But a few responses were published, including one from Meta (formerly Facebook), which pointed to studies it said contradicted my argument. The essay proved to be surprisingly uncontroversial-or, at least, hardly anyone attacked me on social media. Their long-running project, which ramped up online in 2013, was to fabricate, exaggerate, or simply promote stories that would increase Americans’ hatred of one another and distrust of their institutions. A fourth group-Russian agents––also got a boost, though they didn’t need to attack people directly. Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell: The dark psychology of social networksĪll of these groups were suddenly given the power to dominate conversations and intimidate dissenters into silence. It was as if the platforms had passed out a billion little dart guns, and although most users didn’t want to shoot anyone, three kinds of people began darting others with abandon: the far right, the far left, and trolls. Even more important, in my view, was that social-media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook could now be used more easily by anyone to attack anyone.
People could spread rumors and half-truths more quickly, and they could more readily sort themselves into homogenous tribes. I showed how a few small changes to the architecture of social-media platforms, implemented from 2009 to 2012, increased the virality of posts on those platforms, which then changed the nature of social relationships. This spring, The Atlantic published my essay “ Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” in which I argued that the best way to understand the chaos and fragmentation of American society is to see ourselves as citizens of Babel in the days after God rendered them unable to understand one another.
By then, the effects of social media will be radically different, and the harms done in earlier decades may be irreversible. So even if social media really did begin to undermine democracy (and institutional trust and teen mental health) in the early 2010s, we should not expect social science to “settle” the matter until the 2030s. Social-media platforms, meanwhile, can change dramatically in just a few years. This takes time-a couple of years, typically, to conduct and publish a study five or more years before review papers and meta-analyses come out sometimes decades before scholars reach agreement. The research community is built on a quasi-moral norm of skepticism: We begin by assuming the null hypothesis (in this case, that social media is not harmful), and we require researchers to show strong, statistically significant evidence in order to publish their findings. A different possibility is that social media is quite harmful but is changing too quickly for social scientists to capture its effects. Perhaps we’ve fallen prey to yet another moral panic about a new technology and, as with television, we’ll worry about it less after a few decades of conflicting studies. The lack of consensus leaves open the possibility that social media may not be very harmful. That’s been a boon to social-media companies such as Meta, which argues, as did tobacco companies, that the science is not “ settled.” But academic researchers have not yet reached a consensus that social media is harmful. Social media has changed life in America in a thousand ways, and nearly two out of three Americans now believe that these changes are for the worse. Far-right groups then used a variety of platforms to coordinate and carry out the attack. At a far higher level of conflict, the congressional hearings about the January 6 insurrection show us how Donald Trump’s tweets summoned the mob to Washington and aimed it at the vice president. Recent articles on the rising dysfunction within progressive organizations point to the role of Twitter, Slack, and other platforms in prompting “endless and sprawling internal microbattles,” as The Intercept’s Ryan Grim put it, referring to the ACLU. Look at stories about conflict, and it’s often lurking in the background. W ithin the past 15 years, social media has insinuated itself into American life more deeply than food-delivery apps into our diets and microplastics into our bloodstreams.
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