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Social Media Made Us Stupid - and How to Fix It (theatlantic.com) 141

Posted by EditorDavid from the I'm-with-stupid dept.
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the New York University's School of Business, argues in the Atlantic that social-media platforms "trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting." But that was just the beginning.

He now believes this ultimately fueled a viral dynamic leading to "the continual chipping-away of trust" in a democracy which "depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions." The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer (an international measure of citizens' trust in government, business, media, and nongovernmental organizations) showed stable and competent autocracies (China and the United Arab Emirates) at the top of the list, while contentious democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and South Korea scored near the bottom (albeit above Russia).... Mark Zuckerberg may not have wished for any of that. 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.
In the last 10 years, the article argues, the general public — at least in America — became "uniquely stupid." And he's not just speaking about the political right and left, but within both factions, "as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families." The article quotes former CIA analyst Martin Gurri's comment in 2019 that the digital revolution has highly fragmented the public into hostile shards that are "mostly people yelling at each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another."

The article concludes that by now U.S. politics has entered a phase where truth "cannot achieve widespread adherence" and thus "nothing really means anything anymore--at least not in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree." It even contemplates the idea of "highly believable" disinformation generated by AI, possibly by geopolitical adversaries, ultimately evolving into what the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory has described as "an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological extremists leverage the social infrastructure underpinning everyday life to sow discord and erode shared reality."

But then the article also suggests possible reforms: The Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen advocates for simple changes to the architecture of the platforms, rather than for massive and ultimately futile efforts to police all content. 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. Reforms like this...don't stop anyone from saying anything; they just slow the spread of content that is, on average, less likely to be true.

Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification as a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers. Banks and other industries have "know your customer" rules so that they can't do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same.... This one change would wipe out most of the hundreds of millions of bots and fake accounts that currently pollute the major platforms.... Research shows that antisocial behavior becomes more common online when people feel that their identity is unknown and untraceable.

In any case, the growing evidence that social media is damaging democracy is sufficient to warrant greater oversight by a regulatory body, such as the Federal Communications Commission or the Federal Trade Commission. One of the first orders of business should be compelling the platforms to share their data and their algorithms with academic researchers.

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.... Congress should update the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which unwisely set the age of so-called internet adulthood (the age at which companies can collect personal information from children without parental consent) at 13 back in 1998, while making little provision for effective enforcement. The age should be raised to at least 16, and companies should be held responsible for enforcing it. 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. Stop starving children of the experiences they most need to become good citizens: free play in mixed-age groups of children with minimal adult supervision...
The article closes with its own note of hope — and a call to action: In recent years, Americans have started hundreds of groups and organizations dedicated to building trust and friendship across the political divide, including BridgeUSA, Braver Angels (on whose board I serve), and many others listed at BridgeAlliance.us. We cannot expect Congress and the tech companies to save us. We must change ourselves and our communities.
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Social Media Made Us Stupid - and How to Fix It More

Social Media Made Us Stupid - and How to Fix It

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  • Maybe this is not an ideal situation and people are finally realising the rules and insititutions are sh1t and have been created to allow the elite to progress while keeping the pesky normal people at bay. Obviously dictatorships are behind the trend but they will eventually catch up.

    • Re:Internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of ru (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rudy_wayne ( 414635 ) on Saturday April 16, 2022 @07:01PM (#62453126)

      stable and competent autocracies (China and the United Arab Emirates) at the top of the list, while contentious democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and South Korea scored near the bottom

      People in China and UAE have more "trust" in their government only because the government tightly controls all information. People only hear what the government wants them to hear. If the people knew what was actually going on they would have a lot less trust in the government.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 )

        People in China and UAE have more "trust" in their government only because the government tightly controls all information.

        Not really. Chinese people are far better informed than you have been led to believe and the UAE does not censor much at all.

        Citizens of China and the UAE trust their governments because they have seen enormous improvements in their lives.

        Living standards have quadrupled in the UAE and octupled in China within living memory.

      • Re:Internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of ru (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Saturday April 16, 2022 @07:48PM (#62453230)

        It's an easy story to tell yourself. In reality, if things are going well for them people don't much care about the details.

        Many a dictator has risen to power by promising to stop the street violence, clean up the corruption, fix the economy, or make the trains run on time. Many of those were actually causing the street violence or the source of the corruption, but nobody really cares so long as the new guy makes the problems go away.

