From Optimism to Despair: How Social Media is Ruining Our Public Discourse
Tags: Politics, Morality, Social Media, Psychology

Media Skepticism throughout History

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The relationship between humans and media technology (i.e. the means of conveying information) is a complicated mix of credulity and skepticism. On the one hand, the positives of media are undeniable. The introduction of print media via the moveable type in Europe, for instance, saw the rise in education among the masses and enabled a period of scientific inquiry and rapid technological advancement known as the Renaissance. On the other hand, it is hard to deny that print and broadcast media have also been tools for fueling disinformation and propaganda throughout the world.

Criticism of media goes all the way back to the beginning of recorded history. In his discourse with Phaedrus, Socrates warned against the act of writing or what he called the ‘use of letters’, saying it would “create forgetfulness in the learner’s souls, because they will not use their memories.” Instead, he praised the power of rhetoric as the best means of engraving virtue into the soul.

Fast forward to the 16th century, there were a number of European scholars who openly described a ‘distressing sense of information overload’ brought about by the invention of the printing press. In her 2010 bestselling book, Harvard University Professor of History Ann Blair notes that while Renaissance scholars were elated at the abundance of printed books, they also found it increasingly ‘unmanageable’, to use the words of Swiss scientist Conrad Gessner. He said those words during his attempt to catalogue all existing books in his alphabetical bibliography which he published in 1545, barely a hundred years after the commercialization of the moveable type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg.

We can only imagine that the problem has compounded significantly in the years since then.

The explosion of print media, and the emergence of broadcast media in the 1920s, has had implications that go beyond increased cognitive loading. In his landmark 1962 book on the subject of propaganda, Christian theologian Jacques Ellul wrote the following:

“It is a fact that excessive data do not enlighten the reader or the listener; they drown him. He cannot remember them all, or coordinate them, or understand them; if he does not want to risk losing his mind, he will merely draw a general picture from them. And the more facts supplied, the more simplistic the image”. (Ellul 1965, p.87)

Ellul highlighted the apparent gap between the “unmanageable” wealth of information available to us and our individual capacity to process and make value judgments therefrom, wherein lies the real danger. Because individuals are overwhelmed with information and struggle with the associated chaos of having to put it together into a coherent narrative, they readily adopt the “informed opinion” given to them by media establishments, state-sponsored or otherwise. This either serves to integrate the masses into the larger social body or agitate the masses into destroying established order.

Scholars Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky offered an analysis of the news coverage by the media establishments in the USA, a liberal democracy, as examples of how public sentiment and perception can be easily influenced by media. In their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent, they propose what they called the ‘propaganda model’ to describe how multiple levels of filters are present in print and broadcast news media to determine and curate the news cycle in order to facilitate compliance and consent among the populace for the US government and their activities abroad during the Cold War.

Social Media: Excitement to Disillusionment

Being able to publicly pontificate and accumulate Likes in the process was everything my approval-seeking high school mind wanted. “if America was giving social media a Yelp review, a majority would give it zero stars” — A Republican Pollster

As incisive as these observations about media were, they were nevertheless written prior to the digital revolution that is the commercialization of the internet, which fundamentally changed the manner in which ideas are exchanged among the masses. Ellul died in 1994 and the latest edition of Manufacturing Consent was published in 2002. With the rise of email and social media in the late 2000s, active participation in the production and dissemination of ideas was no longer restricted to establishment media gatekeepers, but freely available to the masses where internet services are available.

At its inception, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter were greeted with considerable excitement, at least personally. After having never cracked over 100 comments on my Friendster profile, I caved and signed up for Facebook in 2008. I particularly liked how I could connect with people with whom I had no confidence to interact in real life. Moreover, being able to publicly pontificate and accumulate Likes in the process was everything my approval-seeking high school mind wanted.

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Beyond the whimsical aspect of social media, there was also genuine optimism about how the internet and social media could change societies across the globe. I personally remember the great admiration I had for the use of Twitter to provide real-time on-the-ground coverage of events such as the latest developments in the 2010 Arab Spring, as well as for netizens around the world to show solidarity with the people seeking change in their respective countries. Initially, I, like most people, thought that the increased connectivity and decentralization of information production would lead to the rise of liberal democracies across the globe marked by enlightened civil discourse.

