The social media panic

Some of these concerns have limited merit — Twitter’s “learn to code” debacle, in which users were temporarily banned for joking about the employment prospects of clickbait journalists, comes to mind. Others rely on junk science and moral panic: There is no domestic sex-trafficking epidemic unless all women willfully engaged in prostitution are counted as victims. Regardless, the solutions on the table — whether antitrust investigations or a repeal of Section 230, a legal provision that shields online content providers from some liability by classifying them as platforms rather than publishers — won’t fix what’s wrong with Big Tech. That’s because the platforms are not ultimately responsible for the fact that people often abuse the powers and privileges these companies provide.

Increasingly lost in the conversation about social media’s effect on the world is any semblance of personal responsibility. Too many people proceed as if Facebook is the first communicative space to allow disinformation. Ever heard of cable news? Talk radio? The New York Journal‘s 1898 coverage of the sinking of the Maine? Social media’s infinite scroll function did not turn well-mannered youth into maladjusted creeps. In fact, before the era of social media, teens were vastly more likely to risk personal injury — e.g., by drunk driving — to connect with their friends. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey didn’t create cancel culture. Behind every social media mob lurks not an algorithm, but a human being.

At last week’s hearing, none relished the opportunity to beat up on Zuckerberg more than Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was widely viewed in the media as having scored a killing blow. “Ocasio-Cortez Stumps Zuckerberg,” asserted the Guardian, while that veritable font of truth Rolling Stone declared that she had “exposed” the mogul’s delicate web of lies. In reality, she did no such thing.

Their exchange concerned Facebook’s decision to allow misleading political ads on the platform, an entirely reasonable move on Zuckerberg’s part given that any top-down effort to separate truthful-enough ads from outright disinformation would likely open up the company to further accusations of political bias.

“So, you won’t take down lies or you will take down lies?” asked Ocasio-Cortez. “I think that’s just a pretty simple yes or no.”

Zuckerberg might have countered by pointing out that Ocasio-Cortez is herself an aggressive spreader of misinformation: Three of her five most recent public statements were judged by PolitiFact to be lies, and the other two were deemed “half truths.” Instead, he politely explained that in lieu of having Facebook determine what counts as truthful, he would rather let users decide. Indeed, Zuckerberg noted, it may even be beneficial to allow people to see that their elected officials are willing and eager to peddle dishonesty.

“Congresswoman, in most cases, in a democracy, I believe people should be able to see for themselves what politicians they may or may not vote for are saying and judge their character for themselves,” he said.

Ocasio-Cortez treated this like a confession of wrongdoing and then moved on to accuse Zuckerberg of hosting “ongoing dinner parties with far-right figures” and white nationalists because he solicited feedback from some conservative pundits about what Facebook could do to ease concerns about bias on the platform. The idea that Zuckerberg is kowtowing to the far-right is a ridiculous smear.

Unfortunately, it’s also the kind of paranoid nonsense that dominates the liberal narrative about social media’s pernicious influence on democracy and American politics. To wit: The Left has recently become concerned that Facebook and YouTube in particular are essentially alt-right recruiting devices. A widely read New York Times piece from June, “The Making of a YouTube Radical,” blamed the platform’s recommendation algorithm, which proposes the next video to be played, for steering vulnerable young men toward white nationalist content. One minute, an unsuspecting internet surfer is watching a Dave Rubin or Jordan Peterson video, and in the next, they are consuming neo-Nazi race realism.

“Critics and independent researchers say YouTube has inadvertently created a dangerous on-ramp to extremism by combining two things: a business model that rewards provocative videos with exposure and advertising dollars, and an algorithm that guides users down personalized paths meant to keep them glued to their screens,” warned Times columnist Kevin Roose.

There’s no doubt that some people were radicalized — or “red-pilled,” to borrow a phrase from The Matrix that has come to describe the process of awakening to some non-leftist realization — by watching YouTube videos. But a recent paper by Penn State political scientists Kevin Munger and Joseph Phillips casts doubt on the notion that this is a widespread problem. They found that YouTube users who started watching a video presenting some non-leftist alternative perspective and continued for five more recommended videos only arrived at a white nationalism one every 1,700 times.

“For a random walker beginning at a ‘control’ video from the mainstream media, the probability [of encountering alt-right content] is so small that it is difficult to see on the graph,” they wrote. “But it is certainly no more common than one out of every 10,000 trips.”

According to Munger and Phillips, viewership of far-right content on YouTube peaked in 2017 and has subsequently declined.

As for mainstream conservative content, the Right’s success on social media has bred not just envy but suspicion from the Left. Judd Legum, a progressive writer, recently implied that the Daily Wire’s huge success on Facebook was partly attributable to a “clandestine network of 14 large Facebook pages” that exclusively promote Daily Wire content. Since these pages are not upfront about their loyalty to the Daily Wire, Legum considers them to be engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” a violation of the platform’s terms of service. Legum also suggested that perhaps Zuckerberg had taken no action against this because he wants Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro to defend him from conservatives.