    • Re:Internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of ru (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Nrrqshrr ( 1879148 ) on Saturday April 16, 2022 @07:03PM (#62453128)

      One does not prevent the other. Though I do agree with you that the internet has in general opened people's eyes to possibilities and different ideas, thus giving them the chance of being a little more knowledgeable about everything, it also made it very easy to seek quick alternatives instead of taking the time to build anything concrete. This is the most "connected" of all generations, yet loneliness is off the roof.
      At the risk of sounding like an old geezer, back in my time you had limited options, and so you make do with whatever you have. Now it's very easy to find an alternative, and so at the first sign of trouble everyone just jumps ship. This applies to romance, friendship, work, politics...
      Yes, there is lack of trust due to the institutions being shit. There is lack of trust due to misinformation. But there is also lack of trust because trust takes time to build.
      An ideal society takes time and effort to build, but social media made it easy to look for convenient truths whenever the unpleasant ones appeared.

      • Fair enough, but where will that trust come from?

        It's like a society of beaten dogs:. if institutions don't improve, if people have no reason to invest in those institutions, why would anyone bother?

        Social media seems more a symptom of sentiments previously there, mirroring how marginalized groups on the fringe have responded.

        The problem now is everyone is fringe.

        • Social Media isn't (just) a symptom. Positive reinforcement is a mechanism that creates/strengthens views.

          • Considering there are all manner of views expressed and all manner of positive reinforcement, exactly which ones? Considering the infrequency anyone changes their entire worldview within the span of 280 characters, let alone the entirety f the web, which views are created and which are strengthened?

            Just the ones I disagree with.

            It's blasphemy laws repackaged in scientism, with anyone with a contrary claim obviously groomed into that position.

            But not me.

            • You seem confused as to what I am suggesting. I am not commenting on WHICH views are reinforced or strengthened.

              I was arguing against your assertion that Social Media is just "symptom of sentiments already there".

              I am arguing that social media changes the trajectory of "sentiments" - to use your word, to the extent that it is effectively a cause rather than a symptom.

    • Re:Internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of ru (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Saturday April 16, 2022 @07:50PM (#62453236)
      It's important to distinguish between rules within a social contract vs. dictates handed down from self-appointed power. The former is essential for civilization to exist, and despite what deluded First World suburban anarchists might believe, civilization is not a conspiracy to "sap muh manly energy".

      But the latter (self-appointed power) must always be confronted assertively. People who refuse to be bound by rules, have no authority to make them.

      Whoever isn't able to make these distinctions is doomed to forever ping-pong between being a slave and a chaotic fool rebelling against themselves.

    • Your posting assumes the existence of rules and institutions are at fault. I would challenge that.

      What alternative would you propose for institutions and rules?

      Do you think eliminating rules and institutions would reduce exploitation to the advantage of the wealthy/elite?

      An alternative deduction is that the institutions have been hijacked by the elite/wealthy and turned to their advantage, that they need managing, sizing and steering to keep their purpose.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday April 16, 2022 @06:35PM (#62453086)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by DrMrLordX ( 559371 )

      Nobody claimed AD&D made people idiots. A few thought it made people into devil worshippers. Most thought it just made people into nerds.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • "A few..."?
        Might want to go double check that, or did you not get to experience the Satanic Panic of the 80's yourself?
        I did, and even though I was young it taught me a LOT. Primarily it taught me that people are ignorant herd animals desperately trying to throw any sense of intelligence into the fiery altar of religion so the don't have to deal with the hardships of life. A beautiful lie wins over the ugly truth almost every time...

        • I did, and it wasn't as common as some media outlets made it out to be. I even remember the classic Jack Chick tract about AD&D:

          https://www.chick.com/products... [chick.com]

          Honestly very few people I met really thought D&D was Satanic or dangerous, even in the 80s or 90s when that kind of mindset was more common. And I did play 1e back in the day.

          • I did, and it wasn't as common as some media outlets made it out to be. I even remember the classic Jack Chick tract about AD&D:

            That brought back memories of folks handing them out around campus; that and people writing "Jesus Saves. Do not Erase" on chalkboards, which off course required either " but Moses Invests" or "Moses gets rebound, shoots and scores..." Then of course, there were the Moonies...