Fast forward to 2016, the Arab Spring had come and gone, leaving behind protracted chaos and fighting to this day whose victims are no longer regarded as worthy victims for media coverage. Donald Trump wins the U.S. presidential election, sending my personal Facebook news feed into a hysterical frenzy and me into digital obscurity in order avoid the drama. The initial excitement for many had faded into a state of disillusionment and anxiety about the future. Despite social media’s initial promise of increased connectivity, Americans are more divided and dissatisfied with their social media experience and their views on tech companies.

The extent of the dissatisfaction is palpable. According to a 2019 NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll, a larger majority (> 60%) of respondents comprising of Americans said that social media “wastes time” and “spreads unfair attacks and rumors”, while a smaller majority“ (> 50%) said it “spreads lies and falsehoods” and “divides us”. One Republican pollster commented that “if America was giving social media a Yelp review, a majority would give it zero stars”– yikes !

Moreover, this is not purely a populist or uninformed sentiment. In a 2020 Pew Research poll, a plurality (49%) of tech experts said that technology will significantly weaken democracy, citing issues with distortion of reality and the weaponization of information and the glaring problem of social media-abetted tribalism.

So what went wrong? Why has all the optimism surrounding social media evaporated within a decade of its introduction?

Developments in Social Media

To understand what changed for the worse in terms of our experience on social media, we need to first identify the various changes that have occurred on social media since its inception and how these contribute to our current social media environment.

When considering the evolution of social media, I will restrict myself to Facebook and Twitter because I personally, along with many others, find these two to be more mired in bad behavior (e.g. misinformation and public spats). In contrast, Instagram, for instance, has proven to be less susceptible to such outcomes due to its structural minimalism and its being visual-based. Thus, I will omit it from the discussion at hand.

The first change has to do with traffic volume. It is evident that the number of social media users has increased dramatically; from 2006 to 2019, the number of Americans using social media rose from 11% to 72% of the population.

The second change is the wider availability of shareable internet content for social media platforms. When social media and smartphones first appeared in the late 2000s, it accelerated the rise of mobile-friendly websites, with either older websites updating themselves to suit the times or new digital media companies emerging that specialized in mobile content production. Prior to that, web developers had little concern for user experience and the packaging of their content, key things to consider when attracting web traffic and engagement.

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The third change is the development of key user experience features that result in the structuring of online interactions. Facebook and Twitter, arguably the oldest social media platforms of relevance to political discourse, have undergone many user experience changes since its inception. On Facebook, the Like button was only introduced in 2009. Likewise, the Retweet function on Twitter, which had come to define the platform, was also released in 2009. Facebook then followed up with the Reactions feature, which is higher resolution sequel of the Like button, in 2016.

The confluence of these factors proved potent in changing the nature of our social lives and online public discourse. Users found themselves having more fellow users with whom to engage, more content to spur and motivate discourse, and more personal/social incentives to start and engage in debate.

With more than half of Americans using at least one social media platform, it is likely that we’ll encounter people with different perspectives from us. But barring the occasional actor engaged in malicious online social behavior (i.e. trolling, threatening users etc.), the presence of people with different opinions is nothing particularly problematic. Most liberal democracies have had to deal with a populace that is philosophically and politically heterogeneous. Perhaps our current dissatisfaction is unique to social media and not just the effect of external trends.

Sure enough, in a 2016 survey, a small majority of Americans (59%) felt that social media puts an additional layer of exhaustion and stress to already-fraught political discourse. Moreover, the same poll found that social media discussions are less civil, less informative and more angry compared to in-person discussions for sizeable plurality of users (49%, 34% and 49%, respectively). As to why this is the case, perhaps the answer is to be found in the behavior of users of social media, the content being circulated on social media and the structures that allow for such outcomes.

The Economy of Fake News

As described earlier, the emergence of mobile-friendly and shareable digital media content came concurrently with the rise of social media. Although the internet and social media were initially seen as egalitarian and populist in terms giving a voice to the masses, that did not prevent establishment print and broadcast media outlets from moving into this new digital realm. At the same time, new digital media companies (e.g. Buzzfeed News, Huffington Post, NowThis News, Vox, Breitbart, Rebel News) arose that specialized in producing regular news content, analysis and commentary to be shared primarily on social media.

