Haidt and Lukianoff: The Polarization Spiral – by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff – Persuasion
It was only when Jon teamed up with the technology writer Tobias Rose-Stockwell that we found what we believe is the thing that warped the fabric of social space-time. It was the introduction of the like button, by Facebook, in 2009, which Twitter promptly copied, combined with the introduction of the retweet button by Twitter that same year, which Facebook copied in 2011. Before 2009, social media feeds were almost entirely chronological content was mostly personal (rather than political) and social media was not particularly polarizing. But once users had two super-fast ways to say what they liked, and could do so many times a minute, the social media companies had vastly more information on each user s behavior, and they began to optimize people s newsfeeds using algorithms that continuously improved the platform s ability to engage users and keep them clicking.
At first many thought this viral sharing could be a good thing for democracy, especially after a Facebook page in 2011 helped to start a revolution in Egypt that brought down a corrupt and brutal dictator in just a few weeks. But the rapid increase in public expressions of outrage not just at murderous dictators but at young adult fiction writers, people who accidentally make the OK sign, fellow employees, fellow students who said something, professors who said something at pretty much anyone at any time for almost any reason this was the planetary change.
If not for these changes in social media that occurred during President Obama s first term, we believe that America would not have lost its collective mind during Obama s second term. Few of the witch hunts and other campus events that we described in The Coddling of the American Mind could have happened it would have been hard to conduct rapid public shamings of professors and administrators for words or phrases embedded in well-intentioned emails. There would have been no Great Awokening in 2014, and no presidential campaign run on Twitter in 2016.
Maybe we should make “liking” things on social media illegal. I certainly don’t see much good coming out of it, except more time glued to screens.