Tides of poisonous falsehoods washing over social media
Puny barricades put up by well-meaning gatekeepers at Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, fail to stem hurricane-force surges of conspiracy theories, wild speculations, and deliberate lies—all driven, largely, by hate. Social media tech giants have deployed thousands of fact-checkers to keep ceaseless waves of dangerous misinformation at bay, to little effect.
Sorry if metaphors of unchecked waters of doom are overblown, but this is what it feels like to me: the social media landscape is inundated by falsehoods—many of which are playful, engaging, entertaining, and just plain silly, but too many of which are mean-spirited, hateful, and threatening to a civil society. Much of this landscape has become dark and sinister. Where’s the balance? Darned if I know.
This is evident in a Washington Post editorial by three writers analyzing the social media backlash against the caravan of asylum seekers struggling through Mexico en route to the U.S. See: False narratives swarming through social media
The inherent dynamic of social media compounds malicious content: shaping how we think and believe
Is my doomsaying exaggerated? Perhaps. Perhaps it is of a kind with what Donald Trump describes as “truthful hyperbole” which is typically not all that truthful. But what social media have fostered, in one huge virtual space of the internet-connected world, is a climate of raw emotion inherent in how social media shape consciousness.
“Echo chambers” of haters and conspiracy theorists breed malice within their walls, which is bad enough. But the malice spills over into the larger society where a fraudulent “news” outlet such as Fox News spews its poison to a wide audience.
Torrents of malicious content are scary. But scarier still may be the invisible effects of how we process information of all kinds on these platforms. I dealt with this more extensively in a earlier post, The Other Addiction: Is Democracy Sunk?
In the earlier post, I dwelt on commentary by media insiders Paul Lewis and James Williams (where you will find links to their own material). In a nutshell, they argue that social media shape not just what we think and believe, but how we think and believe. To quote Williams, he speaks of how the “attention economy,” of which social media are the communications superstructures, “privileges our impulses over our intentions.”
Lewis and Williams principally address how the “attention economy” makes us susceptible to manipulation by corporate giants, whose chief aim is to sell things. But there’s more to it: how impulses drive, not just what we want and buy, but how we view the world.
Impulses of love and generosity, prolifically spawned by social media, are unquestionably positives. But darker impulses characterized by fear and anger collectively undermine feelings of love and generosity. Which group of impulses gets the upper hand in the real-world society remains to be seen, but as one who grew up long before the internet grabbed hold of our attention, I fear the worst. The worst is represented by the current President of the United States and his zealous supporters, and second worst is the rest of us failing to pay enough attention to our own unconscious biases, suspicions, and simmering anger.