What's Our Problem?, page 30
Unfortunately, a sizable body of research suggests that the best way to win the social media game is to post things that trigger people’s emotions, especially strong emotions like anger, and especially tribal anger at the out-group.4 These incentives have come to flood social media feeds with anger, political tribalism, and general negativity.* Suddenly, we were all exposed to the inner thoughts of way more strangers than ever before, and lots of people who choose not to spend time with politically hostile people in real life were getting a large dose of them online.
All of this made social media a less nice place to be, which has made a lot of nice people more timid about posting their thoughts. Some have logged off altogether. Over the years, social media has increasingly become a Primitive Mind playground.
Meanwhile, another story was in progress. At some point in the early 2010s, people discovered that they could use social media to do something incredible: speak truth to power. Here’s Ronson again:
Voiceless people realized that they had a voice, and it was powerful and eloquent. If a newspaper ran some racist or homophobic column, we realized we could do something about it. We could get them. We could hit them with a weapon that we understood but they didn’t—a social media shaming. Advertisers would withdraw their advertising. When powerful people misused their privilege, we were going to get them. This was like the democratization of justice. Hierarchies were being leveled out. We were going to do things better.
Like, take this boss:
For a long time, bosses like him could sexually abuse their employees, often without consequences. Speaking out about the abuse could leave the employee ostracized at the company or maybe even out of a job. Others might be hesitant to publicly support her out of fear for their own careers. A situation like this is like a glitch in the Liberal Games.
But social media changed the equation. The employee now had a way to tell her story to lots of strangers and rally a swell of public support that could pressure the company to fire the abusive boss. This new source of power—the digital megaphone—helped provide the equation’s missing element, and in some cases, repair the glitch.
Each correction like this makes a liberal society truer to its promises, like taking steps up a hill toward justice.
The problem is that it wasn’t just the high-minded activists who were exhilarated by this amazing new way to take down bad guys. Millions of social-media-addicted Primitive Minds had just found their new favorite activity. Frothing at the mouth after the latest kill, they asked:
Who’s next?
Intoxicated with the power to be righteous crusaders on a mass scale, Primitive Minds searched for new villains to slay. When there weren’t any obvious villains, they’d manufacture them. It works something like this:
Step 1: Find a villain
What’s the difference between a fair accusation and a smear?
A fair accusation plays by liberal rules. It’s done in good faith and based on commonly held definitions.
A smear is an accusation not beholden to liberal rules, playing instead by Power Games rules: everyone can do whatever they want, if they have the power to pull it off.
The smear is an age-old weapon of the low-rung movement. In 1953, former Communist Bella Dodd explained in a public hearing how Communists use “methods of fear” to fight their enemies:
Anyone who opposes the Communist line, anyone who is going to hurt them in any way, is bound to get the full impact of the attacks of the Communists plus all of their friends. The attack is always in high-sounding words. The congressional committees of the United States Government become the agents of Fascists, and therefore, everyone is asked to organize against the “agents of fascism” … Or it becomes a McCarranite, or a McCarthyite. Let me assure you that these are just general smear words. They are emotional words. They are words which have no definition, and first you create a sense of fear and hatred and then you apply this word to everyone against you.5
Meanwhile, the actual McCarthyites were doing the same exact thing, only swapping out “Fascist” for “Communist” as their Disney movie villain.
A modern social media smear campaign does this too, using similar tactics. Concept creep can make someone into a villain by expanding the definition of damning labels—racist, misogynist, white supremacist, groomer, etc.—to include lesser offenses and a broader range of behavior. Other campaigns will create villains using misrepresentation: out-of-context quotes, willful misinterpretation, or straight-up fabrication.6
And then there’s a trademark rule of any smear campaign: guilty because accused. As tenuous as an accusation may be, once someone is deemed a villain by people in a low-rung movement, there’s no need to dig deeper or clarify anything with them or let them defend themselves. The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood writes about this:
Guilty because accused … tends to kick in during the "Terror and Virtue" phase of revolutions—something has gone wrong, and there must be a purge, as in the French Revolution, Stalin's purges in the USSR, the Red Guard period in China, the reign of the Generals in Argentina and the early days of the Iranian Revolution. The list is long and Left and Right have both indulged.7
So an identified target is, with or without evidence, a guilty villain—which also means a villain necessitating severe punishment.
Step 2: Destroy the villain
During the first decade of the internet, low-rung political groups wanted to ruin their enemies’ lives—but they had no effective way to do it. If you listened closely, you could faintly hear them screaming in the comment sections of articles or YouTube videos, but they had little power in these pockets of oblivion.
But on social media, the same outrage could be shared and retweeted by others who felt the same way—and faint screams became a lot louder.
For every journalist with a traditional megaphone, there are 100 random people with large social media followings. Used in a certain way, these followings are like paintball guns loaded with “smear bullets.” When a movement has a target in their sights, they can instantly fire a smear at them.
If the smear gets noticed by someone who has a large following, they can retweet to blast out the same smear from a much larger gun. Influential activists follow other influential activists, and quickly, the smear is being simultaneously fired at the target from thousands of accounts. What it amounts to is one giant cannonball launcher, firing an industrial-sized smear at the target.
Social media algorithms pick up on activity, with no regard for the kind of activity it is. So quickly, the algorithms crank up the volume on the smear. Shame pours down on the target from a million mouths all at once. Reflecting on his own past as a social media shamer, writer Barrett Wilson says:
How did I become that person? It happened because it was exhilarating. Every time I would call someone racist or sexist, I would get a rush. That rush would then be reaffirmed and sustained by the stars, hearts, and thumbs-up that constitute the nickels and dimes of social media validation. The people giving me these stars, hearts, and thumbs-up were engaging in their own cynical game: A fear of being targeted by the mob induces us to signal publicly that we are part of it.8
When our psyches are down on the low rungs, consumed with this mix of exhilaration and fear, it’s easy to forget that something cruel is happening to a real human. The Primitive Mind specializes in dehumanizing members of its out-group,9 a delusion easier to sustain when the person is just an online avatar. This delusion is responsible for what Ronson calls “a disconnect between the severity of the crime and the gleeful savagery of the punishment.”
Then come the news websites. When something goes viral enough on social media, it ignites the media engine, becoming the subject of a slew of articles, appearing on everything from random blogs to sites like Jezebel and HuffPost and Breitbart to national media brands like CNN and Fox News.* The target is quickly being shamed by some of the largest megaphones on the internet. Those articles are then further amplified when they go viral on social media.
The target is left with a smear plastered on their forehead.
It doesn’t stop there. The Google search algorithm optimizes for relevance and view count, regardless of the whether its front-page results are true or false. The shame storm eventually subsides as the Primitive Minds on social media move on to the next target—but Google search results are forever. One big shame storm is usually all it takes for the smear to be stitched irreparably onto the target’s online presence. Forever forward, googling their name will bring the smear front and center along with anything else about them. Google takes the smear and permanently brands it onto the target’s forehead.
Even if the smear itself is overexaggerated or totally fabricated, the damage to the target’s reputation is extremely real. Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes:
When you are a public figure, people will write and say false things about you. It comes with the territory. Many of those things you brush aside. Many you ignore. The people close to you advise you that silence is best. And it often is. Sometimes, though, silence makes a lie begin to take on the shimmer of truth. In this age of social media, where a story travels the world in minutes, silence sometimes means that other people can hijack your story and soon, their false version becomes the defining story about you.10
But speaking out doesn’t really work either, even when the target can provide demonstrative proof they’re being misrepresented. Author and podcaster Sam Harris, an experienced smear campaign target, explains why:
It is impossible to effectively defend oneself against unethical critics. If nothing else, the law of entropy is on their side, because it will always be easier to make a mess than to clean it up. It is, for instance, easier to call a person a “racist,” a “bigot,” a “misogynist,” etc. than it is for one’s target to prove that he isn’t any of these things. In fact, the very act of defending himself against such accusations quickly becomes debasing. Whether or not the original charges can be made to stick, the victim immediately seems thin-skinned and overly concerned about his reputation. And, rebutted or not, the original charges will be repeated in blogs and comment threads, and many readers will assume that where there’s smoke, there must be fire.11
And for the finishing touch:
Step 3: Make the villain radioactive
In a liberal democracy, the hard cudgel of physical violence isn’t allowed. You can’t burn villains at the stake. But you can burn their reputation and livelihood at the stake. This is the soft cudgel of social consequences. In a human society, the soft cudgel carries nearly as much power as the hard cudgel, but unlike the hard cudgel it comes along with a big asterisk: It only works if everyone decides to let it work. If enough people stand up for the target and push back against the smear campaign, the soft cudgel loses its impact. The pushback is also a soft cudgel of its own—one that can land the smearers with tarnished reputations as cruel bullies.
This is part of the reason those who do business by way of the soft cudgel are always so big on guilt by association.
We talked about the important difference between refusing to go see a campus speaker and actually shutting down the event itself, which prohibits all students from hearing the speaker. One is a person making individual choices; the other is idea supremacy.
A similar distinction can be drawn with boycotting. A group of people boycotting a business they disapprove of is totally fair game in a country like the U.S. Boycotts have been a powerful tool of peaceful activism many times in the past. What’s less fair game is pressuring others to boycott the businesses you disapprove of by promoting the notion that “anyone who doesn’t boycott this business is one of the bad guys.” Individual boycotting is what high-rung activists do. Coercive boycotting is what low-rung mobs do.
Guilt by association is the coercive boycott of a person. Individually boycotting a person means you refuse to work for them, work with them, or employ them. It means you refuse to defend them or listen to them defend themselves. It means you cut off contact with them and cease to be associated with them in any way. Again, all fair game.
But guilt by association—which attacks anyone who doesn’t boycott the target—takes this to the next level. To the supremacy level.
Guilt by association makes a blacklisted target radioactive. Those who praise, defend, or attempt to humanize the target, those who work with or employ the target, those who share the target’s work or offer them a platform, or even those who suggest that a smear campaign has gone too far, will end up on the blacklist alongside the target. So even people who believe the target to be unfairly maligned will usually keep their distance from the target publicly. The target becomes someone with whom it’s “just not worth it” to be involved. This leaves them isolated from society, which can be catastrophic for their career, social life, and mental health.12
On the hottest button topics, during the hottest moments, guilt by association can go further, extending multiple degrees away from the original target, forming a kind of “smear web.”
Let’s say Bob is a provocative podcaster who likes to criticize a certain low-rung movement and point out ways they’re wrong and awful. Now Bob might be an asshole—a tribal low-runger himself who unfairly maligns and misrepresents his enemy movement. Or Bob might be a high-runger whose criticisms of the low-rung movement are cogent, accurate, and consistent with the principles he claims to have. To the low-rung movement, it doesn’t matter which of these Bob is. They may not even be able to tell the difference. Bob holds Viewpoints A, B, and C, which makes him a disgusting member of the out-group. A villain. So the movement smears him, and his name becomes radioactive within the movement’s sphere of influence.
Guilt by association doesn’t just travel from person to person—it also travels from people to ideas. For our purposes, let’s imagine Bob is a low-rung asshole, who makes a lot of low-rung asshole points. But Bob makes a lot of points and let’s say one of those points is something most high-rungers would agree with. We’ll call it Viewpoint D. Bob’s enemies will apply Bob’s smear to all viewpoints that he uses to criticize them, not distinguishing between which viewpoints are asshole-y and which aren’t. Viewpoint D is plastered with the smear along with his other points.
Now say Angela is a reasonably high-rung journalist who doesn’t even know who Bob is—but she also holds Viewpoint D. And one day, she writes an article expressing Viewpoint D. Without realizing it, Angela just touched a radioactive object. The low-rung movement comes across the article and uses it as proof that Angela is a villain with villainous ideas and villainous motives. Soon, the mob is scouring through Angela’s other articles, her past tweets, and old photos of her on Google Images. Through a bunch of misrepresentation, Angela is now thoroughly discredited in the mob’s sphere of influence. The smear has traveled from Bob, to Viewpoint D, to Angela.
In the midst of all of this, Angela has a guest named Jason on her podcast. When the episode is released, Jason receives a slew of shame on social media for going on a villain’s podcast, and fans of Jason, fearful of the mob, become hesitant to share his work or retweet his tweets. The smear manages to make its way all the way to Jason.
Angela’s next scheduled podcast guest, not wanting to deal with what Jason had to go through, cancels the interview, saying she’s “super swamped with work right now.” Other journalists, not wanting to be the next Angela, think twice about publicly expressing Viewpoint D.
This is how a smear, even when applied to a genuine asshole, can spider out into a web that ends up punishing non-assholes and hindering productive discussion.
All of those ecosystem changes we explored in Chapter 3—changes in the media landscape and shifting incentives, the advent of social media and Google search, and a whole lot of algorithms trying to maximize traffic and clicks—inadvertently brought a new weapon into the world: the digital cudgel. No one intended to create a new weapon, but once it came into existence, it was only a matter of time before people picked it up and started using it.
Over time, society develops laws and social etiquette that govern how we behave and keep things contained within the Liberal Games structure. But the digital cudgel dropped into our ecosystem suddenly, catching us off guard, and we’ve been living for the past decade in the social equivalent of the Wild West. The same new weapon that gave high-rung activists new ways to attack injustice also gave Primitive Minds a new way to play the Power Games. In their hands, the digital cudgel created new harms and new injustices.
The early social media culture of “radical de-shaming” was a place where it was safe to admit your shameful secrets with laughter. It was a culture that understood that to be human is to be flawed. The kind of culture that happens when Higher Minds are leading the way. As social media fell more and more into the hands of Primitive Minds, the culture of radical de-shaming gave way to its opposite: the Political Disney World culture of righteous heroes and evil villains, of binary 1s and 0s. The culture where a person’s shameful secret is proof of their true villainous nature and cause for a permanent smear to their reputation. If likes and retweets made social media unpleasant, the digital cudgel went further and made it scary.
As Ronson puts it: “The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people, but we're now creating a surveillance society, where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless.”13
When I’ve talked to people about this, one of the most common retorts is, “This all seems like a big deal on social media, but it’s not actually that big a deal in the real world.”
