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12 September 2022

The End of Real Social Networks

DARON ACEMOGLU

CAMBRIDGE – Not only are billions of people around the world glued to their mobile phones, but the information they consume has changed dramatically – and not 

This argument implies that a combination of stronger regulation and other new technologies can overcome the challenges posed by social media. For example, platforms could provide better information about the provenance of articles; or the same platforms could be discouraged from algorithmically boosting items that might be incendiary or contain misinformation.

But such measures fail to address the depth of the problem. Social media is not only creating echo chambers, propagating falsehoods, and facilitating the circulation of extremist ideas. It also may be shaking the very foundations of human communication and social cohesion, by substituting artificial social networks for real ones.

We are distinguished from other animals mostly by our advanced ability to learn from our community, and to accumulate expertise by observing others. Our most profound ideas and cherished notions come not in isolation or from reading books, but by being embedded in a social milieu and interacting through argumentation, education, performance, and so forth. Trusted sources play an indispensable role in this process, which is why leaders and those with bully pulpits can have such outsize effects. Earlier media innovations capitalized on this, yet none of them modified the very nature of human networks the way that social media have.

What happens when platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit start manipulating what we perceive as our social network? The worrying truth is that nobody knows. And though we could eventually adapt to this change and find ways to neutralize its most pernicious effects, that isn’t an outcome that we should count on, given the direction the industry has been heading.

Social media’s most corrosive effects are starting to look exactly like what the cultural critic Neil Postman anticipated almost four decades ago in his landmark book Amusing Ourselves to Death. “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other,” he observed. “They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions but with good looks, celebrities, and commercials.”

Comparing George Orwell’s 1984 to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Postman then added that, “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

Whereas Postman was worried more about a Huxleyan future than an Orwellian one, social media have been ushering in both at the same time. While governments acquire the means to manipulate our perceptions of reality and reduce us to passivity and egoism, our virtual “friends” are increasingly policing our thoughts. One now must continuously signal one’s virtue and call out people who deviate from prevailing orthodoxy. But “virtue” is whatever one’s artificial online social circle says it is; and in many cases, it is based entirely on lies.

Hannah Arendt, another prescient twentieth-century thinker, warned about where this can lead. “If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.” At that point, social and political life become impossible.

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