        • My parents didn't let me play D&D, and said they thought it made people into Satanists. They made a huge deal about it, going so far as to even ban me from playing any video games with the word "Dragon" in the title. Years later I found out they were secretly actual Satanists and this "moral panic" was all for show, as part of their cover.

      • Nobody claimed AD&D made people idiots.

        I don't know. Once they went past ChainMail and teh original set of books you no longer need to create things. Them youngsters have it to easy.

        A few thought it made people into devil worshippers. Most thought it just made people into nerds.

        Or at least amplified the nerdiness.

    • Social media doesn't cause stupidity, it merely amplifies it - sort of like a lens.

      Social media is more like a mirror held up to society. It reflects us exactly as we are, not how we imagine ourselves to be.

      Attempting to control the narrative by making it more difficult to share bad ideas isn't the fix. This is entirely a symptom of poor public education, which is what enables bad ideas to take root in the first place. Keep in mind that Nazi Germany never needed social media to go down a horribly grim path.

    • Hear hear. We definitely are not as smart as we believe. I think that is what the author describes as "naive conception of human psychology'
      On that subject, people in tech sector are pretty clueless. You could say they are even in denial...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DThorne ( 21879 )
      Absolutely agree. There are a lot of very stupid and poorly informed people in the world, and there always has been. Social media has simply become more user friendly. Does it empower them? Of course it does, the same way it empowers everyone. Did it "make people stupid"? Of course not, good lord.

    • Social media doesn't cause stupidity, it merely amplifies it

      You misunderstood, probably because you didn't read the excellent and well-written article. (It's long, but well worth the time).

      The authors aren't claiming that social media makes people stupid, they're saying it makes society stupid. People organized into effective institutions are collectively far smarter and more capable than individuals. They're saying that social media damages those institutions, making it very hard to form and maintain them. People can't cooperate effectively if they can't agree on basic facts, and social media makes that harder, perhaps than ever before, because social media amplifies disagreement.

      One of the most interesting (and bizarre, and harmful) mechanisms of social media-driven disinformation is the tendency of partisans (of any sort, not just political) to say increasingly ridiculous things to prove their tribal allegiance. Saying stuff that is obviously true isn't a good way to prove that you're a true believer to other true believers, because anyone can believe and say the truth. Instead, to impress your fellow true believers with the depth of your commitment to the cause, you need to say stuff that's extreme, edging away from demonstrable truth into ideas that are more questionable. Social media echo chambers encourage others to repeat your extreme comments, and come up with more and more extreme things to say. This continues until the only way to really prove your true belief is to say things that are clearly false, even ridiculous.

      When that tendency is coupled with the tendency of people to begin to believe something merely because it is repeated a lot, you end up with large numbers of people believing demonstrably false and even clearly ridiculous ideas. In order to believe those ideas, they have to completely suspend whatever critical thinking skills they possess, which makes it possible to convince them of almost anything at all.

      If you can't name a dozen examples of that, you're not paying attention. If you can only name a bunch of examples from one side of the political divide, that just means you've swallowed the misinformation of the other side, because both the left and the right have plenty.

      So, yes, social media "merely amplifies" stupidity, but the degree of amplification and the damage it does to institutions that historically enabled the generation of actual knowledge and effective constitute a true crisis, and it's not clear how we're going to recover.

  • Correlation and causation (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Saturday April 16, 2022 @06:35PM (#62453088)

    Back in the cave days of the late 90s and early 2000s...before facebook was even a half-baked bundle of LAMP in a dorm room, the people who are now in their early 40s and late 30s...the people I went to high school with...were already budding hedonists, impatient, impulsive, kinda dim, somewhat lazy with respect to logic and critical thinking, and overall a poor prospect for the future of the nation.

    Take social media out of the equation and I am still completely unsurprised that the people I went to high school with, as a group, have faired poorly and have not failed to imbibe the lessons of freedom Reagan alluded to when he warned that the capacity for self-rule is not passed through the blood.

    It's completely conceivable that a less stupid generation could have taken the same facebook and turned it into a digital Athens.

    • Agree with your post. Especially this : somewhat lazy with respect to logic and critical thinking. in my mind it's the societal problem/root cause.
    • Username checks out.

    • There's an absolute truth that 50% of the population has intelligence that's under the median.