The revenue model of these media companies is something worth describing to some detail, because it is the primary factor in motivating and sustaining the operations of these media companies. In the days of broadcast media, studio producers and their affiliated TV stations had their costs covered by advertisers/sponsors who saw the expenditure as a marketing investment provided viewership is sufficiently high.

Digitally, the revenue model is similar: companies and advertising agencies pay content producers to run ads or do product placements in order to boost their own sales and sustain the operations of the content producer. Producers can also obtain startup funding from venture capitalists in exchange for some return on their investment (i.e. profit or growth). Thus, for most new startup digital companies, there is enormous pressure to produce content and draw in traffic that would become the basis for attracting ad revenue and thereby sustaining operations.

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…a new industry has emerged to extract revenue and profit from the emotion of the masses while playing hard and fast with the truth, leaving civil discourse as a casualty.

To meet investors’ expectations, these new media companies ran on tight budgets and rapidly produced content, with questionable journalistic results. Tight budgets meant that companies could only hire a small team of writers, typically fresh college graduates. This small team of writers would be sufficient for rapid production of content that would subsequently be packaged with a marketable veneer to be read by audiences, all this at the fraction of the cost of traditional big-budget content producers.

However, all this speed meant a tradeoff in quality or substance. Having foregone a team of on-the-ground reporters or dedicated researchers, much of the written content is a rapidly repackaged retake on an already existing story covered by more established news media companies, companies that slowly but inevitably moved into the digital market, further saturating it.

The net effect is what some commentators call ‘churnalism’ whereby news, cultural and political content are generated at high-volume to turn a profit or achieve economic viability in a market economy. To be fair, this is not an entirely new phenomenon unique to our age. Nevertheless, the phenomenon is well documented and journalists widely recognize the practice as falling short of the ideals of robust and independent journalism.

The proliferation of recycled content is not harmful per se, except that with every iteration of the story, the probability of facts becoming distorted increases. Moreover, in a hyper-competitive media market landscape, each firm is has an incentive not only to be the first to publish, but also to ramp up their coverage or take on the same story in a bid to attract more traffic and make more ad revenue.

Strikingly, it turns out that the ‘best take’ from a financial standpoint, the one that matters most to venture capitalists and investors, is to side with the audience and also to elicit an emotional response, positive (e.g. affection and moral satisfaction) or negative (e.g. disgust and moral outrage).

The benefits of siding with the audience are obvious as the alternative would mean possibly alienating the target audience and losing traffic. Because active social media users are predominantly younger and more politically progressive on average, new digital media companies adopted a left-leaning position in the content they wished to produce.

This resulted in left-leaning writers being at a productive advantage because they could easily generate the appropriate content without being prompted. Thus, as time goes on, the writing teams of these companies inadvertently but steadily became more progressive, with writers of the opposing viewpoint being pushed out, voluntarily or not. A similar phenomenon is true for media companies wishing to cater only to right-leaning audiences.

The benefits of provoking an emotional response, however, were less clear in the context of digital media revenues, yet manipulation of human emotions via print and broadcast media is a well-studied and practiced art known as propaganda. Selective coverage of convenient atrocities and worthy victims was the means by which U.S. media establishments captured and influenced the sentiments of their viewers, usually for the purpose of mobilizing support for U.S. efforts to stop the global spread of communism.

In Nazi Germany, Hitler and his followers successfully used print and broadcast media to convince the German populace to support the Nazi agenda of an extreme German ethno-nationalistic political struggle. They primarily exploited the lingering resentment of the German populace from the First World War (see the Stab-in-the-back myth), making dramatic references to beloved tokens of German culture such as Wagner’s operas in order to persuade the populace to grant them power and legitimacy.

In the digital media landscape, emotional manipulation is just as potent in controlling the masses primarily for monetary goals (I’m probably engaged in it right now in my writing). Researchers from New York University reported in 2017 that the use of moral-emotional language in messages increased its diffusion in cyberspace by 20%. More diffusion, means more views, resulting in more clicks and site traffic, which generates more ad revenue, thereby providing for the livelihoods of the staff and writers, as well as a return on investment for the investors and stakeholders.

In short, increased competition in the digital market led to news media, both establishment and new digital-based ones, sacrificing journalistic standards to increase market share and to meet their corporate bottom lines. Content became increasingly editorialized, catered to audiences and designed to evoke strong emotions, thereby making it more viral and capable of drawing traffic.

