To understand social media, use a bacteria metaphor.
When something can spread information through networks to millions, even billions, it doesn’t follow rules of news media. Those work on the one-to-many system, where the one is paid, vetted, and held responsible. Although purveyors of social media madness may also be hubs, they rarely spread ideas directly to listeners. It travels through webs of minion-like intermediaries, neighbors and colleagues. People don’t discover and listen to Alex Jones or those like him in Sri Lanka or Myanmar all on their own. They find him in links, planted by real or fake users they think they know. They’re convinced by more than his words — they’re convinced by the contacts who refer to Jones, who comment on him. When someone in their network objects, they see that person pilloried.
This is how Stalin worked. Purges led to rumors, and anyone objecting was the first victim. Rumors could be crazy, but they were planted and plugged by peers and neighbors. Russians know this, because it affected nearly every family. 70 years on, Russian hackers live at home, since most Russians obtained tenure to their homes after the Soviet Union fell. They hear the old stories. There’s nothing poetic about what they now do, as they distort social media in Ukraine, France, or the U.S.. It’s old medicine aimed externally.
It’s precisely their previous experience that makes Russians more immune to social media’s distortions than Americans, and better able to wield it against others. Americans, in fact, have inherited the same dilemma of isolation that cursed the native Americans. Those tribes had lost resistance to many bacterial pathogens, in the isolated new world. Unlike the old, their continents didn’t have the notorious Norway rat and its pathogens, nor the smallpox bacterium.
Americans are notoriously innocent about foreign affairs, in part because they live on a gigantic island on the other side of the world from most history. They embrace free speech like it’s an unalloyed good thing, no matter how ignorant, dangerous, or wrong. Globalization shrunk the world, and made it harder to be isolated innocents. Suddenly Americans have to respond to foreign input that isn’t like anything they’re familiar with. They have to deal with a platform like Facebook, a social network that spreads any message.
Foreigners will sometimes claim, along with some Americans, that the U.S. population must have a lower IQ than, say, Europeans or others. That’s because American idiots have more voice that idiots in other parts of the world. American radio and TV relished programs about morons. American politicians often find it easier to aggregate a coalition of the stupid and the self-interested, than explain themselves to the more intelligent and educated. When people from other countries see this, along with our careless education and sloppy child care, they assume it’s due to the general population’s low intellectual level.
Those who feel this way are wrong. Average American IQ is higher than the European mean. This makes sense, since there’s more genetic variety in the US, and the mixture of previously segregated genomes has great benefit, in health and mental abilities. It’s America’s deliberately anti-intellectual culture that drives people to ignorance. The so-called “elite” are anyone with grad or professional education, which gets little respect unless associated with high income. Our culture appeals to those lower than average as much as those above it. But that isn’t random, it’s the result of history. We didn’t have to fight a nearby power of equal strength. The only existential moments in the US history are the formation of the union, the Civil War, and the Cold War’s near misses. We assume we can embrace stupid without risking liberty.
It’s this attitude, generated by the same geographic and social isolation that made native Americans vulnerable to old war disease, that renders Americans susceptible to social media madness. Oblivious to risk, people embrace lies. There’s no draft, no danger they’ll have to fight a war caused by idiocy. Messages and links reach hundreds, thousands, millions of similar people through Facebook. Rumors spread like germs, through a vast network of hosts. They tell our immune system to “fuck off”.
Facebook and Google are clueless. Really. The solution lies in their algorithms, which have inherent biases. These drive the platforms to fuel passionate hatreds. Sophisticated programs are designed to encourage more clicks, a nearly thoughtless, reptilian act. Any search or feed algorithm has levers that programmers use to shape information flows. Public pressure may induce a slightly different method, at the margins. But the platforms are structured like parasites, which must infect hosts with information that leads them to want more of the same.
We need to change it, so that contagion isn’t a business model. Big monopolies are the least likely entities to make any big change. But it must happen, or we’ll succomb to a 21st century disease, foaming at the mouth as we’re pitted against reason.
