Where can you find the greatest disinformation? X marks the spot.
When it comes to who is most harmed by social media, your gender, politics and religion matter.
Advertising guru Leo Burnett created such 20th-century icons as Tony the Tiger, the Marlboro Man, the Maytag Repairman, United's "Fly the Friendly Skies", and Allstate's "Good Hands.” Like Noam Chomsky, Burnett believed that consent (in his case, consent to purchase one product instead of another) could be manufactured just like the product itself.
Fast forward to the second decade of the 21st century, and social media combined with smartphones drove that to heights never conceived by the inventors of either, at least at the outset. Now that they better understand these effects, app developers and social platforms are targeting the youngest possible audiences to instill habits of consumerism, brand loyalty, and political preferences at the earliest available age.
Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at New York University, told Hidden Brain podcast host Shankar Vedantam recently that inequality, hierarchy and sexism have always been present, in nearly every culture, but dense religious networks or extended families and clans served as a moat against despair. Today a similar moat is providing some protection against mental health issues for many conservative kids but those raised instead as liberals (or a little more inquisitive and less accepting of conventional thinking) are more likely to be depressed. Liberals are less happy than conservatives. Haidt says that gap exploded after 2012.
Haidt: In other words, when you trace out these graphs, you know, 2000, 2005, 2010, then everything goes up around 2012-2013. But conservative kids only go up a little; liberal kids go up a lot. Boys go up a little. Girls go up more. More liberal girls go up the most. So this really hits liberal girls.
So, people who say that religion is important to them or who are raised in religious families, they're only a little bit worse off. Whereas people who were secular who say religion isn't important, they're much worse off. And so the way I interpret it is conservatives and religious people are more rooted and anchored in their local communities. They're more parochial. Whereas progressives are more secular, less religious, more cosmopolitan, less rooted, more citizens of the world, and that used to actually be conducive to happiness. But then when everything switches onto digital, when everything switches onto phones around 2012-2013, the kids who are rooted and anchored are not much affected because they still have roots with people.
Whereas the kids who are not rooted get swept away in a tidal wave of anomie or loneliness. Jean Twenge has shown that liberal girls spend by far the most time on social media, more so than any other group, and the kind of stuff they're consuming makes them feel the world is dangerous and stacked against them. So for all these reasons, it turns out gender, politics and religion explain a lot of the variance in who is worse off since 2012.
On March 18, 2024, Elon Musk did a one-on-one with podcaster Don Lemon on Musk’s X platform, formerly known as Twitter. Fortunately, Lemon posted it to YouTube because Musk later banned Lemon from the X platform. Musk’s professed goal was to show that robust discussion on platforms like Twitter always trumps lame attempts to censor, whether by governments or by the platforms themselves. He purchased Twitter with the intention to “free” the platform from algorithms that curtailed so-called hate speech. Over the following year hate speech exploded.
Lemon: It doesn't concern you that hate speech… research shows that it's gone up on the platform since you took over that's not concerning to you?
Musk: I believe that is false. In fact the research that I've seen says it went down.
Lemon: The study from The Institute of Strategic Dialogue found that anti-semitic tweets doubled from June 22 to February 2023. One study reported that as many as 86% of the posts reported for hateful content remained up after being reported. Hate speech on the platform is up.
Musk: Uhh, so what? What they will typically do is they will count the number of posts but not count the number of views so what matters is was that a post given high visibility or what, did like one person see it? And if you look at the number of views of how many times was content viewed on our platform, it is down substantially.
Lemon: Yeah well that's not what the study shows and you said you like transparency.
In part, the conversation revealed—more than Musk’s opinions or X’s algorithmic agenda—the insular nature of wealth and power. The reveal was in Musk’s perplexed expressions when Lemon confronted him (mildly, with punches pulled) about his views towards race (he grew up on the privileged side of Apartheid in South Africa), guns, and his use of Ketamine. Musk was stunned to have to explain views that apparently had never been seriously challenged before.
As Lemon attempted to explore Musk’s upbringing, Musk said there were only a “couple minutes” left and that he had a “whole roomful of people waiting to meet with me.” After the interview, he canceled the oral contract for the show's syndication to other platforms and for future episodes. He was unsettled by the experience.
The Trump Card
We are genetically predisposed, the same as other herd animals that delegate leadership to a sexually privileged stallion, a silverback alpha male gorilla, or an expansively maned lion, to follow a single individual and let them decide where the herd, band, or pride will go, who will get to breed and so forth. Penguin Cobblepot was only wrong in degree and crassness when he told Access Hollywood, “You can grab them by their pussy.”
