Social Media and our Failures

Jonathan Haidt speaking in Seattle

Earlier this year, Jonathan Haidt came to Seattle and spoke about the rise in polarization that he and others have noted since around 2013. What has changed? he asked us to wonder. His answer is social media. As the 2016 election taught us, social media are fertile ground for lies, half-truths, and outrage. Outrage generates clicks, and now even newspapers play the outrage game so that their online articles can get the clicks, too. Haidt’s comments got me to think some more about the lamentable failure of leftist movements over the past several years. It seems as though, just when the calls for change have gotten loudest, we have failed the hardest. Let’s review what’s going wrong, and right, over the last several years.

Successes pre-2013

One reason I love being a lefty is that we just win and win and win. Look at the last 100 years, and our forward-thinking reforms have been vindicated over and over. Consider women’s suffrage, defendants’ rights, Social Security, minority rights, Civil Rights, reproductive freedom, affirmative action, gay rights, disability rights, and more. In the ten years before 2013, we were still doing well. We landed a black man in the White House, something that would have been impossible earlier in my own lifetime. We expanded health insurance coverage. The gay-marriage campaign swept the nation with its appeal to love and fairness. The Obama administration got the abortion pill, RU 486, tested and approved. We even got our black president re-elected when pundits said that the unemployment rate was too high for any incumbent president to win. Yes, there was conservative resistance to all this progress, but that’s been the case for as long as we progressives have made progress. But then what happened? 

Zimmerman verdict

In 2013, outraged citizens on social media demanded that George Zimmerman be tried for the shooting of Trayvon Martin. The governor of Florida dutifully overrode the local authorities to have Zimmerman put on trial, and the prosecution lost. Zimmerman should have listened to the 911 dispatcher who told him to stay put and not go follow the stranger he saw walking through his neighborhood. Being a belligerent shithead, however, is not a crime, and the facts of the case did not support the charges that the state brought against him. After the fact, plenty of people have said that the prosecutor should have charged Zimmerman with a lesser crime that could have stuck, but it’s easy to imagine how much pressure the newly installed authorities were under to throw the book at him. Like many other left-leaning Americans, I thought that a guilty verdict was all but assured, and the loss came as a blow to morale.  

#BlackLivesMatter

I wish this movement had been half as effective as it was popular. It achieved a high profile but few results. How can a phrase like “black lives matter” fail? Of course black lives matter. Racial disparities are an ongoing problem in the States, so serious that the entire nation is dragged down by the problems that plague the black community. The US Army has managed to integrate its officer corps, creating perhaps the best integrated managerial body anywhere in the world, but their success hasn’t been replicated anywhere else in the nation. The increase in economic inequality that we’ve seen since the 80s has naturally hit the black population harder than it’s hit whites. With all that background, here was a movement that had real potential.

The BLM movement succeeded in the first steps toward progress. It raised the profile of the fraught relationship between the black population and the police, and it helped expose predatory policing practices, such as those in Ferguson. It offered a ten-point plan to reform policing across the nation. BLM representatives got all the way to the Oval Office to meet with President Obama.

Once they got the attention of the nation and the president, what did BLM activists achieve? In terms of concrete progress, there hasn’t been much to show. The use of the #blacklivesmatter hashtag dropped off on in the summer of 2016, possibly in response to the killing of five police officers in Dallas and then three more in Baton Rouge.

In 2016, Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King announced a nationwide Injustice Boycott, meant to punish cities, such as New York City, accused of state violence toward the black population. It seems to have gone nowhere. 

2016 election

The left’s approach to the presidential election of 2016 was more about being outraged at Trump than at promoting Hillary. Unlike Bernie, Hillary was a centrist Democrat who seemed to represent the status quo. I like the status quo because for a hundred years the status quo has generally meant liberal progress, but 2016 wasn’t a year for the status quo. Especially on social media, leftists wanted a cause more emotionally driven than Hillary’s practical, realistic approach to progress. Looking for emotions, the left dumped vitriol on Trump, all of which he deserved. What was the net result? He won. The vitriol kept his brand name alive, and it proved to his supporters that he was the man who could really stick his finger in the eye of us leftists. At the last minute, seeing that Trump had a real chance to win, game professional friends and I ginned up a pro-Hillary stunt, but efforts like ours were too little too late.

Hillary handily won the popular vote. She earned more votes than any white man in the history of the US, but it wasn’t enough. Trump is roundly and rightly considered unfit for the presidency, morally bankrupt, and just plain crooked. The left, however, couldn’t rally itself enough even to keep this monster out of the White House. We’ll be paying for this loss for years, probably decades. The loss was deeply demoralizing to the left, myself and my daughter included.

After the election, the nation learned the Russia had spread division and disinformation on social media. Remember, our enemy wants us to be outraged and divided, and they found social media to be useful in achieving that goal. 

#NoDAPL

In the fall of 2016, leftists found an appealing cause in protecting sacred Native American land from a planned oil pipeline. The #blacklivesmatter hashtag had dropped in popularity that summer, and Hillary’s campaign for president didn’t inspire people. Filling the void was #NoDAPL. Opposition to the pipeline had begun in the spring and had grown in the summer, peaking in the fall. It’s hard to imagine a social-justice confrontation that could be more appealing to leftist ideals. On one side was the filthy petrochemical industry, and on the other were Native Americans protecting the integrity of their sacred lands and the purity of their water. Support poured in from across the nation and the world, inspiring left-leaning people everywhere. In December, following President Obama’s intent, the Corps of Engineers denied an easement to the pipeline so that it couldn’t pass under the Missouri River. The activists joyously declared victory, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Then Trump took office, and soon enough the situation reversed. Dispirited activists largely abandoned Standing Rock, and soon enough the encampment was cleared away and oil started flowing through the pipeline. Again, this loss was a hard blow to the morale of the left. A local professional activist who had spent time at Standing Rock recounted how, after the loss, he had to take a long break from activism to recover his mental health. Today you might hear leftists saying that the protests at Standing Rock were a victory because it launched a movement, but that’s not the victory that protestors had their hearts set on.

#MeToo

In the fall of 2017, actress Alyssa Milano publicly accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual-predator behavior and encouraged the use of the #MeToo hashtag. It took off, leading to greater awareness of sexual harassment in general and to damning accusations leveled at many well-known men. Of the many social-media-powered movements of the last several years, this one seems the most successful. Why did it succeed where other movements failed? If we could figure that out, maybe we could find ways to make other online movements successful, too.

Perhaps the peak of the #MeToo movement came in 2018 with the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, although this was the peak of its salience on the national stage, not a success. For a while it looked as though the pressure against Kavanaugh would win out. His accuser was competent and believable. Kavanaugh was angry and pathetic (“I like beer”?). Again, however, we on the left suffered a demoralizing loss.  

2018 midterm elections

One concrete success that we on the left have enjoyed recently is our strong showing in the 2018 midterms. Thank god. Democrats gained governorships and took control of the House of Representatives. The Republicans made gains in the Senate, but not because they got more votes. Most of those Senate races came six years after the Democrats had an unusually strong showing in the Senate, riding along President Obama’s re-election victory. It’s natural that some of the seats gained in 2012 would shift back to the Republicans in 2018. Dems won most of the contested Senate seats; they just didn’t win enough seats to hold onto their big advantage from six years earlier.

Our electoral victory was not powered by social media. There were no national elections, which are especially attractive to social media campaigns. Trump wasn’t running, so he didn’t lure activists into piling on him the way he did in the presidential election two years earlier. If the midterms had gone against the Dems, I would have been strongly tempted to give up hope. 

Shame mobs

One thing social media have been good at is targeting individuals, although even these successes have uncertain results. One famous case was that of Tim Hunt, a British biochemist, molecular physiologist, and Nobel laureate. In 2015 during a talk about women in STEM, he made ironic comments in a tone of voice that indicated he wasn’t serious. These comments were transcribed and shared around the Internet, lacking tone of voice, and there was an international outcry. A concerned, liberal friend of mine said that Hunt’s comments were damaging because they dissuaded women from entering STEM fields. I totally agree. Those comments, shared around the world, gave women the impression that many experts would not welcome them in STEM fields. But how much damage would those comments have done if they hadn’t been taken out of context and hadn’t been disseminated on social media? Was the net effect of the shame mob to make women more likely to choose STEM careers or less?

Or consider the case of James Damore’s Google memo of 2017. Yes, it offended people with its reference to inborn differences between men and women, but outraged people on social media exaggerated and misrepresented what Damore had said. By making his memo sound worse than it was, they made programming seem less attractive to young women. 

An analogous event took place here in Seattle in 2018, when controversy erupted over Stuart Reges’s article in Quillette about the gender gap in computer science and what we can do about it. Based on his years of experience teaching, he recommended making it mandatory for students to take a coding class, which would expose more female students to coding. That recommendation was ignored, and instead his critics shamed him for his comments about gender and academic achievement. In the article, he pointed to evidence that boys are more likely to do better in math than in reading, while girls are more likely to do better in reading than math. The Seattle Times reporter garbled this position into something different and false: that boys are better than girls at math. As a result, people got a false impression about Reges and, by extension, about how welcome women are in STEM fields. When shame mobs make things out to be worse than they are, they hurt the very people they are trying to help.

How to overcome outrage

If outrage on social media hurts our cause and plays into Russia’s hands, we should stop it. Currently there are groups working to overcome divisions, and we can join up with them. Jonathan Haidt and his crew have the OpenMind program for organizations that want to hold discussions that are productive instead of destructive. It features a self-study segment that is eye-opening even if you never use their templates for group discussions. Better Angels is trying to depolarize America with conversations. The group More in Common is also working to overcome polarization, with their Hidden Tribes program as their major contribution that effort. The left’s pattern of letting outrage guide us has failed repeatedly, and we need to do better.

OpenMind: https://openmindplatform.org

Better Angels: https://www.better-angels.org

Hidden Tribes from More in Common: https://hiddentribes.us

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Calls to Liberal Action: Another post about how the left needs to do better.