The Social Media Upheaval

Encounter Intelligence #5

by Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Social media giants are poisoning our journalism, our politics, our relationships and ultimately our minds. Glenn Reynolds looks at the up and downsides of social media and at proposals for regulation, and offers his own fix that respects free speech while reducing social media's toll.

Genres: Nonfiction

68 pages, Paperback

First published May 28, 2019

Reviews

[Charles Haywood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Glenn Reynolds, the famous “Instapundit” and a law professor at the University of Tennessee, offers a short book about social media and the problems it brings. He frames his analysis and argument as a parallel to James C. Scott’s "Against the Grain," which valorizes Mesopotamian hunter-gatherers. Reynolds’s point is that just as when hunter-gatherers became city dwellers they also became more susceptible to disease, so when we submitted ourselves to living on social media, we also became more susceptible to disease. That is, to diseases of the mind, and he offers some possible cures and vaccines.

The Social Media Upheaval is best read together with Tim Wu’s fantastic "The Curse of Bigness," which covers in more detail how we should enhance, and increase enforcement of, antitrust law in order to break the pernicious political power of the Lords of Tech that results from economic concentration. Reynolds also recommends antitrust enforcement in preference to other ways of addressing the problems, but Wu offers a more expansive analysis of antitrust specifically, so that’s why you should read the two together. Combining the two also reinforces that the problems with Big Tech are a non-partisan issue. Reynolds is a conservative, or at least a libertarian, and Wu a liberal, but they have a great deal in common. True, conservatives face particular attacks from social media companies, as I discuss below, but most of the problems Reynolds (and Wu) outline affect all of society.

For Reynolds, the root of all problems with social media is that, like diseases in a Mesopotamian city, ideas spread far more quickly than they ever could in the past. Unlike earlier increases in the speed of ideas, such as that resulting from the printing press, this does not benefit society. Speed of idea transmission is common to all social media, because it is the core of social media’s business model. Of course, the creators of social media platforms characterize it with the neutral-sounding term “engagement.” But what that really means is that tens of thousands of smart people are paid to find ways to make readers or viewers skim over something they see and to encourage them to spread it quickly to others, such that they also will react with the same emotions. Since what is served up by the social media platform is algorithmically chosen to amplify the user’s emotions, most often negative and easy emotions, the usual result is a cascade of facile yet destructive negativity, with profit being collected at every step by the manipulators.

Why doesn’t faster transmission of ideas through social media benefit society? After all, books and newspapers created a more educated and better informed society. Because what “engagement” creates is classic mob behavior, not reflection. Reynolds does not cite Gustave Le Bon’s classic "The Crowd," but that book explains much behavior on social media, by showing how people who are part of a crowd act wholly differently than they do as individuals. The most dramatic demonstrations of this are the shame mobs that arise frequently, attacking someone for perceived bad behavior. This is made worse by that social media tends to reduce empathy, by increasing herd behavior and nearly eliminating face-to-face interaction, even among close friends. The entire point of social media is to bypass the rational centers of the brain, that is, to deliberately create mobs, in order to make money for the Lords of Tech, who conceal their manipulations behind claims of “keeping the world connected.”

Aside from mob behavior, social media also leads to an overall degradation in the ability to think clearly and deeply, and in the ability to read and comprehend complex material. For a democracy, based on the idea of rational deliberation, this is a big problem (especially when the ruling classes are disproportionately represented in, and reliant for opinion formation on, social media, especially Twitter). An even bigger problem for society is that there is strong evidence that screen time is the cause of a global drop in IQ in the developed world, reversing the Flynn effect, whereby IQ had been increasing steadily for a hundred years. A dumb, unreflective mob is not the stuff of which high-functioning societies are made. And then, of course, there’s the privacy problem—that social media companies know far, far more about us than most people would prefer, and they use and sell that information with no limits at all. Reynolds does not talk about this in detail—it doesn’t really fit his disease frame, but more importantly, I suspect, he knows that everyone knows about this problem, and he probably thinks of this as a free market exchange of sorts, less worthy of social attention than negative externalities such as mob behavior and destruction of rational thought.

