anyway. That’s the reality.
It’s become accepted wisdom that platforms like Twitter and Facebook and TikTok spread misinformation far and wide, which convinces people that the world is flat or that birds aren’t real or that people are selling babies and shipping them inside pieces of Wayfair furniture. And it’s taken as fact that these tools increase the polarization of society, turning people against each other in a number of ways, including by inflating social-media “filter bubbles.” We all know this. And particularly when there is an event like a federal election, concern about both of these factors tends to increase. That’s why we see articles like this one from Wired, which talks about how social platforms have “given up” on things like fact-checking misinformation on their networks.
But is there any proof that social media either convinces people to believe things that aren’t true, or that it increases the levels of polarization around political or social issues? I don’t want to give away the ending of this newsletter, but the short answer to both of those questions is no. While social media may make it easier to spread misinformation farther and faster, it hasn’t really changed human nature itself all that much. In other words, social media is more of a symptom than it is a cause.
Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Continue reading “Social media is a symptom, not a cause”