Breaking the Social Media Prism: How To Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing
By Chris Bail
Princeton University Press, 2021

After the last two US Presidential elections, there can be little doubt left in even the most skeptical observer that social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook play massive, tectonic roles in the daily lives of millions of people. This applies equally to those who don’t use social media: plenty of people whose lives were made materially and morally worse by the Trump administration, for instance, never participated in the social media platforms that got him elected and allowed him to establish a cult-leader status with those same people’s neighbors, teachers, and city councillors. If you’re an American, you might not spend two hours every day on Facebook, but the Capitol of your country was breached by people who do. Even those of us who avoid the headwaters of social media still live downstream of its effects. 

This would seem to make it urgently incumbent on American and world society to understand those effects, to understand these organizations that routinely exercise the kind of intimate and extortionate coercive power the Western world hasn’t seen since the days of the medieval Christian Church. 

That urgent need makes books like Chris Bail’s Breaking the Social Media Prism all the more frustrating. Instead of the kind of dispassionate and systematic studies the species needs in order to understand this staggering new force in its midst, we have these books: bantam-weight collections of recycled anecdotes, sotto voce fear-mongering, and TED Talk reductionism. 

To add insult to injury, in most cases, these little (or is it Chicken Little?) books are written by some of the same people who caused the problem in the first place. Jaron Lanier, author of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, in addition to being what Bail describes as a “prolific writer, social critic, and all-around Renaissance man,” was an early Silicon Valley pioneer. Roger McNamee, author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, is a “legendary technology investor.” Nir Eyal, author of Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, helped craft the groundwork for the behavioral engineering behind the online ads he’s now cautioning against. Tristan Harris, star of the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, now lectures about exactly the kind of addictive technologies Google was perfecting while he was on its payroll as an “ethicist.” 

Bail calls these and other such figures “Silicon Valley apostates,” but there’s more than a slight whiff of opportunism around all of them. They have their books and speaking gigs and cable news slots decrying the insidious reach and power of social media platforms, true. But they made - and continue to make - tidy little piles of money out of those platforms first. And if one of those platforms were to approach one of those “apostates” with a simple proposition - here’s $10 million to help develop some new and incredibly harmful social-engineering technology, and you have to stay silent about its harmful effects for a full year after your deposit clears - well, it’s fairly easy to picture each one of them immediately agreeing, and fairly impossible to imagine any of them refusing. It’s chapping to endure blasé moralizing from “apostates” so readily rentable. 

According to Bail, users tend to think of the most popular social media platforms, places like Facebook and Twitter, as mirrors, showing them themselves and their places in society. “But they are more like prisms that bend and refract our social environment - distorting our sense of ourselves, and each other,” he writes. “The social media prism exerts its most profound influence when people are not aware that it exists.” 

Bail imagines a renovation of the current landscape of social media in order to make its actions and intentions transparent - and to incentivize healthy participation. The cure to the prisms, he maintains, is ... award badges:

Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms could optimize the order of posts in their users’ timelines based on the amount of approval they generate from people on both sides of the aisle, instead of simple engagement metrics alone … Our current platforms could also create new incentives for people to engage in such productive debate - for example, leaderboards that track how often prominent users generate content that appeals to people from both parties. Or they could invent new forms of status - such as badges for people who effectively attract diverse audiences … 

It’s almost inevitable: whenever these Silicon Valley explainers commence explaining the cures for Orwellian technologies, they sound Orwellian - maybe it’s in the contract. First Bail tells his readers that although he knows that the social media prism exists, they don’t (until he tells them); then he tells them that the cure for all that massive-scale social manipulation is more massive-scale social manipulation, only benevolent this time, designed to soft-wire its users into being better people. 

Maybe he’s right. If millions of people have surrendered their individual wills and identities for the slow hourly dopamine drip of scrolling through social media on their phone, and if this surrender has turned them into sheep who are easily manipulated by political camps (Bail is at his most convincing on this political element), then maybe the only workable solution is more manipulation, better manipulation. But even if this is a viable solution, it’s the most damn depressing viable solution imaginable.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.