Of course, to some extent these problems are more general problems of modernity, exacerbated by social media. Television, for example, began the process of making people think in images rather than reasoning from the printed word after reflection. But social media has blown the problems up to enormous proportions, and added to them new problems, such as massive amounts of actual lies, which, because of the speed of transmission of information, and the algorithms of engagement, have much more impact on society than lies (or their cousins, conspiracy theories) used to. No doubt social media has positive sides, but those positive sides, such as the ability to find others with shared, but rare, interests, are not tied to or benefited by the pernicious mechanisms built into today’s social media.

Why do people jump with gusto into this poisonous stew, if it’s so bad for us? Nobody is forcing us to, after all. Because the internet, and social media in particular, is addictive. The jokes about dopamine are not jokes. It’s addictive, because it’s designed to be addictive. There is a reason that Facebook, years ago, stopped simply showing you the posts of friends in the order they appeared, and instead showed you what they chose to show you. It’s not to make it better for you. It’s to make it addictive and allow them to hoover up money, while decreasing your actual satisfaction with the experience. After all, you’re the product, not the customer.

So, given that we are diseased, what to do? Reynolds goes through various possibilities. He points out that speed of transmission of speech has traditionally been viewed as a reason to potentially regulate speech, since it reduces time to reflect, if the speech encourages harm. Reynolds’s point isn’t that social media speech should therefore be regulated, necessarily, but that speech that encourages people to act without thinking is more problematic than other speech, and therefore we shouldn’t rule out regulation in the reflexive belief that we are thereby somehow limiting free speech.

But if we did directly regulate, there’s little reason, Reynolds says, to believe that would solve the problems. He points out what is often not understood—big companies love regulation. They have the money, resources, and contacts to shape and manipulate it to their advantage, so it does not crimp their activities, but does prevent competition by smaller and poorer companies. And limiting competition is an obsession with all of Big Tech—as Wu outlines, all these companies, from Google to Facebook, have successfully bought up their competition, without any governmental antitrust objection, and thereby achieved the status of unassailable oligopolies. So regulation as it is currently being discussed, where Facebook leads old men in Congress around by the nose and some toothless law is ultimately passed, is a waste of time. It is no coincidence that as criticism of social media companies increases, there has been a huge increase in the amount of political spending by Big Tech—and that’s just the visible and traceable spending.

After setting this groundwork, Reynolds briefly examines several possible regulatory fixes. Ending online anonymity through some kind of ability for authorities to easily find out who is behind any particular social media action, in essence a form of licensing, gives far too much power to governments (and, Reynolds does not say, to the Lords of Tech—witness how Facebook, a few weeks back, was happy to hand out to left-wing media outlets the name of a private citizen who had supposedly created an altered video of Nancy Pelosi, in order to assist him being doxxed and attacked). Another solution Reynolds endorses is algorithmic transparency, which he sees as more promising. For example, requiring social media to allow you simply to see posts of people you choose to see in chronological order, rather than as determined by the platform, would decrease the problems caused by curated engagement designed to compel emotional behavior. Related to this is something Reynolds does not really discuss, but would presumably endorse, data portability, in which users would have to be provided an easy way to transfer all their data to alternate social media platforms. Both these seem like excellent ideas.

Reynolds only very briefly considers removing Section 230 immunity, which has gotten a lot of attention lately. To provide more background, this is a section of a 1996 law, the Communications Decency Act, that relieves social media platforms, and only them (not newspapers or other traditional media) from any responsibility for what is published on their platforms. The idea of granting Section 230 immunity, back in 1996, was that since technology companies, then a totally new thing, were providing strictly neutral platforms, they should not be held responsible for speech on them, and the result would be a free and open internet—with the exception that such platforms should also be encouraged to suppress pornography. Thus, Section 230 treated internet platforms as a type of common carrier, giving them the standard privileges of common carriers. For example, UPS is not responsible for the contents of what it ships, but as a quid pro quo has to offer services on equal terms to everyone similarly situated, the core requirement for all common carriers. Immunity for internet platforms is the same principle.

But trying to achieve both its goals, Congress then also allowed internet platforms to not offer service on equal terms in one narrow area, explicitly permitting censorship of obscene material, along with, the fatal words, “other objectionable content.” In retrospect, this was a huge mistake, because the exception erased the requirement of offering service to all. Internet platforms have used Section 230 to invert what Congress intended. They don’t prevent pornography, but they also don’t provide a neutral platform, yet they are clad from head to foot in legal armor plate.

Reynolds rejects as politically unfeasible removing Section 230 immunity, or conditioning its continuance on adopting neutrality with respect to political content. That seems like an odd reason to reject such a promising solution, since all regulatory solutions are, right now, politically unfeasible. In fact, all of the Section 230 discussion in this book is pretty cursory and unsatisfactory, especially from a law professor. All social media platforms are undeniably common carriers as traditionally viewed, since companies like Google, Facebook, Instagram and so forth have managed to nearly wholly occupy the entire space of utilities that are, for many people, for better or worse, essential for their daily lives. You only have to ask yourself one question. Would you permit the telephone company, or your mobile provider, to disconnect you and ban you from using the phone if they disliked what you said on your phone? Unless you say “yes,” no major social media platform should be allowed to engage in any kind of viewpoint discrimination. (In fact, Facebook made this exact argument when arguing for “net neutrality.” As usual, the company talks out of both sides of its mouth.) My guess is that Reynolds glosses over Section 230 immunity because removing it doesn’t really solve the problems he outlines, especially speed of idea transmission; most of the problems it would address are those of political bias.

Soon enough, though, Reynolds tightens his focus to antitrust. Not only is competition nonexistent, for the reasons and through the mechanisms Wu identifies, but the tech companies collude across supposedly unrelated lines of business. “[T]he huge tech companies constitute interlocking monopolies in various fields, and often support one another against competitors—as PayPal, for example, cut off money transfers to YouTube competitor BitChute, and Twitter competitor Gab.” This is only part of the problem—again, being nonpartisan, what Reynolds ignores is that PayPal did this not primarily in order to hamper competition, since neither BitChute nor Gab was a relevant competitor of YouTube or Twitter, and other small potential competitors were not cut off by PayPal. Rather, it was done as a political action, to hamper conservative political speech, since the point of those specific competitors is that they compete primarily by offering a censorship-free platform where conservatives can speak freely without the chilling effect of censorship, something that the Lords of Tech are obsessed with preventing. Just a few weeks ago, for example, all the internet platforms (including Pinterest!) colluded to forbid dissemination of Project Veritas’s expose of a top Google executive’s admission that they use the platform to actively aid Democrats. (Twitter used to say it was “the free speech wing of the free speech party.” That seems painfully laughable now.) Reynolds instead focuses on the traditional problems with monopoly and oligopoly—not the modern, Robert Bork vision of consumer harm being the only relevant concern, but the earlier, Brandeisian aversion to excessive political power resulting from massive economic power. Breaking up Big Tech, and forbidding collusion among the successor companies, thereby ensuring competition, would reduce all the problems with social media. It would hamper the wildfire spread of problematic content, and encourage competitors to compete on the axes of better privacy, more algorithmic transparency, less systemic bias, and so forth, perhaps obviating the need for more direct government action with respect to those matters.

Reynolds concludes that using antitrust to increase competition is the way to go, extensively quoting Wu. I completely agree with this. That’s the cure, and continuing to enforce antitrust is the vaccine. And being nonpartisan, this solution is the only one that might get political traction in the current environment. But since no vaccine is perfect, and continuing his disease metaphor, Reynolds notes that better education might help create the equivalent of immunity, reinforcing the beneficial effects of antitrust enforcement. I suppose, but what he specifically advocates is “training people in critical reading and critical thinking.” I don’t think he has children, so perhaps he doesn’t realize that’s already very popular in schools, and merely code for indoctrinating children into leftist thinking. I can assure him that at no public school in America is questioning Left pieties regarded as critical thinking. And schools aren’t going to go back to teaching old fashioned civics and history, even though Reynolds is right that would make discourse on the internet better.

More compelling is the idea that society may by itself develop immunities and workarounds that limit the damage. We forget that it’s only been ten years or so that we’ve really been in the social media world; how people behave often changes on its own, though it usually seems like current behaviors will go on forever. People may come to realize that social media isn’t real and isn’t important. Perhaps people will stop using social media or use it much less; perhaps other distractions (with their own problems) will arise. Such adaptations, or unforeseen other changes, could lead to the diseases wrought by social media becoming, as Reynolds says, endemic, rather than epidemic.

Along these lines, I am given to understand that private social networks have gained some ground. Facebook allows private groups, and one can imagine that if a platform could be created that allowed private social networks to operate easily and slickly, without any kind of interference and censorship of the type Facebook imposes, it could catch on. Listening to a recent Palladium magazine podcast, for example (I highly recommend Palladium), it was suggested that Urbit (with which Curtis Yarvin was until recently involved) might help with such a platform. Just because we now can’t see exactly how this would work, and that network effects are by definition lacking at the beginning, doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen. Similarly, Jordan Peterson keeps promising that his new platform, thinkspot, will be rolled out soon, though it’s opaque to me what it’s going to do. True, anything like this would be viciously attacked, just like BitChute and Gab, with the active cooperation of a vast ecosystem of third parties wholly committed to total Left dominance, including payment processors, funding platforms such as Patreon and GoFundMe, credit card companies, and corrupt state and local governments such as Andrew Cuomo’s New York. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t eagerly look into these platforms (I, for example, am about to start also publishing podcast narrations on LBRY, a blockchain based alternative platform).

A piece of practical advice Reynolds offers is for targets to ignore social media firestorms, since they are usually a tempest in a teapot. “Once the anger is discharged online, it’s very unusual for people to follow it up with concrete actions in the real world.” “A less fevered response might be healthier.” If those, individuals or entities, subject to attack on social media simply ignored the attacks for a few days, they would find it almost always simply disappears. I think this is true, and for that reason, I don’t see why people feel the need to hasten and apologize on social media when they are being chased by a mob. You will never catch me dead apologizing for anything, and most especially never offering pre-emptive apologies, but then, I’m not on social media in any relevant way, so I’d be impossible to attack on social media. I suppose if I did something perceived as awful, like shoot a baby elephant (not a desire of mine), and someone put a picture of it on social media, people could talk about it and whip up a mob. But I wouldn’t notice unless someone came to my house or work to threaten me as a result, and that’s what guns are for. And it seems to me that mobs don’t pick non-public targets who themselves aren’t on social media. I am no longer on Facebook, nor are my children on any form of social media.

[Review completes as first comment.]

[George P. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone, it seems, uses Facebook and Twitter…and hates them. The Left hates them because the Russians used them to steal the 2016 presidential election from Hilary Clinton and give it to Donald Trump. (That’s the allegation anyway, highly improbable in my opinion.) The Right hates them because they censor and deplatform conservative speech. (A more probable allegation, in my opinion.) And because everyone hates them, everyone wants to reform them.

The Social Media Upheaval by Glenn Harlan Reynolds explains why social media have become so powerful and so hated in the last decade, as well as how to ameliorate their worst features. Reynolds is the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee. He blogs at InstaPundit.com—he’s known as the “Blogfather” whose links to other sites cause “Instalanches” of sudden, high-volume web traffic. He writes for such publications as The Atlantic, Forbes, Popular Mechanics, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. He lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.

The basic problem with social media, in Reynolds’ telling, is their design. “It’s almost as if the social media world was designed to spread viruses of the mind,” he writes, then cites Jaron Lanier’s work on “engagement.” As Lanier writes, “Engagement is not meant to serve any particular purpose other than its own enhancement, and yet the result is an unnatural global amplification of the ‘easy’ emotions, which happen to be the negative ones.” Combine the negative emotions with social media’s bandwagon effect and the tendency of users not to read past headlines, and you find that, in Reynolds’ words, “Social media makes people less informed but more partisan.”

That’s bad enough, but then you have to factor in the monopolistic nature of current social media. In the early days of the internet, blogs and chat boards existed at individual domains that you had to separately visit. Now, you never have to leave Facebook. There’s a clear upside to this, of course—ease of use. The downside is when Facebook begins to regulate who or what can make use of its platform. The same goes for Twitter and like-minded social media.

Because of this corporate censorship, deplatforming, and demonetization, some—such as Sen. Josh Hawley—have urged legislation to regulate content in a variety of ways. Reynolds has doubts about that from a First Amendment perspective, which I share. Instead, he urges legislation based on antitrust principles. He writes: “Policing platforms, and collusion among them…is likely to do more good than censorship. Antitrust scrutiny of monopolies and collusion will do more for the integrity of social media, and the protection of society from hysteria and misinformation, than regulation of content. And such antitrust regulation doesn’t raise the same First Amendment and free speech problems.”