Thus, a new industry has emerged to extract revenue and profit from the emotion of the masses while playing hard and fast with the truth, leaving civil discourse as a casualty. Of course, digital media establishments are not the only ones to blame for producing content that is of questionable veracity, politically partisan and loaded with moral-emotional language. Social media users also engage in this via more modest and amateur content production in the form of micro-blogs (as is the case for Tweets and Facebook posts), memes, vlogs and other video production.

In spite of the less-than-financially lucrative prospects of news genre content production, ordinary people nevertheless engage in it with enthusiasm, whether in an independent capacity or under the auspices of a corporate structures. So what are the incentives for doing so if not financial?

Social Media Today: A Gladiatorial Circus

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The desire for increased social status is a common motivator for our actions in public.

The answer is that it is socially lucrative. The desire for increased social status is a common motivator for our actions in public. Non-political content producers gain influence and a following primarily through displayed expertise and competency in a particular field. High-quality professional production, exciting and engaging content: these are the marks of those who rise to the top of the hierarchy of their chosen fields (e.g. filmmaking, songwriting, video game streaming etc.).

For those dabbling in news and cultural/political content, another key dimension in attaining influence is the appearance of moral respectability. For content producers whose livelihoods rely on attracting a following, being cast out socially for moral repugnance is especially negative since it would mean the loss of credibility and goodwill, resulting in the evaporation of their livelihoods.

But if they can commandeer the appearance of integrity, they would gain the admiration of viewers and build a loyal following whom they can influence and from whose patronage they get their livelihoods. Thus, they are doubly incentivized to exhibit signals of moral uprightness in the content they produce and in their public communication.

Mind you, social status from moral respectability is not a desire limited to public figures and those in the business of producing news content. As social creatures, humans are overwhelmingly motivated to be seen as moral actors in their everyday lives because norm-breaking behavior generally makes one vulnerable to gossip, preening and ostracism from peers.

Thus, both ordinary people and professional content producers are motivated to broadcast their moral uprightness, and the primary means by which this is done on social media is participating in moral discourse. With this social framework in mind, news and current events, then, can be seen as a continual stream of litmus tests or indicators of one’s moral standing.

Public moral discourse is an important contributor to promoting societal moral improvement. “Calling it like it is” allows us identify deficiencies where they exist and spur cooperative action on the matter. Foregoing this would enable the proliferation of these deficiencies, which then exact compounding costs on society at large.

That being said, public moral discourse is problematic because it is ineffective and easily done with mixed motives. Philosophy professors Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke used conventional concepts of social psychology to illustrate how moral discourse progressively devolves into a counterproductive self-aggrandizing spectacle which they call “moral grandstanding”. To be fair, they are not accusing everyone engaging in moral discourse of grandstanding, but they nonetheless point out that grandstanding is at work whenever one aims to convince others (e.g. within or outside one’s own in-group) that one is morally respectable.

In their essay, Tosi and Warmke note the marks of moral grandstanding to include the following:

1) Piling on: reiteration of previously stated point without providing additional input.

2) Ramping up: bringing up stronger claims about the matter under discussion.

3) Trumping up: insisting on the existence of additional moral problems where there is none.

4) Excessive displays of emotion: this is rather self-explanatory

5) Claims of self-evidence: making references to one’s own person or status to justify one’s arguments.

To illustrate these marks using a recent (and, for many of us, personally relevant) example, consider the following fictional Facebook discussion on the breaking news of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis:

A: A man literally begs for his life as policemen mercilessly put him in a chokehold. How has America come to this where an unarmed man is subdued killed in broad daylight by the police? B: I saw this too. No one deserves to die like this. Breaks my heart. C: I just hope that justice is served and that these dirtbag policemen get locked away for a long long time. Absolutely sickening, and I’m just disgusted at my friends who would still defend crooked cops. D: As a long-time advocate for social justice, I can now say that reform has failed us. When a Black man can still murdered in cold blood by the police in 2020, I’d say it’s time to abolish the police. E: Oh please, when you’ve had 200+ years of slavery and 99 years of segregation, should we be surprised that this happened in America in 2020? No. Racism is built into the very core and foundation of this country, period. Make no mistake what Trump meant by Make America “Great” Again.

Breaking down the discussion thread in terms of the framework offered by Tosi and Warmke, “A” makes the original post and implicitly states their righteous bewilderment and disgust at the incident.

