Social Media Divides People, U.S. Psychologist Warns

In April, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published an essay in The Atlantic in which he attempted to explain "Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid," as the piece's title suggested. Anyone familiar with Haidt's work over the previous half-decade could have predicted his answer: Social Media.

Photo Insert: A former Twitter developer had once compared the Retweet button to the provision of a four-year-old with a loaded weapon.

Although Haidt acknowledges that political polarization and factional animosity predate the platforms' rise and that many other factors are at play, he believes that the viral tools—Like Facebook's and Share buttons, Twitter's Retweet function—have algorithmically and irreversibly corroded public life.

He has determined that a significant historical gap may be pinpointed between 2010 and 2014, when these functionalities became widely available on smartphones, Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote for the New Yorker.

“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.

“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. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly a billion dart guns globally. 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. 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.”

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