![]() (Haidt had experimented with such a model before.) Bail was cautious. ![]() He suggested that the two of them collaborate on a comprehensive literature review that they could share, as a Google Doc, with other researchers. Two weeks later, Haidt wrote to Bail, expressing his frustration at the way Facebook officials consistently cited the same handful of studies in their defense. ![]() On January 6, 2021, he was on the phone with Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke and the author of the recent book “ Breaking the Social Media Prism,” when Bail urged him to turn on the television. Haidt acknowledges that the extant literature on social media’s effects is large and complex, and that there is something in it for everyone. Chief among Haidt’s worries is that use of social media has left us particularly vulnerable to confirmation bias, or the propensity to fix upon evidence that shores up our prior beliefs. These are, needless to say, common concerns. And, unfortunately, those were the brains that inform, instruct, and entertain most of the country.” Haidt’s prevailing metaphor of thoroughgoing fragmentation is the story of the Tower of Babel: the rise of social media has “unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.” We’ve been shooting one another ever since.” While the right has thrived on conspiracy-mongering and misinformation, the left has turned punitive: “When everyone was issued a dart gun in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in the brain. ![]() Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly a billion dart guns globally. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. “A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. “What changed in the 2010s?” Haidt asks, reminding his audience that a former Twitter developer had once compared the Retweet button to the provision of a four-year-old with a loaded weapon. He has determined that a great historical discontinuity can be dated with some precision to the period between 20, when these features became widely available on phones. Although Haidt concedes that political polarization and factional enmity long predate the rise of the platforms, and that there are plenty of other factors involved, he believes that the tools of virality-Facebook’s Like and Share buttons, Twitter’s Retweet function-have algorithmically and irrevocably corroded public life. In April, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published an essay in The Atlantic in which he sought to explain, as the piece’s title had it, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Anyone familiar with Haidt’s work in the past half decade could have anticipated his answer: social media.
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