“B” then piles on, registering their viewpoint on the matter that is in alignment with “A”. They also use explicit displays of emotion to highlight the seriousness with which they approach the issue at hand.

“C” ramps up the conversation from one of bewilderment to one of moral outrage and indignation. Moreover, conflating a broad support for cops with a defense of the action in question, “C” explicitly and publicly denounces those who support policemen.

“D” appeals to their own role as a long-time advocate for social justice to argue for a more extreme position on the matter (i.e. abolition).

“E” trumps up charges against the legitimacy of the nation as a whole, and against the sitting president, insinuating that the cruelty of the incident in question is the true goal of the said leader.

Now, consider what might happen when a dissenting or skeptical viewpoint is presented from a sixth individual who perhaps took special issue with “C”’s demand for jailtime:

F: Yeah, I mean, this looks awful and indefensible. But let’s not rush to charge these policemen with murder until we get all the facts. After all, it is better than ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.

(Now, to be sure, the evidence that we currently have is more than enough to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Derek Chauvin is guilty of murder. But again, this is merely a fictional scenario set for when the story first broke.)

The suggestion of innocence on the part of the policemen involved by “F” would constitute a sharp break from the norms represented by the five people (“A” through “E”). It is entirely conceivable that the five, and others who align with their moral norms, would mount some pushback on “F”. They might even pile on, ramp up or trump up each other’s criticism of “F” as part of their pushback and punishment for what they view as the morally repugnant and norm-breaking behavior of “F”.

In response, friends or sympathizers of “F” might then be driven to mount a defense for “F”. The defense might involve liking the original statement by “F”, piling on using alternative digital media content that supports “F”. In so doing, they create a parallel performance of moral grandstanding for their own in-group.

Now, we have two opposing camps engaged in a public faceoff. Because “A” through “F” and their respective camps appear as a digital avatars on a screen, it is easy for both sides to dehumanize each other and thus shut out all opportunity to authentically engage and listen. Mired with barbs and strongly emotive words, at some point the discussion devolves into a theatre of emotionally satisfying blows, with both sides striving for the final word and neither side likely to back down from their original position.

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Whenever we see members of our cultural/political in-group being piled upon, we perceive it as a threat to the interests and wellbeing of the entire group, are thus driven to jump in and defend group interests.

Sounds familiar? Of course, this thread is fictional and the words are entirely made up for illustrative purposes. However, this kind of moral grandstanding and mob behavior is pervasive in our social media discourse for two reasons: the first is individual self-interest in gaining social status and avoiding ostracism from one’s in-group as described earlier; the second and more surprising reason is the individual’s interest in the status and wellbeing of their in-group.

Explaining this group-centric interest, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote that humans are mostly individualistic but exhibit highly group-oriented behavior on occasion. He summed this up in the simple metaphor “we are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.”

Taking an evolutionary psychology perspective, Haidt argues that pre-civilization humans and hive animals (e.g. bees, ants and wasps) shared similar challenges (e.g. territory, needy offspring and confronted with rival neighboring groups) that incentivized in-group cooperation. Thus, according to Haidt, humans evolved as the only primates with hive-like ‘ultrasocial’ instincts and the ability to share and communicate intentionality, which are critical for coordinating activities (e.g. group hunting) and delegating roles for group ends.

In our modern era, group-centric behavior where the individual is subsumed into a larger group entity can be found in organized religion, team sports and our partisan politics. Whenever we see members of our cultural/political in-group being piled upon, we perceive it as a threat to the interests and wellbeing of the entire group, are thus driven to jump in and defend group interests.

Thus, putting everything together in simple terms, writers and content producers working in a faulty profit-driven media ecosystem write stories and package them with an emotionally-manipulative and highly-political spin to be published on the internet and shared on social media. The audience then sees the story, predictably gets an emotional reaction, shares the story on social media and initiates a moral discourse around the story in the process. This draws their circle of friends and beyond into the moral discourse where emotions are strong and the social stakes are high.

Consistent with dualistic nature of morality, the moral discourse gives rise to two opposing sides that view each other as morally repugnant. The discourse quickly becomes polarized, making things more angry and less likely to achieve a satisfactory resolution for both sides. Meanwhile, much ado has been wrought, which means more clicks and traffic to the digital media websites, resulting in them getting a bigger cut of that sweet ad revenue money.