General

On April 12, 2022 by Jonathan Zdziarski

I have previously written about social media, and how it capitalizes on what I’ve referred to as the cult phenomenon, or virality, as a core revenue generator. I didn’t (and still don’t) think our government officials have any business participating in a system designed to foster vitriol and mob mentality, at least in any official capacity. Today, I came across this sublime piece by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who does an extraordinary job correlating the milestones in social media’s technical advancements with the changes in society we’ve all seen occur over the past decade. I strongly recommend everyone take the time to read it thoroughly.

Haidt is a little weak on his recommendations towards the end of the article (although I do think adults should go outside and play, too), but I think the technical community can pick up where he left off and come up with adequate solutions that social media companies can adopt. The chief problem, however, is what I stated in my own post in 2020: public companies capitalize on the same behaviors that are causing our society to break down. Public companies are legally required to act in the best interest of their shareholders; e.g. make money. So it seems not only do we need the help of the technical community to solve these problems, but we also need the help of financial / economics experts to find ways to make those technical solutions palatable to shareholders. As much as I loathe the greed of Wall St., the reality is that short of destroying capitalism, it isn’t going away.

I propose, perhaps with the support of a government body, technology experts, psychologists, and financial experts put a working group together to find tenable technical solutions that curb the mob behavior Haidt describes, and present a financially profitable (or at least financially lateral) proposal for the executives of these social media companies. Simply yelling about how awful Facebook is, on Facebook, isn’t going to get anyone to move. On the other hand, it seems that people like Zuckerberg are almost begging to see a government-sponsored panel of experts put forward a report with a formalized set of recommendations for social media. Would they listen? I would very much like to find out.