Tag: facebook
We Can't Blame Polarized America On Social Media Alone

We Can't Blame Polarized America On Social Media Alone

To hear some people tell it, social media — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc. — have driven Americans crazy. Our very democracy is imperiled by mis- and disinformation circulating online among angry crackpots fomenting civil war between rival “tribes” that sound like street gangs.

The Crips versus the Bloods, for example, or the Libs versus MAGA. Each a partisan cartoon to the other; both dreaming of victory and the subjugation of their imagined (and often largely imaginary) enemies.

Perhaps the most influential proponent of this view has been the eminent social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. A prolific author and self-described political centrist, Haidt took to The Atlantic recently to explain “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.”

“Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly,” he wrote. “We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.

“It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics and American history.”

At the expense of being a smart aleck, when has this not been true? Never mind the unpleasantries of the 1860s. How about the upheavals a century later, when billboards appeared all over the American South depicting “Martin Luther King at a Communist Training School”?

For sheer chaos, nothing in my lifetime rivals 1968, with the assassinations of Rev. King and Robert Kennedy, followed by the Chicago police riot at the Democratic National Convention and the presidential candidacy of Alabama’s segregationist Gov. George Wallace.

One could go on. I’ve always been a fan of Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America, an alternate history in which Charles Lindbergh defeated FDR in the 1940 presidential election, leading to a Hitler-friendly regime.

Absurd, you say? Not much crazier than Donald Trump’s man-crush on Vladimir Putin. Not to mention North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

That said, there’s plenty of evidence for Haidt’s view of “social media as a universal solvent, breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached.” He thinks the great turning point came in 2009, when online platforms invented the “like,” “retweet” and “share” functions, greatly enhancing what George Orwell called “groupthink.”

Online echo chambers definitely encourage users to communicate only with like-minded people, Haidt stresses, thus “supercharging confirmation bias, making it far easier for people to find evidence for absurd beliefs and conspiracy theories ... such as those spreading across right-wing media and now into Congress. ‘Pizzagate,’ QAnon, the belief that vaccines contain microchips, the conviction that Donald Trump won re-election — it’s hard to imagine any of these ideas or belief systems reaching the levels that they have without Facebook and Twitter.”

True enough. On the Democratic left, Haidt thinks, online groupthink has helped stifle dissent at universities and large news organizations. One small but telling example: The New York Times has never published a review of J.K. Rowling’s most recent novel, The Ink Black Heart, although the author is perhaps the best-selling novelist in the English-speaking world. However, she has also expressed views deemed transphobic by activists and thus has been rendered an unperson in literary circles.

(I bought the novel on publication day but found it heavy going. I also find the hubbub over her views incomprehensible.)

The great political beneficiary of social media, Haidt argues, has been Trump, whom he calls “the first politician to master the new dynamics of the post-Babel era, in which outrage is the key to virality, stage performance crushes competence ...”

To me, Trump’s superpower was TV, not the internet. He imported the race-based themes of professional wrestling to politics; that, and his sheer shamelessness. Because something else happened in 2009 that was far more consequential to the MAGA crowd than Facebook’s “like” function: The United States inaugurated Barack Obama, a Black president with an Islamic-sounding name.

A large proportion of Trump’s target audience simply lost their minds. And social media had very little to do with it. One of his most attention-grabbing falsehoods, early on, was that he’d employed investigators who were making shocking discoveries about Obama’s allegedly foreign birth and secret Muslim faith. Un-American outsiders were taking over.

The same crowd that heeded Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Clinton Chronicles videos, depicting Bill and Hillary Clinton’s many supposed murders, and who sat stuck in traffic listening to Rush Limbaugh railing against liberal perfidy was all too ready to believe that a Black impostor had infiltrated the White House.

And then along came the Fox News network, developing a larger audience and a more comprehensively conspiratorial worldview — to the point where its executives now admit pandering to audience views not of what actually happened out there in the visible world, but what ought to have happened in the world of their collective imagination.

So it’s all Facebook’s fault?

I don’t think so.

Reprinted with permission from Sun Times.

trump's facebook ad

While Trump Incites Potential Violence, Meta Monetizes His Facebook Ads

On March 18, former President Donald Trump started running Facebook ads from his own page — the first time that his page has run new ads since Meta allowed him to return to the platform and gave him full advertising access. The same day, Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social and called for his supporters to “PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!”

On January 25, two years after Trump was suspended for inciting violence on January 6, 2021, Meta announced that the company would be reinstating his accounts on its platforms. In deciding that Trump could return, the company determined that “the risk to public safety,” which it set out as the measure for ending his ban, has “sufficiently receded” — a flawed assessment given Trump’s history of pushing dangerous misinformation. The accounts were ultimately restored on February 9, with Trump posting on Facebook again on March 17.

Media Matters has now found that his previously suspended page started running ads again on March 18, attacking the “Deep State,” “Fake News,” and “Big Tech.” Several of the ads feature Trump telling his followers: “The Deep State and Fake News will do everything in their power to destroy me and stop YOU from having a voice in your own country.”

Half of the ads include video of Trump attacking Facebook and other tech companies: “Your all-time favorite president is back on Facebook. What Big Tech did to me and you was an absolute disgrace.”

While Trump’s page started running these ads, Trump was posting on Truth Social, suggesting that he will be arrested on March 21 and claiming that “IT’S TIME” and he needs his supporters to “PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!” and “SAVE AMERICA!PROTEST, PROTEST, PROTEST!!!”

Throughout his suspension, Trump ran Meta ads from various pages run by his joint fundraising committee, but limitations such as a prohibition on ads that were in his voice reportedly made fundraising more difficult and Trump’s ad spending on Meta’s platforms before his suspension dwarfed the PAC’s ad spending while he was banned. (His Facebook page was the platform’s largest political advertiser in the last five years.)

By reinstating Trump’s accounts, Meta prioritized the revenue it will get from Trump over public safety. On the day his page ran new ads for the first time since his reinstatement, he was on another platform encouraging his supporters to protest — demonstrating that the threat he poses to public safety has clearly not receded.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Trump Poised To Abandon His Own 'Truth Social' Web Platform

Trump Poised To Abandon His Own 'Truth Social' Web Platform

Former President Donald Trump is gearing up to screw over his social media platform, Truth Social, for a return to mainstream websites like Facebook and Twitter that banned him for inciting violence to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election, several outlets are reporting.

Despite the cascade of calamities that have befallen Truth Social in months past, Trump has enjoyed unfettered authority to make spectacularly conspiratorial, preposterous, tone-deaf, and usually outright false claims to the right-wing hotheads on his beleaguered enterprise.

Yet the former president has told confidants he looks forward to the expiration of a contractual clause that compels him to make “all social media communications” on his Truth Social account six hours before posting them on other platforms, according to Rolling Stone, citing filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Trump agreed to this condition, branded “Social Media Exclusivity Term” in the filing, with Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), whose board he fled weeks before the SEC and a Manhattan federal grand jury subpoenaed the company last June.

The exclusivity term doesn’t restrict the self-declared 2024 presidential candidate’s campaign efforts, though, allowing him to grace other social media platforms first to post content that “specifically relates to political messaging, political fundraising or get-out-the-vote.”

The exclusivity term, which came into effect in December 2021 and will last 18 months, is up in June this year, per Rolling Stone, and after that, the agreement will “[extend] in perpetuity for additional [six-month] terms,” except “notice is given.”

Sources close to the defeated, twice-impeached president told Rolling Stone that Trump was unconcerned about the nearly-ended exclusivity agreement and non-committal about renewal, saying, “There’s not going to be a need for that.”

“He said there’s an expiration date and that he didn’t want to make commitments,” a source told the publication.

The development stood in stark contrast to Trump’s months-long insistence that he would not return to Twitter, which he sued alongside Facebook and Google for “censorship,” after which he claimed that Truth Social was “Number One” on the social media scene.

The claim was, of course, a lie. Not only did Truth Social’s 3.3 million unique visitors last August and September represent a smidgen compared to Twitter’s then- 238 million daily active users, but TMTG and the blank-check company seeking to take it public, Digital World Acquisition Corporation, were in heaps of trouble.

Four executives departed Digital World in November and December 2022, as reported by Forbes, rocking the company, which had fallen into financial difficulties so severe — as investors backed out of its chaotic deal to merge with TMTG — that it switched headquarters from a grand office space in Miami, Florida, to a UPS mailbox.

Trump dismissed those reports — including a story on Fox Business that Truth Social and TMTG were stiffing a vendor out of over $1 million — as “fake news” and would later privately mock Elon Musk’s nascent, chaotic reign as “Chief Twit.”

Despite publicly insisting that he “[doesn’t] see any reason for” returning to Twitter after Musk unbanned his Twitter account in November and Truth Social was doing "phenomenally well," the ex-president has considered comparing himself to Superman on his first Twitter post in over two years.

The ex-president has also considered making a WWE-style campaign video, rants about January 6, 2021, and targeted insults at President Biden as his comeback post, sources informed Rolling Stone.

What Online Disinformers Dish Out Is Killing The Befuddled And Benighted

What Online Disinformers Dish Out Is Killing The Befuddled And Benighted

Possibly you recall the “Information Superhighway,” a phrase popularized by then-Vice President Al Gore to describe the internet. The expectation was that universal connectivity would lead to widespread enlightenment and social progress. Instead, we got QAnon, TikTok, metastasizing superstition, and the cult of Donald J. Trump — a speedway to delusion and disorder. We got social media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc.

Maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, the newspaper where you may be reading this probably runs an astrology feature — an ancient belief system based upon a pre-Copernican understanding of the heavens in which stars were believed to orbit the Earth and to influence human events.

To most, astrology’s a harmless diversion. I once had a neighbor, a banker, who cast elaborate horoscopes and offered personal advice based upon the stars. His readings were amazingly complex and detailed. Once, he overheard my wife and me bickering about what she saw as the appalling chaos of my office.

The astrologer chuckled in his deep-voiced way and said, “It’s a sure thing he’s not a Virgo.”

Now, to the question “What’s your sign?” I quote Arkansas humorist Mike Trimble: “Slippery when wet.”

My September birthday, however, definitely makes me a Virgo. With odds 12-to-1 in his favor, the astrologer had gotten it dead wrong.

If you think his views were shaken, you’ve never known a serious practitioner. Evidently, my messy office signified a deeper passion for order. Or something. I forget. And while I haven’t seen the fellow in years, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d become a COVID conspiracy maven and vaccine-denier. I hope it didn’t kill him.

Mere reality isn’t enough for some people. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say it’s too much. For millions, contemporary life far surpasses their ability to assimilate and absorb conflicting information. So they turn to social media, where cranks and charlatans are happy to provide them with magic and circuses: storybook mysteries hidden from ordinary mortals but discoverable by an enlightened few.

Check out Alex Jones’ Infowars website. A contemptible fraud, Jones became a billionaire by popularizing such off-the-wall notions as the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre being a government-sponsored hoax featuring “crisis actors” masquerading as bereaved parents. It’s all a plot to seize your guns, of course. Guns being the magical totem that will protect you against what Scripture calls “the malice and snares of the devil.”

Hillary Clinton, that is. Along with international Jewish conspirator George Soros. Also Dr. Anthony Fauci. But hold that thought.

On his website, Jones also peddles survivalist gear, toxic dietary supplements, and miracle “cures” for COVID-19. It’s not clear if Jones inspired Trump’s nutball advice to inject bleach.

Even after the courts ordered Jones to pay almost $1.5 billion last year in damages to the parents of slain children he has slandered, he retains millions of online followers. Utterly shameless, he was among the invited speakers at Trump’s January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally.

“We will never back down to the satanic pedophile, globalist New World Order and their walking-dead reanimated corpse Joe Biden,” Jones announced at a post-election MAGA rally, “and we will never recognize him.” It sounds like self-parody, but he kept a straight face.

Oddly, he’s since fallen out with QAnon, the political cult holding that a cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles fixed the 2020 election.

Anyway, here’s the thing: From the Black Death of the 14th century to COVID-19, lurid fantasies have always arisen to explain the inexplicable. Human beings crave simple stories with villains and heroes. History has to have a meaning and a moral — the more melodramatic the better.

Social media, meanwhile, allows crackpot imaginings and idle fantasies to develop into full-blown conspiracy theories more quickly and circulate more widely all the time.

The saner among us must be thankful that Dr. Fauci is not Jewish. Otherwise, there’s no telling to what craven depths the conspiracist wing of the House Republican majority might have been willing to take their announced plan to investigate him.

Even the tycoon Elon Musk, who received his own medical education at the prestigious University of Twitter, wants Fauci prosecuted. Not to be outdone, exhibitionist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia — she of “Jewish space lasers” fame — jumped right on board.

Perhaps the most eminent public health official in American history, Fauci retires this week at age 82 from his job as director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He says he has nothing to hide and no problem testifying.

“What really, really concerns me,” he told The New York Times, “is the politicization of public health principles. How you can have red states under-vaccinated and blue states well-vaccinated and having deaths much more prevalent among people in red states because they’re under-vaccinated — that’s tragic for the population.”

Quite so.

Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of The Hunting of the President.