Jonathan Haidt is Right about Social Media
Sure, we can wait for more academic studies, but we also know from experience
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University and the author of a number of books, including The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012) and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018) (with Greg Lukianoff). I’ve assigned The Righteous Mind in law school and undergraduate seminars and have always found that it leads to fruitful discussions. I also reviewed The Coddling of the American Mind, which featured my first use of bourbon as a metaphor.
Haidt has a knack for translating complex ideas to wide audiences. And he’s recently turned his attention to social media. In 2019, I joined him for a dialogue at NYU sponsored by the Veritas Forum and moderated by the Washington Post’s Christine Emba. We covered a range of topics, including civic fracture, weakening institutions, and the loss of social trust. Haidt and I also discussed the role that social media plays in these growing challenges. He opened our dialogue by calling social media “the nuclear bomb of democracy” that “just blows us apart.”
In the News
In May 2022, Haidt wrote an article in The Atlantic called “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” He argued that Americans can no longer understand each other—we are like the citizens in the biblical story of Babel speaking different languages. Haidt identified a number of contributing factors, but he placed the most blame on social media beginning in the early 2010s.
Haidt focused specifically on decisions by Facebook and Twitter to introduce their “like,” “share,” and “retweet” buttons. These features made content more public for everyone, with personal opinions and preferences now shared not only with close friends but also with total strangers. Even more significantly, those strangers could respond with disapproval and scorn on a performative stage. This in turn led to an uptick in the frequency and volume of attacks on social media.
Eventually, the online facilitation of anger and vitriol damaged not only relationships but also institutions, a change “most pronounced in universities, scholarly associations, creative industries, and political organizations at every level (national, state, and local).” When faculty, institutional leaders, and journalists found their words going viral and often out of context, they “began self-censoring to an unhealthy degree.”
Haidt predicted the next casualty after individual relationships and institutions would be democracy itself:
A democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions. Blind and irrevocable trust in any particular individual or organization is never warranted. But when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side.
He argued that “recent academic studies suggest that social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general.”
Haidt’s article drew a lot of attention, including a response from Meta (Facebook). Meta’s head of research, Pratiti Raychoudhury, argued that the academic literature presented “a far more nuanced picture” than Haidt offered. According to Raychoudhury, “credible studies” did not support Haidt’s claim “that social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general.” Additionally, “more and more research also discredits the idea that social media algorithms create an echo chamber that causes polarization and political upheavals.” Raychoudhury urged caution: “We need more academic research to better understand social media’s true impact, especially on democracy in America.”
Haidt responded with another Atlantic piece citing three additional studies and concluding:
These three studies cannot prove that social media caused the global decline, but—contra Meta and Zuckerberg—they show a global trend toward polarization in the previous decade, the one in which the world embraced social media.
Haidt acknowledged that “the science is not yet settled” but urged reforms anyway. As he put it, “Is social media probably damaging American democracy . . . or probably not?”
In my Head
I’ve highlighted Haidt’s claims because I find them correct, important, and somewhat actionable. As a social scientist, Haidt is cautiously noting when causal theories are not yet “settled.” As a human being, Haidt knows he’s right.
Most of us know it, too. It doesn’t matter what your political or religious beliefs are, it doesn’t matter how much time you’ve spent in school, it doesn’t matter where you live. If you’re among the vast majority of Americans who have been sucked into social media, you know that Haidt is right about its effect on discourse and the particular challenges of social media attacks.
I want to share my reflections on three of his claims about social media attacks that rang true for me:
1. They silence others.
Social media attacks work in part because the “barrage of snide, disparaging, and otherwise hostile comments” directed at an individual also mean that “nobody rises to your defense (out of fear of getting attacked themselves).” This reticence to chime in can be amplified by the breadth and volume of hostile comments—it’s not always immediately clear who is mad at what, or how best to engage in the fray. And nobody wants to lead a defensive charge that others don’t follow.
2. They are usually short-lived.
Most social media attacks burn themselves out in a few hours or, at most, a few days. But in their most intense moments, they feel utterly overwhelming. In those moments, we need institutional leaders to stand up to social media outrage. In local, volunteer leadership positions, that will require acts of wisdom and courage. In well-compensated positions of leadership in higher education, government, and corporate America, this kind of wisdom and courage should be required rather than simply hoped for.
3. They feel more comprehensive than they are.
Haidt recounts a story from a business executive who used to think that a dozen angry comments from customers meant thousands of other disgruntled customers. But not every “like” of an angry tweet or Facebook post reflects the emotional intensity of the comment’s author. I recently had a friend who was being targeted with vicious social media attacks for something she had written. To her, it felt like “America” hated her. But really, a couple dozen activists were haranguing her with relentless and uncharitable critiques, and a few hundred other people “liked” those critiques. The level of critique feels enormous, but its actual footprint is miniscule.
Haidt’s follow-up article ended with a call for citizens “who develop the new habits, virtues, technologies, and shared narratives that will allow us to reap the benefits of living and working together in peace.” This may sound vague and grandiose, but if you believe his warnings, then it may also be necessary. And habits, virtues, and technologies do not appear out of nowhere—they take time, institutions, and trust. We may be running short on all three.
In the World
A lot of people have been sounding the alarm about the dangers and pitfalls of social media. But I’ve personally found the most persuasive voices to be the engineers who designed the algorithms that condition us to respond. On this topic, the 2020 Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma” is especially good. The film looks at how companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook have tweaked their products in response to consumer preferences and demands. It interviews engineers and corporate leaders at these companies who express ambivalence and even regret about what they’ve unleashed.
As one expert interviewed in the documentary notes: “Facebook discovered that they were able to affect real-world behavior and emotions without ever triggering the users’ awareness.”
“The Social Dilemma” explores the rise of fake news, disinformation, loneliness, and outrage stemming from these social media evolutions. One of the most important takeaways for me is that individual willpower is unlikely to overcome algorithms carefully designed to induce and amplify our worst instincts. We’ll need more creative approaches for engaging with—and disengaging from—the algorithmically driven feeds that cross our screens.
This documentary is unsettling but well worth your time.
Thank you for this, John. I learned a lot from watching The Social Dilemma and the research made available by the Center for Humane Technology. I also read everything that L.M. Sacasas writes (The Convivial Society). I was once very active on Twitter, Facebook, and (to a lesser extent) Instagram. As a writer, I was convinced for a while that being active on these sites were vital for cultivating a reader base. But over time, I sensed it was doing something to me, conforming me to something other than Christ, even if my posts were generally about following Him. And while I could identify many benefits to being present and active on those sites, including whatever good things I gave and received from others, it became obvious that those benefits were inextricably linked to the corrosive characteristics of the platforms themselves. In spring of 2021, I made the difficult decision to retreat from social media and publish my thoughts and ideas exclusively in long form and on sites that didn’t use manipulative algorithms. I still have a Twitter account and publish links to my long-form work, but I don’t otherwise engage. Now that I’ve been away from it all for over a year, I’m convinced that active participation on those sites pulls us into the sphere/dominion of spiritual principalities that most modern Christians -- so profoundly shaped by post-enlightenment, rationalist, and materialist presuppositions -- haven’t learned out how to identify yet.
While I am not an academic, it appears to me the dynamics you outline in this article are demonstrably true. Where we go from here seems like a painful path, and yet necessary for the preservation of democracy, and the shared benefit that democracy makes possible.