ArgumentThe Dark Psychology of Social Networks

Published 6 December 2019

Every communication technology brings with it different constructive and destructive effects. Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell write that it typically takes some time to find and improve the balance between these negative and positive effects. The note that as social media has aged, the initial optimism which welcomed the new technology’s introduction has been replaced by a growing awareness of the technology deleterious effects – especially on the quality and purpose of political discussion.

Every communication technology brings with it different constructive and destructive effects. Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell write in The Atlantic that it typically takes some time to find and improve the balance between these negative and positive effects.

The note that as social media has aged, the initial optimism which welcomed the new technology’s introduction has been replaced by a growing awareness of the technology deleterious effects – especially on the quality and purpose of political discussion.

They write that online political discussions, often carried out among anonymous strangers, has become angrier and less civil than the typical face-to-face political discussions in real life. Moreover, networks of “tribal” partisans tend to create worldviews that can become more and more extreme; disinformation campaigns flourish; violent ideologies lure recruits.

“If we want democracy to succeed—indeed, if we want the idea of democracy to regain respect in an age when dissatisfaction with democracies is rising—we’ll need to understand the many ways in which social-media platforms create conditions that may be hostile to democracy’s success,” they write.

They suggest three types of reform:

(1) Reduce the frequency and intensity of public performance. Social media creates incentives for moral grandstanding rather than authentic communication. There ways to reduce those incentives, for example: “demetrication,” a process which obscures like and share counts, so that content can be evaluated on its own merit, and so that social-media users are not subject to continual, public popularity contests.

(2) Reduce the reach of unverified accounts. Bad actors—trolls, foreign agents, and domestic provocateurs—benefit the most from the current system, in which anyone can create hundreds of fake accounts and use them to manipulate millions of people. Social media would become less toxic, and democracies less hackable, if the major platforms required basic identity verification before anyone could open an account—or at least an account type that allowed the owner to reach large audiences.

(3) Reduce the contagiousness of low-quality information. Social media has become more toxic as friction has been removed. Adding friction back in has been shown to improve the quality of content. For example: Just after a user submits a comment, AI can identify text that’s similar to comments previously flagged as toxic and ask, “Are you sure you want to post this?” Instagram said that this extra step has caused many users to rethink offensive messages.