These specific pages may well be doing something underhanded. But they only contribute to the Daily Wire’s success in small ways. Most of the site’s traffic is due to promotion from Shapiro’s own Facebook page. It’s not some secret cabal of fake pages or Zuckerberg looking the other way. With more than 5 million Facebook followers, Shapiro is just really popular.

In saner times, right-leaning media’s incredible success on social media would prompt celebration from conservatives. The Right has its own news outlets and can get its message directly in front of the American people without having to count on traditional media gatekeepers.

And yet the whining about social media companies supposedly not treating conservatives fairly has become incessant. Leading the charge is Prager, whose PragerU videos promote conservative ideas on YouTube. Prager has sued Google, which owns YouTube, for restricting some of its content. YouTube has a feature that allows users to avoid seeing adult content, and thus videos that are labeled as such are invisible to these users, which constitute about 1.5% of the total. Prager and his team are free to quibble with this moderation, but the suit essentially demands that the company be treated as a public utility and subjected to government regulation. This is quite the slippery slope, and a conservative intellectual who frequently, and correctly, criticizes governments for meddling in private businesses ought to know better.

Many conservatives have rightly mocked the idea that algorithms are driving defenseless teens into the waiting arms of the alt-right. But all too many have succumbed to algorithm panic when similar claims are made, including the idea that social media is making teens anxious and depressed.

There is no more obvious example than Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, the crusading leader of the populist anti-corporate faction of the GOP. Hawley has put forth a spate of bills and policy recommendations that would empower a government panel to adjudicate Big Tech’s political biases (one wonders how Hawley thinks this would go under a Warren administration), kill several of the supposedly addictive features of social media, and prompt platforms to close comments sections in order to deal with increased libel risk. Why anyone thinks that last item would protect conservative speech is a mystery.

Hawley’s Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology Act (SMART) would ban infinite scroll and autoplay, two features that remove natural stopping points from a user’s social media experience. It would also target “streak badges,” which are icons that appear as rewards for engaging in continuous conversation on apps such as Snapchat.

Supporters of Hawley’s approach contend that social media is uniquely addictive and harmful for teens. The psychologist Jean Twenge believes that young people who came of age after the advent of smartphones, and the constant, ubiquitous access to social media they provide, suffer from depression and anxiety. In her 2017 book iGen, Twenge writes that today’s super-connected teens are less rebellious and happy (indeed, that’s in the subtitle of the book).

It may be true that people who stay up all night exchanging snaps or scrolling through Facebook aren’t sleeping enough and thus have mental health issues. But the science of tech addiction and mental health is wildly unsettled. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders labels tech and social media overuse a “condition for further study,” not a recognized addiction. It is not clear that people are addicted to social media in the same way that alcoholics are addicted to alcohol. There needs to be much more research done on the biological, neurochemical effects of social media. In the meantime, the mundane observation that children really like chatting with their friends is hardly the basis of an addiction epidemic.

In fact, lost in all the panic over social media addiction is a plain truth: Using Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat is fun and beneficial for millions of teens who use the technology to keep in touch with their friends. While Twenge’s research often presumes that teens are enviously consuming their friends’ content and become sick with jealousy or fears of abandonment, a recent study essentially negates this claim. Candice Odgers, a professor of psychological science at the University of California-Irvine, found “no connection between the amount of time that young people spend online using digital technologies and mental health symptoms like depression, anxiety.” Teens who were sending more messages appeared to have better mental health. Engaging with their friends, even on social media, probably makes people happier in the long run.

Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing, sure. Social media can interfere with homework, jobs, family, and other obligations. But the same is true of a whole host of other activities. Importantly, legislators do not have an impressive track record when it comes to regulation in these areas: comic books, video games, etc. Responsible people do not delegate their obligations to the federal government. Parents must restrict their children’s smartphone usage when necessary, not expect the authorities to ham-fistedly do so for everyone, everywhere, when there’s very little evidence of a crisis.

For those who seek to blame their problems on others, the sheer bigness of Big Tech provides an appealing target. Rather than grapple with her failure to win what should have been a slam-dunk presidential election, Hillary Clinton retreated to the idea that pernicious tech factors, specifically Russian bots and ads, swung the election to Donald Trump. Warren is already gearing up to do the same in the event she is the Democratic candidate. A Warren administration would undoubtedly prosecute the case against Big Tech with gusto.

But conservatives have also fallen into the trap of knee-jerk condemnation whenever there is a feature or policy that irks them. The solution can hardly be to invite the government to make itself czar of Big Tech.

Robby Soave is an associate editor at Reason magazine and author of the book Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump.