Social Media Is Us...And That's The Problem

We create the digital environment every time we log on, every time we post, every time we engage.

From the spring 2023 issue of the Sacred Heart University Magazine

by Bill Yousman, Ph.D.

It's difficult to overstate the immediate, profound and resounding impact of Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter in October 2022. Simply put, Musk buying Twitter wasn’t just a matter of an entrepreneur purchasing a business; risking hyperbole, it was one of the world’s wealthiest billionaires taking ownership of nothing less than public debate itself. As such, it requires us to look up and really pay attention to a crucially significant moment in cultural and political history.

One of Musk’s first acts was to fire many of Twitter’s executives. He also immediately loosened content restrictions on the platform and restored thousands of accounts previously banned due to the danger they posed to the public wellbeing—accounts such as those of avowed white supremacists or others actively spreading disinformation.

Purveyors of online hate and disinformation celebrated Musk’s changes. Almost as soon as there was enough data to analyze, researchers were reporting that hate speech and misinformation were surging on Twitter, with a sharp rise in racist, antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ slurs and provocations, as well as an increase in wild, unsubstantiated claims about vaccines, the results of the 2020 election, climate change and other contentious issues.

None of this is surprising. It was already known that social media is marred by conspiracy theories, anger, misogyny and divisiveness—and, of course, false beliefs, misconceptions, deliberate lies and propaganda have long preexisted social media. What was newly highlighted, however, is the extent to which the social media industries actually rely on these social ills and, as such, actively feed them. Facebook’s own internal report on extremism, hate and disinformation made note of “compelling evidence that our core product mechanics, such as virality, recommendations and optimizing for engagement, are a significant part of why these types of speech flourish on the platform” (emphasis added). Thus, though social media is perhaps best understood as an amplifier or accelerant rather than a first cause, what is worrying and should not be overlooked is that this is intentional. If our culture is on fire—and it increasingly does seem to be ablaze—social media is not the flames. Nor is it the match. But it very well may be the gasoline.

Thus, for Musk to self-identify as a “free-speech absolutist” in justifying his actions as owner of one of the world’s most influential social media platforms (if not the largest—that distinction goes to Facebook, which currently reports almost three billion monthly users) is effectively to claim “fire will burn where fire will burn” while selling said gasoline to arsonists.

Yet, despite the vitriol, we keep coming back to partake in social media and its offerings, leaving us to wonder: why does it captivate us so? To put it plainly (while liberally borrowing from one of my favorite science fiction films of the 1970s …), because social media is … us!

In Soylent Green, Charlton Heston’s character discovers that the titular substance manufactured to feed an overpopulated world is actually made out of humans themselves. Like Soylent Green, social media is made from human thought, human communication. Indeed, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are only the delivery systems. The content is built from what we post and upload. Billions of us spend innumerable hours gorging ourselves on an endless stream of memes, video clips taken out of context, doctored photos and misleading statements created and shared by people hungry for attention. People, in other words, like us. Because they are us. The Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world play crucial roles because the algorithmic constructs of the platforms are designed to ensure the emotionally charged and often inflammatory content we choose to consume most rises like cream to the top. If social media is filled with hate, anger, bigotry and lies, it is because we are avid diners. It is feeding something in us.

Furthermore, one doesn’t even have to pay attention to social media at all to be affected by it. In Soylent Green, the starving masses don’t have much choice, even as they discover the truth of what they are eating. It is either consume each other or perish. Our own choices are not quite as stark as literal cannibalism, but at the same time we don’t really have the choice to opt out of cultures that are increasingly shaped by social media. It is the zeitgeist of the twenty-first century, playing an outsized role in public discourse as it becomes fodder for coverage even in legacy media like newspapers, radio and television. As the historian Jill Lepore writes about journalists, it’s a mistake to underestimate “the degree to which so many of them appear to have so wholly given themselves over to Twitter—knowing the world through it, reporting from it, being ruled by it.”

Take, for example, cable television’s most popular host, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. Carlson is an undeniably divisive figure, but let’s consider Carlson’s and his employer’s own definition of his role in media. In their own words, Carlson “is not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary.’” Such was the argument of Fox News’s lawyers and the decision of Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil in response to a 2020 slander lawsuit, even though the very name of the network on which he appears seems to imply at least a degree of journalistic integrity. But this just isn’t the case. Stated directly—and their defense really can’t be read any other way—Fox News purposefully pays Tucker Carlson to lie to and mislead his audience.

Despite this, 65% of Republicans, responding to a 2022 poll about news anchors, indicated that they trust him, ranking Carlson higher than most other news anchors and hinting at his influence on the worldview of his devoted fans. As a matter of fairness, it should be noted that a very similar legal defense was made on behalf of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who benefits from similar levels of trust among Democrats.

But for our purposes here, let’s look at both social media’s and Tucker Carlson’s roles in distorting and weaponizing even the most seemingly apolitical (and potentially tragic) experiences in recent public consciousness. On January 2, 2023, at 8:55 p.m. EST, on national television, an outwardly typical NFL collision occurred when a wide receiver for the Cincinnati Bengals ran full steam into Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin. After making the tackle, Hamlin briefly rose to his feet before collapsing. Silence shrouded the stadium as fans, players and team personnel watched CPR being administered to the fallen athlete. As we might expect, Hamlin’s name instantly began trending on Twitter as viewers expressed their concern, fears and sympathy.

