Social media isn't destroying society

But it does reward and amplify those willing to treat online discourse as a self-contained game.

Photo by Rodion Kutsaiev on Unsplash

One of the dominant narratives of our time is that social media is a technological wrecking ball responsible for everything bad in our society, including polarisation, misinformation, conspiracy theorising, attacks on democracy, collapsing trust in institutions, populism, mental illness, loneliness, radicalisation, misogyny, ethnic riots, and more.

Previously, I’ve expressed scepticism about these narratives. Partly, this is because the evidence for such alarmist ideas tends to be very weak. However, it’s also because social media is routinely blamed for country-specific things—for example, Americans often blame social media for their unique political dysfunction, forgetting that other countries also have social media—or for problems that long predate social media.

Recently, a brilliant and highly-educated person told me that social media has ushered in an unprecedented era of ideological fragmentation, sucking communities into clashing bespoke realities. This person was highly knowledgeable about world history. And yet, it somehow escaped their attention that ideological fragmentation and polarisation were far worse throughout much of pre-social media history.

To take only the most striking example, early-twentieth-century Europe involved intense ideological conflicts between a wide range of political movements, including literal fascists and communists. Tens of millions died as a result of such conflicts. Whole societies fell into brutal forms of oppression. These were not insignificant historical events!

Similar points could be made about any number of other issues.

Is social media responsible for right-wing authoritarian populism? One reason for scepticism is that the attitudes associated with this movement—nationalism, xenophobia, the desire for a strongman, and so on—often found far more extreme, passionate, and widespread support before social media.

Likewise for the conventional wisdom that social media has created a new age of conspiracy theories or “misinformation”. From widespread anti-Semitic conspiracies like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Cold War paranoia, McCarthyism, medieval witch hunts, or the major world religions, extraordinary popular delusions are staple features of the human condition.

The two most deadly ideologies of the twentieth century, fascism and communism, were founded on misinformation and conspiracy theories: the former scapegoated Jews and other groups for societal ills, while communist movements were fuelled by explosive paranoia about capitalist sabotage and hidden bourgeois enemies, not to mention a Marxist worldview that wrongly depicts all property owners and profit makers as parasites. And, of course, similar points could be made about practices like imperialism and slavery, which were legitimised by a vast range of widespread falsehoods and lies.

Or consider one final example: Netflix has recently released ‘Adolescence’ (spoilers ahead), a very well-acted and occasionally well-written series about a teenage boy who murders a teenage girl. The series is intended as a warning about social media and online radicalisation into highly misogynistic incel communities. One of the show’s writers thinks children and adolescents should be banned from social media. Keir Starmer believes the series should be shown in schools to showcase the dangers of social media.

One of the strangest things about the gushing discourse surrounding the series is the complete absence of any compelling evidence that social media is responsible for the sorts of violent acts depicted in the show. But an even stranger thing is that despite the show creators’ propagandistic intentions, what the series actually depicts—a manipulative, rage-filled, and possibly psychopathic teenage boy murdering a girl who publicly humiliated him—is a story as old as humanity.

None of this is to say that social media platforms are harmless. Such significant changes in communication technology have likely had many important consequences, including negative ones. Nevertheless, much of the discourse exploring these consequences is simplistic, alarmist, and historically ignorant. It replaces serious scientific analysis with an attention-grabbing technopanic, lazily treating coarse-grained correlations—for any events or trends in society, they will always be reflected on social media—as clear evidence for causation.

I’m also not denying that a vast amount of popular content on social media is terrible. Admittedly, “social media” here is too broad a label to be useful. Nevertheless, specific platforms like Twitter/X, TikTok, and Facebook obviously often feature and amplify content that’s sensationalist, simplistic, tribal, performative, attention-seeking, narcissistic, and worse. Moreover, such platforms seem to feature significantly more such content than one finds in legacy media.

Why is this?

Does social media gamify communication?

One interesting analysis comes from the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, who argues that Twitter “gamifies” communication.