Max Fisher

Truth or falsity has little bearing on a post’s reception, except to the extent that a liar is freer to alter facts to conform to a button-pushing narrative. What matters is whether the post can provoke a powerful reaction, usually outrage.

Cut the cord. Free yourself. Set new norms that treat these technologies as what they are: poison. The new cigarettes.

It’s all the same formula, after all, whether driven by deep learning or the newest A.I. By small companies or large ones. American firms or Chinese. Amid Silicon Valley retrenchment or growth. Political backlash toward tech or political embrace. It is the ruthless maximizing of attention, governed by blinkered tech-manifesto ideologies rooted mostly in greed and hubris, if it is governed at all. Our worst biases and impulses activated many times beyond their baseline. Our basest instincts, which we have worked over eons to contain under the seal of civilization, suddenly amplified and distorted at world-altering scales. Billions of individuals pulled a few notches toward tribalism, aggression, and distrust, the consequences visible at every tier of public and private life. All so that a few companies—and the self-congratulating tech elite who sit atop them—might enrich themselves at our expense.

The platforms, they concluded, were reshaping not just online behavior but underlying social impulses, and not just individually but collectively, potentially altering the nature of ‘civic engagement and activism, political polarization, propaganda, and misinformation.’ They called it the MAD model, for the three forces rewiring people’s minds. Motivation: the instincts and habits hijacked by the mechanics of social media platforms. Attention: users’ focus manipulated to distort their perceptions of social cues and mores. Design: platforms that had been constructed in ways that train and incentivize certain behaviors.

A new truism of politics was emerging: social media elevated anti-establishment politicians conversant with exaggerated moral-emotional language.

I came to think of Facebook’s policy team as akin to Philip Morris scientists tasked with developing a safer, better filter. In one sense, cutting down the carcinogens ingested by billions of smokers worldwide saved or prolonged lives on a scale few of us could ever match. In another sense, those scientists were working for the cigarette company, advancing the cause of selling cigarettes that harmed people at enormous scale. I was not surprised then, that everyone I spoke to at Facebook, no matter how intelligent or introspective, expressed total certainty that the product was not innately harmful.

‘There’s always going to be borderline content on platforms. That’s to be expected,’ [Jonathan] Kaiser said, straining to sympathize with the tech companies. ‘The shocking thing,’ he added, ‘is that YouTube’s algorithms basically are helping people go in these directions.’