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For example, she has suggested modifying the "Share" function on Facebook so that after any content has been shared twice, the third person in the chain must take the time to copy and paste the content into a new post. It's been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. Reforms should limit the platforms' amplification of the aggressive fringes while giving more voice to what More in Common calls "the exhausted majority. What changes are needed? Across eight studies, Bor and Petersen found that being online did not make most people more aggressive or hostile; rather, it allowed a small number of aggressive people to attack a much larger set of victims. One result is that young people educated in the post-Babel era are less likely to arrive at a coherent story of who we are as a people, and less likely to share any such story with those who attended different schools or who were educated in a different decade. Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared. President Bill Clinton praised Nonzero's optimistic portrayal of a more cooperative future thanks to continued technological advance. Enhanced-virality platforms thereby facilitate massive collective punishment for small or imagined offenses, with real-world consequences, including innocent people losing their jobs and being shamed into suicide. The "Hidden Tribes" study, by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8, 000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. But it is within our power to reduce social media's ability to dissolve trust and foment structural stupidity. Reform Social Media.
"Pizzagate, " QAnon, the belief that vaccines contain microchips, the conviction that Donald Trump won reelection—it's hard to imagine any of these ideas or belief systems reaching the levels that they have without Facebook and Twitter. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, "We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon. In the first decade of the new century, social media was widely believed to be a boon to democracy. But after Babel, nothing really means anything anymore––at least not in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth.
It has not worked out as he expected. Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single "mass audience, " all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. Read more of Jonathan Haidt's writing in The Atlantic on social media and society: When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Democracy After Babel. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following 2009. One example of such a reform is to end closed party primaries, replacing them with a single, nonpartisan, open primary from which the top several candidates advance to a general election that also uses ranked-choice voting. People who try to silence or intimidate their critics make themselves stupider, almost as if they are shooting darts into their own brain. That habit is still with us today.
American factions won't be the only ones using AI and social media to generate attack content; our adversaries will too. Social media has weakened all three. He was the first politician to master the new dynamics of the post-Babel era, in which outrage is the key to virality, stage performance crushes competence, Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country, and stories cannot be shared (or at least trusted) across more than a few adjacent fragments—so truth cannot achieve widespread adherence. Part of America's greatness in the 20th century came from having developed the most capable, vibrant, and productive network of knowledge-producing institutions in all of human history, linking together the world's best universities, private companies that turned scientific advances into life-changing consumer products, and government agencies that supported scientific research and led the collaboration that put people on the moon. We now know that it's not just the Russians attacking American democracy. The progressive left is so committed to maximizing the dangers of COVID that it often embraces an equally maximalist, one-size-fits-all strategy for vaccines, masks, and social distancing—even as they pertain to children. Anxiety makes new things seem more threatening. In the Book of Genesis, we are told that the descendants of Noah built a great city in the land of Shinar. Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous. The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation. On the right, the term RINO (Republican in Name Only) was superseded in 2015 by the more contemptuous term cuckservative, popularized on Twitter by Trump supporters. The early internet of the 1990s, with its chat rooms, message boards, and email, exemplified the Nonzero thesis, as did the first wave of social-media platforms, which launched around 2003. Myspace, Friendster, and Facebook made it easy to connect with friends and strangers to talk about common interests, for free, and at a scale never before imaginable.
In their early incarnations, platforms such as Myspace and Facebook were relatively harmless. A successful attack attracts a barrage of likes and follow-on strikes. The cause is not known, but the timing points to social media as a substantial contributor—the surge began just as the large majority of American teens became daily users of the major platforms. In a comment to Vox that recalls the first post-Babel diaspora, he said: The digital revolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those broken pieces of glass.
But that essay continues on to a less quoted yet equally important insight, about democracy's vulnerability to triviality. In a 2018 interview, Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, said that the way to deal with the media is "to flood the zone with shit. " Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal solvent, breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached. But by rewiring everything in a headlong rush for growth—with a naive conception of human psychology, little understanding of the intricacy of institutions, and no concern for external costs imposed on society—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another's speech. The mid-20th century was a time of unusually low polarization in Congress, which began reverting back to historical levels in the 1970s and '80s. For techno-democratic optimists, it seemed to be only the beginning of what humanity could do. The high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the global Occupy movement. A widely discussed reform would end this political gamesmanship by having justices serve staggered 18-year terms so that each president makes one appointment every two years. The universal charge against people who disagree with this narrative is not "traitor"; it is "racist, " "transphobe, " "Karen, " or some related scarlet letter marking the perpetrator as one who hates or harms a marginalized group. Blind and irrevocable trust in any particular individual or organization is never warranted. The members of Gen Z––those born in and after 1997––bear none of the blame for the mess we are in, but they are going to inherit it, and the preliminary signs are that older generations have prevented them from learning how to handle it. This one change would wipe out most of the hundreds of millions of bots and fake accounts that currently pollute the major platforms.