      The problem is that social media amplifies the voices of those who are alarmist, alongside the voices of those who are good looking, and some other categories. These aren't necessarily the people who others should listen to. (That's by the way true for media in general, but media in general at least tends to have more levels of people who scrutinise what's being said or written.)

      So I think it's an inherent problem

  • The bigger problem than social media (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ickleberry ( 864871 ) <web@pineapple.vg> on Saturday April 16, 2022 @06:38PM (#62453094) Homepage
    Is that in the modern world you are not required to interact with humans for your daily life. If I stay in my cottage all day I can convince myself to believe whatever bullshit I can dream up. All my food can be provided by delivery and paid for with universal basic income, I have no requirement to socialise at all. I can find stuff online posted by similar-minded people to back them up with confirmation bias.

    Before internet if I started spouting bullshit in the local pub people would let me know that it is in fact bullshit. Getting rid of Facebook won't solve this problem (although it would be lovely if Facebook was got rid of)
    • Real human interaction doesn't fix it.
    • Unless you're posting in some echo chamber... you spout bullshit on the Internet and people will let you know that it is in fact bullshit too. Ain't nothing changed IMO.
    • Perhaps changing repost/retweeting rules so that only verified accounts can repost/retweet or can be reposted/retweeted.

    • Is that in the modern world you are not required to interact with humans for your daily life. If I stay in my cottage all day I can convince myself to believe whatever bullshit I can dream up. All my food can be provided by delivery and paid for with universal basic income, I have no requirement to socialise at all. I can find stuff online posted by similar-minded people to back them up with confirmation bias.

      Before internet if I started spouting bullshit in the local pub people would let me know that it is in fact bullshit. Getting rid of Facebook won't solve this problem (although it would be lovely if Facebook was got rid of)

      It works both ways though. Facebook is the pub now. And the pub can reinforce bullshit every bit as effectively as anything else can (the pubs weren't trying to shut down WWI, for example).

  • Doesn't *make* people stupid.

    They have to be incredibly stupid to use either in the first place.

    Nuff said.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • No, I'm not buying it. There's neither causality nor correlation here. Not even coincidence. Stupidity and social media are related only in that the latter amplifies and broadcasts the former as strongly as it amplifies anything. We are the way we are because, deep down, we were never as good as we thought we were. It's the amplifying nature of social media that makes it seem like we're getting dumber - it's just becoming more evident.

      You can choose what you amplify, humans are multi faceted. Amplifying courtsey is no more or less hypocritical than amplifying rudeness.

  • Depending on technology to fix lack of discipline isn't going to work.

    If you are THAT addicted to social media you need therapy, not technology.

    But good luck trying to "regulate" platforms.

  • It's made us stupid? Speak for yourselves (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I've never used it or paid attention to those who cite it as a source without any corroboration

  • Complex solutions, vs simple answers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Saturday April 16, 2022 @07:04PM (#62453132)

    The world is complex, and people create more complexity.
    Social media, promote fast and simple ideas. While the long and complex idea that have real value of speech are either not allowed like with Twitter, or will be algorithm demoted in Facebook, because it will cut down on the number of impressions per post.

    We need more depth at the trade off of having less verity. While more verity with less depth is more attractive.

  • I'm sorry, what? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Archangel_Azazel ( 707030 ) on Saturday April 16, 2022 @07:12PM (#62453162) Homepage Journal

    "We cannot expect Congress and the tech companies to save us. We must change ourselves and our communities."

    In my book, they're 1/2 right, but for a reason more complex than most are willing to delve into.
    Government COULD do a lot to help. It is *not* the job of the Government to "save us", especially not from ourselves. Rather, if you remove financial incentives currently present in government such as the "revolving door" between it, big tech, and big defense/military contractors and the legal and morally bankrupt "lobbying" that goes on... there's a chance that we may be able to start piecing our country back together. To do that would take a united and concentrated effort from folks who are HEAVILY invested in keeping things corrupt and sowing as much malcontent and distrust as possible. Scared people are easier to control and sell things to, because logic flies out the window.
    I've watched countless times as someone will try to suggest this only to be shouted down from *both* sides because...well...we just CAN'T have both sides win something. In order for R's to win, D's *must* lose! Zero sum governance only benefits those who didn't need a government to begin with. Gated luxury communities anyone?
    We've got a long road if we want to get anywhere close to prosperity again. I do not see us doing that without another revolution, we've given the country over to her enemies decades ago now, and they have us cowering in a corner about everything and anything. Our language has been co-opted to the point where everyone is offended by people getting offended that people are offended by something someone might have said.
    Much better to be angry at the person in line at the store paying for a candy bar with their food stamp card (the nerve!!), or any of a thousand other "small picture bullshit" topics than to actually address the fact that we would rather shoot our neighbor than help them. Reap what we've sown, we deserve it. Maybe we can still learn, here's to hoping?

