Over the past two decades, social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, 4chan and others have grown to become dominant and influential forces in global culture. In “The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World,” author Max Fisher lays out how this happened and chronicles the damage to society these platforms continue to wreak.
Social media’s primary goal has always been “keeping people glued to their platform as many hours a day as possible” — to consume as much of our time and conscious attention as possible, so the companies can make more money from advertising. Fisher explains how human development and psychology are being exploited by social media to keep people online.
Humans evolved living in small groups. Survival of the group required its members to work together and get along. Thus, humans evolved characteristics that promoted social bonding. People have greater self-esteem when they feel they are socially accepted. Our need to fit in can become obsessive and thus can become a vulnerability. Other vulnerabilities include being susceptible to addiction, divisiveness and “traumatic bonding,” where we compulsively seek a positive response, even at our own expense. Three strong emotions we feel are fear, hate and anger. Add disgust to anger and you get outrage. According to Fisher, moral outrage is a social instinct developed over thousands of years to alert group members of someone’s misbehavior and to keep members in line.
Survival of the community also required people embracing an attitude of “us versus them,” and showing hostility towards the “out-group.” Fisher writes that these characteristics are “mostly unconscious, almost animalistic, and therefore easily manipulated, whether by opportunistic leaders or profit-seeking algorithms.”
Mark Zuckerberg and other social media leaders understood these human characteristics and vulnerabilities and worked hard to exploit them. Manipulation was built into their platforms from the beginning. Knowing that creating strong emotions will keep users online, recommendation engines were designed to promote extreme and divisive content, rewarding inflammatory language and outlandish claims. Algorithms quickly drive users to content that’s geared to outrage. Fisher writes, “When you see a post expressing moral outrage, 250,000 years of evolution kick in. It impels you to join in.” Social instincts overwhelm reason. Social media makes us more likely to share misinformation and conspiracies.
Facebook designed the “like” button to exploit people’s unconscious need to be accepted. It’s so powerful that it even shows up on brain scans. Likes and shares provide users with high-volume social rewards — and a small hit of dopamine, social media’s accomplice inside our brains. Facebook’s filters are manipulated to show users only posts that fit our preexisting biases, again enhancing the users’ feeling of self-worth. Social media algorithms have no moral compass or reality check and quickly steer users to the greatest emotion-driving, extreme content.
Algorithmic amplification and online incentives don’t just indulge extremists; they create them.
They reward hyperpartisan provocateurs, for-profit click farms and outright scammers, with no concern for fairness, accuracy or the greater good. They drive people into “self-reinforcing echo chambers of extremism.” Fisher writes that social media has become “so powerful and pervasive in our lives, that it changes how we think, behave, and relate to one another.” When this effect is multiplied across billions of users, social media has had the power to change society itself. And not for the better.
Fisher provides multiple examples of terrible consequences caused by social media. Many involved mass violence stemming from false rumors, such as the 2017 Rohingya genocide in Myanmar and the 2019 massacre at a mosque in New Zealand, as well as many other mass murders that regularly occur. Social media has driven child pornography, greatly magnified the anti-vaccine movement and was the primary platform behind Pizzagate, QAnon, The Big Lie and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Unethical social media provocateurs have invented bullshit attacks on thousands of people, ruining their lives.
Social media has created a new, reimagined far-right. Fisher writes that social media was able to cultivate what previously far-right groups could not: “a large and willing audience for white nationalism among America’s youth.” The number of far-right white nationalists on Twitter increased by 700% between 2012 and 2016. Far-right enthusiasts who greatly benefited from social media include conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, former President Donald Trump and Trump’s former chief strategist and senior counsel, Steve Bannon. Bannon has even boasted that the new “alt right” could now “activate the army” through social media. And, of course, Russia is a fervent user of social media in efforts to turn Americans against each other. Russia didn’t invent anything. Russia just used the tools social media made available.
YouTube is arguably the worst. The YouTube algorithm stitches together channels and makes recommendations towards extreme content, knowing extremism drives usership, and then clusters mainstream channels with hatemongers, subcultures and conspiracy theorists. Distortion is imposed on millions of people. But wait! It’s worse! Google owns YouTube and actively promotes YouTube extremist videos in Google’s search engine to boost revenue and profits.
Throughout all of this, social media companies have been constantly warned and given examples of the harm they are causing. Their response has always been to do the opposite of what was needed, instead tweaking algorithms to increase user time. They have behaved like tobacco companies and implemented the strategy of “diminish, discredit, deny.” They refuse to take responsibility and stick to the assertion that “any bad behavior is the users’ fault, no matter how crucial a role the platform played in enabling, encouraging, and profiting from those transgressions.” They claim that there is nothing more important than free speech (except, of course, making money) and thus have done the absolute minimum to address the problems. Their focus remains on aggressive growth.
To me, one of the scariest elements of this story is that now social media platforms are using advanced machine learning to forgo human involvement and let their algorithms adjust on their own to drive even greater user online addiction. What could go wrong?
How can we stop this madness? Fisher writes, “The problem with Facebook is Facebook.” These problems can’t be fixed by making tweaks along the margin. Simply put, we need to turn off the algorithms, get rid of engagement-based ranking and go back to the old days when social media just displayed your friends’ posts from newest to oldest. Change would come quickly if social media companies were held legally responsible for the consequences of anything their platforms promoted. Through forceful regulation, we can quickly stop the harm social media is inflicting on our culture, our society, our country and on the entire world.
Dave Gamrath is a longtime community activist who founded InspireSeattle.org and serves on multiple regional boards and committees.
Read more of the Dec. 28, 2022-Jan. 3, 2023 issue.