When our public square is governed by mob dynamics unrestrained by due process, we don't get justice and inclusion; we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth. First, the dart guns of social media give more power to trolls and provocateurs while silencing good citizens. Newspapers full of lies evolved into professional journalistic enterprises, with norms that required seeking out multiple sides of a story, followed by editorial review, followed by fact-checking. Zero-sum conflicts—such as the wars of religion that arose as the printing press spread heretical ideas across Europe—were better thought of as temporary setbacks, and sometimes even integral to progress. Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country's future—and to us as a people. A surge in rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among American teens began suddenly in the early 2010s. These jobs should all be done in a nonpartisan way. The motives of teachers and administrators come into question, and overreaching laws or curricular reforms sometimes follow, dumbing down education and reducing trust in it further. What regime could build a wall to keep out the internet?
Whatever else the effects of these shifts, they have likely impeded the development of abilities needed for effective self-governance for many young adults. Right-wing death threats, many delivered by anonymous accounts, are proving effective in cowing traditional conservatives, for example in driving out local election officials who failed to "stop the steal. " They confront you with counterevidence and counterargument. It's more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. The group furthest to the left, the "progressive activists, " comprised 8 percent of the population.
We've been shooting one another ever since. Reforms should reduce the outsize influence of angry extremists and make legislators more responsive to the average voter in their district. They knew that democracy had an Achilles' heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to "the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions. " Is our democracy any healthier now that we've had Twitter brawls over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Tax the Rich dress at the annual Met Gala, and Melania Trump's dress at a 9/11 memorial event, which had stitching that kind of looked like a skyscraper? Trump did not destroy the tower; he merely exploited its fall.
They admit that in their online discussions they often curse, make fun of their opponents, and get blocked by other users or reported for inappropriate comments. The wave of threats delivered to dissenting Republican members of Congress has similarly pushed many of the remaining moderates to quit or go silent, giving us a party ever more divorced from the conservative tradition, constitutional responsibility, and reality. Mark Zuckerberg may not have wished for any of that. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. The volume of outrage was shocking. According to the political scientist Karen Stenner, whose work the "Hidden Tribes" study drew upon, they are psychologically different from the larger group of "traditional conservatives" (19 percent of the population), who emphasize order, decorum, and slow rather than radical change. Once social-media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics. More generally, to prepare the members of the next generation for post-Babel democracy, perhaps the most important thing we can do is let them out to play. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. And when traditional liberals go silent, as so many did in the summer of 2020, the progressive activists' more radical narrative takes over as the governing narrative of an organization. One of the major goals was to polarize the American public and spread distrust—to split us apart at the exact weak point that Madison had identified.
Someone on Twitter will find a way to associate the dissenter with racism, and others will pile on. For example, university communities that could tolerate a range of speakers as recently as 2010 arguably began to lose that ability in subsequent years, as Gen Z began to arrive on campus. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same. The problem is that the left controls the commanding heights of the culture: universities, news organizations, Hollywood, art museums, advertising, much of Silicon Valley, and the teachers' unions and teaching colleges that shape K–12 education. Now, however, artificial intelligence is close to enabling the limitless spread of highly believable disinformation. But gradually, social-media users became more comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations. In the 10 years since then, Zuckerberg did exactly what he said he would do. It would also likely reduce the frequency of death threats, rape threats, racist nastiness, and trolling more generally. A democracy cannot survive if its public squares are places where people fear speaking up and where no stable consensus can be reached. Tragically, we see stupefaction playing out on both sides in the COVID wars. Historically, civilizations have relied on shared blood, gods, and enemies to counteract the tendency to split apart as they grow. In February 2012, as he prepared to take Facebook public, Mark Zuckerberg reflected on those extraordinary times and set forth his plans.