  • It has long been used as a weapon. One movie that shows this is - Death of Stalin (2018)

  • Trust was doomed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Saturday April 16, 2022 @08:29PM (#62453294)

    The thing about the loss of trust in institutions - that was always doomed, because for some time now most if not all institutions people trusted were in fact acting in a very untrustworthy manner - so as the internet grew and actions were actually transparent and not so easily erased from history, trust in those institutions was going to fall.

    Until the institutions are in effect re-booted there is no regaining trust, because they continue doing the very things that made people lose respect for them begin with.

  • but that would lead to loss of control by those in power

  • Social media did not make us stupid (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday April 16, 2022 @08:52PM (#62453316)
    Immobilized the stupid into a powerful group that could be manipulated into doing bad things. Out of the 3 billion users on Facebook the vast majority of political troll posts can be traced back to about 400,000 people globally. That sounds like a big number until you realize it's 1% of the total number of users.

    It's not even the social media amplifies the voices of bad people it's that bad people tend to have a lot of money and they use that money to amplify the voices of other bad people to do bad things.

    The distinction is important because you need to be aware of what the problem actually is before you can go about solving it.

    • It's a lot smaller of a number when you realize that it's not actually 400,000 people, it's more like 12 people running ~33,000 bots each.

    • Yes, we need to be aware of the problem to solve it. But where did you get the idea that there are 3 billion people using Facebook?

      Even total number of Facebook accounts is around that number. Number of people behind those accounts is much much lower.

  • TFS never explains how we got stupid. The comments here don't mention it. Are we talking about trust or stupidness?

    Presumably stupid suggests a drop in IQ. Has that happened?

    I think the change has been a matter of emotion. When emotions drive actions, the actions often look stupid. Various changes in our environment have stirred more emotion than we have commonly seen in peacetime history. It's been disruptive. Each individual will have to find a way to manage their emotions, and those of others, more effec

  • While I like his suggestion of removing anonymous nature of Social Media, I do not know if it will completely solve the problem.

    I do take offense at the claim that this crap is believable. Honestly, most of this crap is so ridiculous I question the state of mind of people that believe any of it.

    QAnon in particular - the idea of (a) President having a 'secret' plan to do something that everyone wants done, and (b) and anonymous ally secretly spreads that information to 'help him' is obviously just plain MOR

  • ... and TV ?

    Social media has given people a "voice" and although it's mostly used to connect with family & friends, it does facilitate the ability for anyone to "produce" headlines or have their own TV show, but...

    doesn't it just amplify existing stupidity?

    Traditional newspapers and TV news is controlled, either by governments or by corporations, for the most part.
    Independent journalism, these days, is hard to find.

    So, prior to the internet and social media, we could all choose to be "dumb together" and

  • Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification as a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers. Banks and other industries have "know your customer" rules so that they can't do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same.

    Sounds like a good way to kill large social-media platforms--which, of course, is probably w

  • You were already stupid, and it wasn't that unique.

    Even the bubbles had started to form prior to social media. In particular with news networks that tried to separate themselves from legitimate news sources (calling everybody reporting facts "mainstream media"). While Fox News is the poster child of that, it isn't and wasn't unique.

  • There's a reason I ended my association with so-called 'social media' when Livejournal fell out of favor with everyone.

  • Can someone please condense that down into a 280 character post?

  • Facebook does not make you stupid, but ... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by haraldm ( 643017 ) on Sunday April 17, 2022 @03:57AM (#62453630)
    ... but it helps some to show how stupid they are.

    • ... but it helps some to show how stupid they are.

      and gives them a huge audience to so do...

    • start your sentence in the subject line... allowing the entire world to see how absurd you can be. Just like Facebook.