It was later determined that Hamlin had likely experienced commotio cordis, wherein cardiac arrest is instigated by a uniquely ill-timed impact to the patient’s chest. Fortunately, due to the immediate medical care he received on the field, Hamlin survived.

But long before his health and safety were assured, something hostile also quickly emerged. Thousands of anti-vaxxers, those who deny the efficacy of vaccines and falsely link them to a wide variety of dangerous health outcomes, took to social media to advance their unfounded claims that the COVID-19 vaccine was responsible for Hamlin’s heart attack. Sadly, this was as predictable as the expressions of sympathy and concern. Imran Ahmed of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, notes, “We have seen consistently that every time a high-profile death has occurred, very quickly anti-vaxxers have jumped on and said, ‘Yes, that happened because of the vaccine, and here’s the information about it.’”

Then, also predictably, the very next night on his primetime broadcast, Carlson amplified and endorsed conspiratorial thinking about Hamlin’s injury to his millions of viewers, calling medical professionals who disputed that it had anything to do with the vaccine “witch doctors” and liars. Put another way, a man whose job—now by legal definition—is to lie to and mislead his verifiably trusting audience told that audience, with no acknowledgement of the irony, that it is the trained medical professionals who are not to be trusted. These provocations then recirculated on social media, a vicious and self-reinforcing cycle.

Disinformation regarding vaccines is only one of many misleading discourses festering on social media and infecting not only the rest of our media environment, but the fabric of our society. Because it’s not just bizarre rants about the earth being flat. Promulgated lies that the 2020 presidential election was stolen erode our trust in the nature of democracy. Unhinged conspiracy theories about satanic, cannibalistic pedophile rings run by celebrities and politicians led to very real death threats and a terrifying armed invasion (what came to be known as “Pizzagate”). Meanwhile, those of us who live and work in Connecticut know all too well how the unfathomable tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary was wildly dismissed as anti-gun propaganda by Alex Jones’s Info Wars screed. It would seem that nothing is so believable as a lie, making hoaxes real and reality a hoax.

Of course, with every action there is a reaction so that, as the writer Freddie deBoer notes, “You have conservative anger over an evolving culture, liberal angst over the continued salience of reactionary populism, leftist fury over our inability to make anything happen. …You have angry conspiracy theorists and angry fact-checkers and angry gamers and angry Redditors …” And it’s not that there isn’t plenty to be angry or judiciously fearful about in 2023. But to harken back to Soylent Green, we are both feeding and eating each other while social media giants turn our metaphorical cannibalism to cash.

Are we overreacting? Sociologists in the 1960s began writing about moral panics, which Stanley Cohen identified as the tendency to recognize a new trend or phenomenon as “a threat to societal values and interests,” leading to cries that something must be done to fight the menace and preserve the social order we are in danger of losing. This has happened repeatedly in cultural history, with a wide variety of manufactured threats from comic books and rock music to video games and rap … and now social media. So how frightened should we be, really?

First, it must be fully recognized that not only is social media here to stay, but as humanity evolves parallel to the technology it creates, social media is now as fundamental to how we communicate as oxygen is to speech. Thus, the challenge social media presents is how to walk the razor’s edge. We can easily use social media to cook and eat lies and disinformation about vital matters of public health and democracy, to viciously attack one another, to play out and accelerate all our fears and anger. Or we can use social media to help bring communities together, to advance knowledge and political engagement and to challenge propaganda, bigotry and hate.

Our first task must be to hold the Musks and Zuckerbergs, and all those who own and control the technologies, to account. We must demand that they recognize the social responsibilities of their privileged positions as clearly as they do the opportunities to generate more and more profit from the manipulation of our attention, the gathering of our data and the stoking of our anger. This will require public policy interventions that free enterprise absolutists might not like, but as with other industries that have the potential to inflict damage, social media is simply too pervasive and powerful for us to take a laissez-faire approach in the innocent hope things will get better – particularly as we know the current intentional design of social media ensures that it won’t.

But as with all previous popular innovations that have changed the world, the technologies of social media and human agency are inevitably intertwined. It has never been, nor will it ever be, people or technology. It is always people and technology. They are inseparable. Therefore, we must also hold ourselves accountable as we reflect on how we use social media, the role we allow it to play in our lives and what types of behaviors we perform online. The scholar Osita Nwanevu puts it like this: “While it will never solve a single structural problem, it’s important for each of us to practice self-discipline, particularly with things that might easily become all-consuming. Social media is one of them.”

We are social media. Social media is us. We create the digital environment every time we log on, every time we post, every time we engage; and, for better or worse, we will create the future of social media just as social media will play a significant role in creating the futures of our neighborhoods, our communities, our nations and ourselves.

Some writers have referred to social media as a grand experiment. It is also a test. Not our first, nor our last, but a real test nevertheless. If we fail, the consequences will be severe.