Stop Hate-Sharing

Riot in the Galleria, Umberto Boccioni

Everyone agrees that America is becoming more and more polarized and that social media deserves some of the blame. I think it’s worth tracing out exactly why this is the case. What mechanisms on social media trigger our most tribal impulses? What are the individual actions or habits on social media platforms driving polarization? 

Much has been written and said about the way social media creates echo chambers of similar opinions and insulates us from disagreement. But beyond simple groupthink, I’d like to focus on the way social media tends to convince us that opposing tribes are sinister. Consider the following sequence:

1. The Sharks and the Jets are social groups that distrust each other and each has its own Facebook group.
2. A Shark writes a somewhat nasty joke about a member of the Jets as part of an email that he accidentally sends to the wrong email address. Of course, it ends up forwarded to a Jet.
3. The Jet shares the email joke on the Jet Facebook Group with the caption "SEE: THIS IS WHAT THEY REALLY THINK OF US!"
4. The post is pinged around, with lots of angry commentary, on various Jet social media hubs. It is constantly used in conversations as evidence of Shark-hate.

Notice all that has gone wrong here: Social media has amplified routine stupidity into a fundamental building block of an offended group's collective worldview. The original joke, foolish as it was, only makes sense in the context it was intended—but no amount of apologizing or explanation will change the reaction of the offended group. Note, too, how easily the offended group grabs hold of an anecdote and generalizes ill-will and hostility from a shadowy "they." 

My thesis: As a medium, social media makes it easy for us to amplify individual errors and wrongs against us from other tribes. Much of our outrage is directed at mistakes that would be better ignored, but our pride, our self-righteousness, our anger, and our fear all encourage outrage that is, technically speaking, vicious. 

Why do we amplify so much stupidity? Well, to start, outrage at other groups strengthens our ties to the groups we claim membership in. In 1984, George Orwell describes a particularly dystopian version of this: the "Two Minutes Hate," a propaganda reel that induces seething rage against Big Brother's enemies. The anger is easily directed against almost anything that characterizes the rival nations: "The rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp." We feel most connected to our online tribes by defining our enemies. The 2010s were a golden age of both social media and identity politics, and this cannot be a coincidence. 

It just feels good to be angry online—to draw swords with your friends and admirers against the relentless evil of the world. In Glittering Vices, philosopher Rebecca DeYoung quotes the theologian Frederick Buechner: "Of the seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun ... to smack your lips over grievances long past ... to savor the pain you are giving back—in many ways it is a feast fit for a king." At its basest level, hate-sharing something from another tribe is just another way of hunting for dopamine on social media, that great dopamine safari. 

When we can straw man or lampoon the worst of opposing tribes, we also gain back control of the world by simplifying ideological conflict into straightforward conflicts of good and evil, or oppressor and oppressed. Amplifying the worst of our enemies can convince us that our enemies are motivated purely by power and hatred—and that they are too foolish to reason with. It closes off the possibility of reconciliation or compromise. This simplification of the world is oddly comforting. DeYoung notes: 

The wrathful presume to judge impartially when really they are blinded by a selfishly one-sided view of the world ... it's much easier to be angry than to be helpless, to be angry than to accept suffering. The presumption of control also means we often prefer to stay angry than to seek reconciliation or forgiveness.

Anger is a tempting substitute for intellectual humility in ideological disagreements full of nuance and complexity. If your opponents' arguments are really just excuses to hate women (pro-lifers) or life (pro-abortion), then there is not much need to listen or persuade. Social media assists us by finding the very worst of our opponents and amplifying their stories and sins.

This sequence, from stupidity to amplification to vilification, plays itself out millions of times a day across the world. A Harvard professor argues (sloppily) that homeschooling merits more government attention and regulation. The conservative evangelical world prepares to revolt.  The backlash includes generalizations about "Harvard," "Ivy Leagues," “elites," and the "left," treating an article as the party platform of some shadowy leftist cabal. This amplification also manages to portray what purports to be an argument as, secretly, a power play. The state is coming for your guns and for your children—first they came for the homeschoolers!

And, unless you've been living under a rock with particularly spotty wi-fi, you've surely seen this happening in the other direction. The cultural left's devotion to exposing and vilifying micro-aggressions is built on the same pillars of amplification. Can you believe what my uncle just said? White people, am I right? As Iona Italia (reviewing Jonathan Haidt and Gregg Lukianoff's Coddling of the American Mind) explains:

Footage of a single incident of racist bullying—such as a Ryanair passenger’s recent boorish tirade against his black seatmate—can circulate worldwide within hours, in this age of smartphones, in which everyone is a potential reporter. The thousands of retweets and shares can make the event seem omnipresent: as if such incidents happened all the time, posing a constant threat to our peaceful co-existence.

This kind of paranoia encourages further retaliation, leading to the many "Ben Shapiro OWNS Snowflake LIBTARD" variations which are omnipresent in dredges of the conservative interweb, or the right-wing provocateurs who roam college campuses looking for fresh liberal TEARS to feed their social media audience. 

Of course, these are second-rate imitations of the old Jimmy Kimmel trick: Wander the streets long enough and you'll find stupidity. Kimmel's gag is designed to show how foolish it would be if all of our lives were lived out publicly, if everyone had a platform, and if the very worst of that platform could be shown to millions of people on late-night television. In other words: why we shouldn't take everyone seriously. For every genuine abuse of power these media machines reveal, there are five scandals that should have been ignored.

None of this is to say that we should dismantle social media or try to return to some idyllic pre-Zuckerberg state. (This would be, among other things, ahistorical). Instead, it is to point out that using social media comes with moral responsibilities and that thoughtless participation in culture wars has consequences. 

We have a moral responsibility to be charitable to those who disagree with us. So: Don't join mobs. Think twice before hate-reading, and sleep on anything critical you are tempted to post. Assume the best intentions about your cultural enemies, and respond as if they are looking over your shoulder. Fighting polarization will require disagreement that has both substance, seriousness, and courtesy—and heaven knows we are in short supply of these.

In one of her best essays, "Puritans and Prigs," Marilynne Robinson defines "priggishness" as

Our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved ... There is a reflex in this culture of generalized disapproval, of great or small disparagement, of eagerness to be perceived as better than one's kind. 

Priggishness, she argues, is an imitation of morality rooted in self-righteousness rather than humility. Priggishness, she explains,

Creates clear distinctions among people, and not only justifies the disparagement of others but positively requires it. Its adherents are overwhelmingly those who feel secure in their own reasonableness, worth, and goodness, and are filled with a generous zeal to establish their virtues through the whole of society, and with an inspiring hope that this transformation can be accomplished. 

Robinson concludes with a citation of John Calvin, whose expansive definition of "neighbor" in "love thy neighbor" would preclude our tribal wars. "Perhaps we might ponder," Robinson asks, "the impulse to disparage, to cheapen, to deface, and to falsify, which has made a valuable inheritance worthless ... If Jonathan Edwards were here, he would certainly call that a sin. I am hard-pressed to think of a better word."