      Rather jarring when it happens eh? But yeah, it sure is fun subverting expectations. It doesn't put a drag on understanding the content at all. It is a shame the subject line is so small; otherwise, I would be able to place my entire message in it! "Subject" why would I need to use that?

  • Cause or symptom? (Score:3)

    by rantrantrant ( 4753443 ) on Sunday April 17, 2022 @04:13AM (#62453646)
    Everyone's blaming social media for polarising political & social discourse. While I'd certainly agree that they've found ways to profit from it & augment it on their platforms, I'm sceptical of whether it's a main, underlying cause - essentially, the medium isn't the message. What other contributors to polarisation are there? For example, that our democratic institutions don't appear to be responsive to "the will of the people," i.e. it doesn't matter which parties we vote for, we just get more of the same, or that corporations, think tanks, lobby groups, & corporate owned media have been spreading misinformation about democratic institutions, public services & systems, etc., claiming that they are detrimental to voters & the economy, that there's no such thing as society, only individuals & their families, etc.. As far as I understand it, when an electorate loses faith in its democratic institutions, things tend to get polarised & extremist factions gain greater credibility by claiming to "fix" a broken system. An extreme example was the Weimar Republic & a more recent version was what happened in Greece in the 2010s immediately after the electorate realised that the EU, IMF & ECB were going to override their newly elected government. We can see an upsurge in authoritarian right-wing populism & extreme "looney left" factions in the EU, which is worrying. Perhaps we need to address the immediate social issues rather than trying to scapegoat advertising & media agencies? (As much as I detest social media companies!)

  • The lack of trust in established institutions didn't really start with social media. It started with the Enlightenment. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this lately. We've been on a slippery slope for centuries now, and while we certainly know more about our place in the real universe, are we actually better off for this knowledge?

    I used to think so, but now I kind of envy my religious friends. Their beliefs are stupid, and yet marching off to a pointless death, sure in the knowledge that your life m

  • How is this different from a mob mentality, or lynch-mob for that matter.

    Humans in groups get stupid. The better someone is at being mediocre, the more likely they are pushed "up" as leaders and representative of the masses. Those who stand out by being smart are ignored and often kicked from the group.

    Masses like the middle, not "novel", nor smart, nor sensible Notice the trend for online groups to implement standards of behavior, that can exclude telling the "truth" if it is hurtful or not "kind".

    Incre

  • Idiots (Score:4)

    by Impy the Impiuos Imp ( 442658 ) on Sunday April 17, 2022 @07:03AM (#62453754) Journal

    Get rid of anonymity...in an era of cancellation?

    Yeah! That'll restore trust and fix the problem.

  • He now believes this ultimately fueled a viral dynamic leading to "the continual chipping-away of trust" in a democracy which "depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions."

    But this raises an interesting question, which is whether those rules, norms, and institutions are legitimate. Some of them are, some of them aren't (at least in their present forms) and we do need to re-examine them in order to determine which are which, and what we should do about it. I

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • TFA describes social science, not social media (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Shadow of Eternity ( 795165 ) on Sunday April 17, 2022 @10:00AM (#62454110)

    Every single thing the article bemoans is practically textbook postmodernism. No more trust in institutions? No shit, it's a revolutionary ideology that's been deliberately seeking the overthrow of every single social and civil institution. No more agreement on bedrock things? No shit, the entire point of postmodernism's cult programming is that there's no such thing as facts and evidence because those are "tools of the patriarchy". You need to listen to "other ways of knowing". Breakdown of the social contract? No shit, that revolutionary cult has gotten to the point they're marching around with flags and uniforms and taking over cities using guns.

  • Humans we already stupid, greedy, selfish and biased against others.

    SOCIAL MEDIA DIDNT DO SHIT THAT WASNT ALREADY HERE.

    Be less obtuse
  • Earlier this year I took a skeptical look at the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer. It was some piece of work. I called my blog post "Dismantling Democracy, with George Orwell." Here's the link: https://staggeringimplications... [wordpress.com]

  • How would having people get out more make them more intelligent?

    I would guess that intelligent, thoughtful people tend to be less dominant in social circumstances, both online and in real life. I would also guess that the people who are the most active on social media are also the most active in real life social circles.

    The short of it is, if as a society we don't teach children to respect those who are intelligent, then they simply have less voice. Getting kids to go out will not solve this in any way. I d

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