At 64 pages, The Social Media Upheaval is a quick read and valuable for precisely that reason. If you’re worried about the negative effectives social media is having on American public discourse (and mental health), read it.

Book Reviewed
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, The Social Media Upheaval(New York: Encounter Books, 2019).

P.S. If you liked my review, please click “Helpful” on my Amazon review page.

[Becca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing new really. Should social media be policed for content or should the tech giants be broken up? The author says where they stand but I think they massively underplayed the education aspect. If you must fracture the big companies people will still follow what they know/like/trust. I think we should be teaching ppl to question why they trust the companies they trust and how to examine stories for themselves. Thankfully it was a short read.

[Theda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this Book !

Short read with a wealth of information and analysis.

Reynolds explains why Social Media is too Fast, Incomplete, Emotional and Untrustworthy.
Discusses the pros and cons of various types of regulation, and the need to train people as critical thinkers and readers.
Presents a compelling argument for addressing this as an issue of anti-trust rather than affecting free speech.

I’m a skeptical reader by nature, but didn’t find anything here to disagree with; and found much that concurs with my own observations. Highly recommend this book.

[Susie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anti-Trust Elaboration

I would like to know more about how this approach would be accomplished w/o risking even more control of speech by the state. In other words, details of the plan to break up the monopolies would be helpful.

[Steve Seyboldt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Glen Reynolds brings his legal and constitutional knowledge to look the up and downsides of social media. Also he looks at regulation proposals and offers his own fix that respects free speech while reducing social media's toll. It is a short read, only 60 pages, but very insightful.

[Taylor Barkley · Rating 3 out of 5]

A star for brevity. More like a long op ed or old timey pamphlet. His solutions aren’t as simple as he makes them seem. Some errors too. Also neglects to mention Twitter suspended him in 2016 and he’s faced his own social media mob. I liked his city disease resilience analogy.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reynolds is upset. The Social Media has done wrong to Reynolds and his friends. And now it's time for the Government to interfere. Not much. Just enough "to keep balance".

[Corbin Payne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved his use of both data and common sense as well as his theme of personal and community healing. Let’s hope that Prof. Reynolds proves to be a Jonah more so than a Cassandra.

[Laurence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth reading

Raises interesting questions but a bit short on answers....author seems afraid say what he really thinks...pulls his punches...doesn’t really analyze his own shaming by Twitter mobs (who may have been paid enforcement arm of Left).

[Paul Sand · Rating 2 out of 5]

[Imported automatically from my blog. Some formatting there may not have translated here.]

I bought the Kindle version of this short book after listening to Nick Gillespie's podcast interview with the author, Instapundit and Blogfather Glenn Reynolds. Glenn's a good guy. So's Nick.

Let me come into it this way: one of the core principles of classical liberal democracy is that the populace is best served by a robust climate of free expression. The more the merrier! People can use their reasoning faculties to evaluate outside ideas, concepts, and values. And (generally) make decent decisions about political questions: the scope and powers of government, qualities they desire in their representatives, and the like.

But what if that is becoming less true? Glenn analogizes to the very earliest cities, which sprang up and subsequently self-destructed, because "we" didn't know how easily illnesses can spread in an urban environment.

Glenn argues that the current environment is exhibiting signs of increasing mental illness (or at least dysfunction): increased suicide rates, substance abuse, alienation, and general lack of bonhomie. (A theme echoed in recent books by Jonah Goldberg, Ben Sasse, Arthur C. Brooks, and many others.) He blames, primarily social media for this, specifically Twitter, Facebook, and Google. (I think he leaves Amazon out.)

As a result, we're headed for a sad crack-up of the foundations of American political life, probably presaging a future of authoritarianism and immiseration.

He could be right, of course. I'm not so sure.

His argument is not typically libertarian: use existing antitrust laws to break up those nasty companies. To his libertarian credit, he neatly debunks other regulatory solutions. I don't know whether a breakup would solve anything, though, and it seems like it would involve a lot of wealth destruction.

It's a very short book, and a very quick read. I got the Kindle version; Amazon claims the print version is 68 pages. I think the type must be large and the margins wide.

[Jim White · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was quite a good summary of the adverse impacts of various social media platforms on society, as well as possible alternatives.