The Automation of Delusion
Social media can be used in purely benign, even positive ways. Sharing photos with our friends and relatives, joining community interest groups, and building businesses are almost always positive activities. However, our ever-evolving social media technologies can also afford us with an efficient method to join a cult, become addicted, or feed our nihilism. Our new technologies may not be the initial cause of our cultural fragmentation, but they can accelerate it.
An excellent May 2022 article in The Atlantic, entitled Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid, was written by Jonathan Haidt. I think the author is spot on, except that the use of the adjective ‘stupid’ might be misplaced. In fact, Jonathan does not say that we, as individuals or even groups, are stupid. His main point is that our society has created an information dissemination and validation system that is seriously flawed.
Almost all educated people believe that rectifying common mental mistakes, knowledge gaps, and achieving a comfortable life will encourage less educated individuals to follow suit. They believe that poverty, the lack of education, and undisciplined thinking are the primary causes of diminished mental capacity, economic chances, and unhappy lives. This might be the progressives’ delusion about those who think differently from themselves.
A substantial percentage of Americans now denigrate and ignore the “wisdom” of the educated classes. The educated classes are losing the cultural wars because they think that their hard-edged logic would defeat the gut instinct of those they describe as the deplorables. Simply stated, “dumb” people do not appreciate being ridiculed, and the educated classes are not smart enough to realize their mistake.
Ironically, the educated classes, mostly residing on the coasts, are now at the mercy of social media platforms developed primarily in progressive states like California and Massachusetts. These systems, such as Facebook and Twitter (now X), reward highly emotional and often illogical, unsubstantiated propaganda campaigns waged by state actors, aggressive corporations, and extremist politicians.
As one example of the problem, Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook, reported on the activities of Facebook operations in several countries. To her surprise and horror, she discovered that Facebook employees were creating fake accounts and generating fake likes to benefit specific political parties, thereby deceiving everyone into believing the “chosen” politicians were more well-liked than they were. We found that not all malicious bots originate from Russia or North Korea. Who better to activate bots on Facebook than Facebook technicians? It is a fact that Elon Musk continually tweaks the Twitter (now X) algorithm to his benefit, as the wealthiest man in the world.
Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, wrote in an early letter to investors: Facebook hoped “to rewire the way people spread and consume information by giving them the power to share.” He said it would help them to “once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.”
Social media companies succeeded in altering our core institutions and industries; however, they may not have done so in entirely beneficial ways. The invention of the retweet 
and like 
buttons allowed users to endorse social media posts made by others. Suddenly, a gold rush mentality set in as millions of users either actively created more enticing posts or passively reacted to the posts of others. Researchers found that posts that trigger emotions, especially anger towards enemies, tend to receive more likes and retweets.
In reality, the new social media encourages dishonesty and mob behavior. The technologies were said to be designed for the benefit of everyone, but suddenly have become dark agents attacking the foundations of our institutions and collective trust.
The masters of the dark science of mass delusion can be clearly identified. Who would have believed twenty years ago that a President of the United States would use social media to broadcast his impulsive, chaotic thinking on an hourly basis? In Trump’s first term, his @realDonaldTrump handle had about 89 million followers, and he tweeted over 57,000 times.
America’s Founding Fathers believed that prosperity and longevity were better achieved by patience, consultation, and deliberation. The following from Jonathan Haidt’s article summarizes their thinking in the 1780s:
“The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. 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 tubulency and weakness of unruly passions.’ The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment…”
Sadly, it seems clear to me that our current, virtually unregulated social media undermines the very existence of our republic. The infusion of artificial intelligence will add more rocket fuel to this seemingly unstoppable and destructive social media technology.
Assuming I am correct, what is to be done? Do we all capitulate and learn the dark arts of delusion, masquerading as persuasion? Do we ban social media? Do “progressives” leave the social media field to the likes of MAGA? Do we impose reasonable guardrails on social media?
This is the last in a series of three posts about social media.