I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything.
Last October, Cobblepot sat for a deposition. Carroll's attorneys quoted the video and then asked, "That's what you said, correct?”
Trump: ”Well, historically, that's true with stars.”
Attorney: ”It's true with stars that they can grab women by the pussy?"
Trump: "Well, if you look over the last million years, I guess that's been largely true. Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately, or fortunately."
Attorney: ”And you consider yourself to be a star?"
Trump: "I think you can say that, yeah.”
There is something perhaps even more disturbing than the male genetic dominance trope here—the pollution of public debate over norms and priorities. As the global population swells, we concentrate wealth into ever fewer hands and on relatively arbitrary selection criteria. The process for human leaders is even more random than for stallions, gorillas and lions.
The Swift Effect
Fifty years ago, the world's population was 2 billion, and only a small fraction—likely less than 5 percent—listened to music on the radio, bought records of artists the radio broadcasters most favored, and replayed them over and over. Unlike “classical” music, popular music was largely regionalized and particular to local cultures and traditional styles. Then Elvis Presley, The Beatles, and Michael Jackson changed all that.
By the time Jackson recorded his sixth solo album, Thriller, his audience of 70 million was more than ten times greater than Elvis could reach 10 years earlier. Today, with listening audiences propelled by smartphones into the billions, Taylor Swift (who is at best musically mediocre compared to The Beatles or Michael Jackson) is accruing social command power comparable to Musk or any other billionaire, and she achieved it rapidly, at a relatively young age.
Conferring that kind of arbitrary power can alter the trajectory of history. Genghis Khan, Christopher Columbus, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Adolph Hitler were not empowered because they were benevolent or had some sexual display of plumage or skill in single combat that marked them as herd leaders. But, each did have some special prowess—an oratory skill, a would-be emperor’s ambition, a grasp of geography—accompanied by a great deal of luck to be in the right place at the right time. Now consider to whom we are giving that sort of power today: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg. They have some special skills, no doubt, but not anything close to what might be required to command global public policy in an era of cascading crises that were centuries in the making.
Reading Warren Buffet’s annual letter to shareholders, one can easily see that, apart from being the world's 8th most valuable company worth 1.1 trillion, Berkshire Hathaway has not done much better in the stock market than someone throwing darts or betting on the Fortune 500. Their big earners are stocks that track global growth trends, with near-zero consideration for the environment, indigenous cultures, or our common future—Occidental Petroleum, the railroads, Coca-Cola, and Chevron, for instance. In this chart, from 2019, Berkshire Hathaway ranked 4th most climate polluting company, but since it is a major shareholder in Apple, it should really be number 3. And while we do need more and better rail transport, on my recent rail travel across North America what I mainly saw moving were petrochemicals, coal, and grain for cattle.
Where are Buffet, Gates and the rest leading us? Is it a better watering hole for the human herd? A safe place to wait out the coming storm? Or is it to Mars or some private island? Is it back to the rapacious ethics of the previous century, or ahead with a profound naïveté towards the societal and ecological impacts of new technology, gene tampering, and better living through chemistry?
Do these people confer with anyone at all? If so, chances are it is only with the like-minded inside their own cocoons, or with self-reinforcing social media like X. Confronted by reality, they wince and then strike back.
Musk once said, “Happiness equals reality minus expectations.” I tend to agree, and although I have a pessimistic outlook towards the likelihood of human survival beyond the present century, I seem to be very happy because my expectations align with reality. I am prepared to be pleasantly surprised and working to help that happen, too. For Musk, Gates and others with inordinate wealth and power, I suspect reality will rudely intrude upon expectations, and that won’t be long in coming.
I was also fortunate to grow up without a smartphone or child-programming social media algorithms, at least of the digital type. A better formulation, post-2012, of Musk’s axiom might be, “Happiness equals reality minus smartphones.”
References
Graham et al., Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2009.
Graham et al., Mapping the Moral Domain, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2011.
Graham et al., Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2013.
Haidt, J, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, 2024.
Haidt, J, The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment, Psychological Review, 2001.
Haidt, J, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, 2006.
Haidt, J, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, 2013.
Lukianoff, G. and J. Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, 2018.
Vedantem, S. Hidden Brain: Escaping the Matrix (2024)
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