Ending the Tyranny of the Feed

THE WAR ON TRUTH, PART V: Social media is the primary delivery system for lies, radicalization and polarization. Time to hold the algorithms accountable.

The world feels like it’s come unmoored. Democracies are wobbling, alliances are fracturing, and the basic fabric of shared reality is being shredded. Way too many successful politicians seem way too crazy. But the chaos we’re witnessing not just a coincidence of bad actors and bad luck. It is enabled and driven by social media by people prepared to harm society for a hefty profit.

I am referring to the fact that social media algorithms are, with very high probability, engineered to maximize engagement. But lies and radicalism maximize engagement, because the truth can be boring and moderation can seem lame to people scrolling in search of excitement. We are needlessly fatalistic about this, as if there’s nothing to be done or human nature alone were to blame. This is wrong. Social media is doing things a certain way because it’s profitable. But society has no obligation to allow anything that is profitable. Slave labor may be profitable, but we do not allow it.

You’d think all this is obvious, yet limited the damage has proven difficult. Though preventing radicalization and hatred and protecting young people should be imperatives, the global populist right has turned doing nothing into a crusade for “free speech” and part of its war on the “elites” – which another way for saying disdain for expertise and indifference to education.

And yet, some good news has arrived. In a twist no one predicted, two midsize nations have stepped forward with a sense of urgency that the rest of the democratic world has largely lacked: Romania and Australia. In recent weeks they decided to act — one to fight foreign disinformation and defend its electoral process, the other to protect its children from algorithmic addiction and despair.

The urgency of this has been given a prominent platform in recent weeks by the harrowing Netflix series Adolescence, which brutally portrays how a vulnerable teenage boy is groomed by online radicalization and toxic masculinity, driving him to commit a horrific murder. It is a gut-wrenching reminder of what happens when chaos is amplified for profit.

This entire catastrophe is a grand parable of the human condition: