A Toxic Conspiracy and the Unintended Consequences
March 5, 2023
A Toxic Conspiracy
This post is about how technology, social media and the news industry have conspired to make money, and how it has gone so terribly wrong.
The combination of new technology, social media and the news delivery has happened relatively recently. It’s only in the past decade or so that the technology has developed to the point where not only do we have the internet, invented in the 1990s, but we also now have the mobile internet that gives us 24/7 access to social media and the news. Today, most people get much of their news, information, entertainment, directions, education and their work and family connections fed to them through their small screens.
The mobile internet created an opportunity for the social media industry to invent and develop itself, and for the news industry to completely reinvent itself in the past few years. Prior to this, the news used to come to us through a few trusted media sources as facts, delivered through analogue media channels – a one-way street. The new technology created an explosion of new opportunities and questionable new players – a two-way street revolution.
At its best, social media provides a connection service between people; the news industry provides up-to-date information, and the new technology brings instant communication capability. Together these industries collaborate and conspire to provide services to us with the intention of making money for the companies involved. At their best, they provide these services to our advantage, and many people benefit significantly from using them. But at their worst their predatory practices have released demons in our thinking, learning and behaviour. News and social media now take centre stage in our lives, which is resulting in very negative unintended consequences.
The Attention Economy
Currently, the news and social media businesses are very slick, professional, expensive and fast paced operations getting us sucked into a confusing whirlwind of well-produced news, entertainment and sometimes questionable information. Everything is craftily packaged and presented to demand our attention, happening right now on the screen in front of us. Our focus and attention have been commandeered through our eyeballs to create an economy, now called the ‘Attention Economy’. The trick is to get us to pay attention to a particular app and to stay on that site. The more we stay and pay attention, the more we watch and ‘click’, the more we click, the more advertising we see. The more advertising we see the more we want to buy. The more we buy, the more money the advertisers and the media make. Facebook and Google now totally dominate, controlling 80% of the internet advertising, taking the power and business away from the traditional news media that create the content. Through this conspiracy, we have become the vulnerable victims of the power of the internet by deep-pocketed corporations subtly raiding our attention for their profit. Their trick is working; we end up selling our attention to the highest bidder.
The Attention Economy has now been sent into hyper-drive, taking the social media mantra from ‘Making the world a better place’ to ‘Making the company more profitable’. We are bombarded with news and information from so many legitimate sources or fake media, each designed to feed our curiosity and capture our attention and emotions, ready to deliver to each of us all the time. The news industry recognized the opportunities in this digital world by going beyond just digitizing the analogue factual news, to actually drawing people in to actively respond by participating in the content development and distribution.
This means that one person’s input seems to be as authoritative or truthful as any other. With no hierarchy of expertise or authority, everyone has equal access and complete freedom to say what they wish, as long as it is not against the law. We may not even know the true identity of whoever is making the contribution, and what they say is unfettered and consequence free. Today, lived experience is sometimes presented as being more important and accurate than considered research or science. Individual freedom with no social controls or guard rails results in multiple truths, at best. What we see or read may well be disinformation, misinformation or a conspiracy. The Trump insurgency of January 6 2021, is an example of what can happen.
Predatory Practices
The news is now presented in a way that is always critical, important and urgent. Online information squeezes out all the nuances and it’s one compelling headline or hyper-link after another, with news junkies living in a constant sugar rush. The way the information is presented we are steered into making choices, with no time for managing complexity, for dreaming, mind wandering, creativity, unstructured thinking and for reacting responsibly, things are broken and a response is needed now.
Which side are you on – Meghan/ Harry or the Palace, the teachers or Doug Ford, responding to climate change or supporting fossil fuels, Russia or Ukraine, loving or loathing Trump or Musk, vaccine or anti-vaccine, abortion or pro-life, capitalism or socialism…there is no middle ground. Even the model health service, the NHS in the UK, has now become a derisive subject, the nurses or the government? We take sides and we judge. Complex politics have become personal and social polarities. Solutions look simple. Quick, which side are you on?
This situation bombarding us is so confusing that many of us create and live in a bubble of apps and news sources that we trust. This helps us be less confused but it triggers a channel of information and advertising to us more likely to get the desired result. The filtering is done by algorithms that send us items coinciding with those already viewed and liked. This feeds our biases but reinforces our thinking through being fed items that will be stereotypical but liked. As a result, people are rewarded by getting recognition and attention online, which makes it even more attractive.
Humans focus on negative news and fear as a defense mechanism. Novelty and negativity are two very important aspects of the news that we pay attention to, so that’s what gets fed to us. The more heartbreaking and sensational the news, the more attention grabbing it is. The more colourful the stories with graphic, horrific, even violent content, the more we pay attention. Fake or outrageous news about something that endangers us personally or socially generates a response.
The social media psychologists have apparently determined that anger is more engaging than pleasantries and so some messages are designed to create moral outrage because those that make us angry get retweeted and overshared with groups. Collective moral outrage is more lucrative because activist groups put pressure on politicians, and this creates information chain reactions, more clicks. Fake news travels faster than real news, and shocking news travels faster than reassuring news.
The internet boundary between free speech and hate speech is confusing and unclear. With anonymity and no moral compass or constraints, people are emboldened to say things that they would not say face to face, things that are cruel and inhuman in the real world, extreme and outrageous. This results in people feeling victimized, criticized and bullied, a particularly difficult result for younger people. But no matter how much harassment or terrorism is involved in the messages, the social media companies wear a cloak of immunity. They claim that they are only distribution platforms that cannot be held responsible for the content that organizations and individuals choose to present on their platforms. It’s not their fault.
The Unintended Consequences
‘Doomscrolling’ has become a thing, with people constantly refreshing their feed and feeling bad, with young people especially getting angry, aggressive and miserable. We are not just being informed but also manipulated and becoming distressed, exhausted and cross. This is creating stress symptoms that are spiraling into long-term mental health issues in high-risk groups, and people losing faith in the future.
Younger people are particularly vulnerable. The media has got them glued to their cell phones. For young people, their online media world and offline real world don’t just overlap, they are inseparable and indistinguishable. Their identities and relationships are online, connecting with ‘friends’, and important influencers that they may never have even met. Teenagers in particular have suffered the most from the social isolation of the pandemic and childhood family stress, with the negative influence of the social media just making things worse, leading to increased substance abuse, mental disorders and self-harm.
It’s believed that our thinking and critical analysis are deteriorating. The 24/7 news cycle is speeding up and our brains, which have only so much capability, just can’t absorb the information coming at us, so we skim, read less and look for shorter and therefore more simplistic and shallow headlines, leading to more polarization. It’s thought that our brains are now trained to consume vast amounts of short pieces of shallow information while losing the capability to consume books and develop deep learning and understanding skills. As a result we are getting used to information fragmentation and becoming addicted to scrolling. (Thanks for reading this far!)
The stress created by this situation is resulting in less creativity and innovation, we get sluggish, make more mistakes and remember less. We suffer mental stress and become angry, sleep less, become exhausted, stop receiving information, and respond by becoming preoccupied with our own behaviour, through such platforms as TikTok, rather than demonstrating empathy and compassion to the broader outside world.
We are in danger of becoming narcissistic, craving arbitrary and frequent rewards through likes, attention and praise. Even so, we are less happy, we have to work hard to be optimistic. We blame ourselves for feeling out of control and may turn to mental health and well-being diagnoses such as ADHD. But we are hooked.
The fear and anger being stirred up by the media reports are extending beyond the individual to the larger society and creating a collective free-floating anxiety. The threat alert and response are now constant and very real. People are afraid to walk in the streets at night or to let their children play outside with unstructured play and freedom, while the statistics show that violence against adults and children has plummeted. Despite the high-profile and publicised cases, our society is as safe as ever. Meanwhile, ironically, our children get bored with their constant structural constraints and turn to the social media for relief, distraction, and an escape!
Managing the Consequences
It’s generally accepted that individuals are not to blame for these unintended consequences; it’s the manipulative environment that they find themselves in that’s the cause of the problem. There is also a recognition that we can’t go on like this, but that there are no easy answers.
There’s an argument that we need to take time away from the internet, let go the news and social media and step back, debate and contemplate, let the world take its course, and, just for a while, consider the lives of those around us and how we can make a real difference; but the question is, ‘Can we find and access an inner stillness, or are we helpless in the face of so much emotional power aimed at us?’
There are things we can do, such as avoiding news by deleting some news apps, focusing on journalism based on facts, such as the COVID presentations, taking the time to read books or newspaper articles, or by finding something that we can actually influence, like caring for others. We are now seeing news avoidance, with some doom scrollers looking for joy scrolling. Some people are binging on cat videos as a relief! A focus on self-care and maintaining our real-world, face-to-face personal relationships are also considered to be very important. Living in monastic self-denial is not the answer, but we have to find an internet diet that works, where we can visit online but not live there.
Employers can also be sensitive to their employees’ behaviours and not make the problems worse through their work activities. Some employers are responding by providing access to counselling for employees on life-style, wellness and well-being. There is a movement to introduce a 4-day work-week to provide employees with time away from the stress. Others are making allowances for unstructured work breaks or by disallowing contact between bosses and employees during the evenings or week-ends.
Governments are wading in to find a path that will be helpful. Governments can influence school boards to include social media management in student/teacher discussions, along with related subjects such as healthy sexual relationships and personal safety. A major challenge for governments is that the social media is now considered by many to be an essential public utility run by competing, commercial companies. Where should the restrictive boundaries be and how much can/should governments intervene? The social media companies claim that they are self-regulating and should be legally allowed to continue to operate in a free competitive market. Governments are arguing that more public ownership and government regulation of big tech and the media is the answer. Many are now taking steps to restrict access to some social media. This story continues to unfold every day…Quick, check the news.
But is anything really going to happen? The very rich and powerful news and social media lobbies will certainly stop change happening until enough of us decide that we have had enough, and are collectively prepared to push back and create enough pressure to bring about change. Do you see this happening anytime soon?
Ironically, much of the information in this post has been drawn from documentaries, articles, and internet reports made available through the social media and news industry services discussed here. An important specific source has been Johann Hari’s book ‘Stolen Focus’, Crown Publishing, New York, 2022