WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE…
A COUNTRY RIVEN by ethnic tension. Spontaneous protests driven by viral memes. Violence and riots fueled by hateful fake-news posts, often about “terrorism” by marginalized groups.
It’s a story we’ve seen play out around the world recently, from France and Germany to Burma, Sri Lanka, and Nigeria. The particulars are different—gas prices were the trigger in France, lies about machete attacks in Nigeria—but one element has been present every time: Facebook. In each of these countries, the platform’s power to accelerate hate and disinformation has translated into real-world violence.
Americans used to watch this kind of stuff with the comforting conviction that It Can’t Happen Here. But we’ve learned that the United States is not as exceptional as we might have thought, nor are contemporary societies as protected from civil conflict as we had hoped.
Just picture a reasonably proximate scenario: It’s the winter of 2020, and Donald Trump—having lost reelection by a margin closer than expected—is in full attack mode, whipping up stories of runaway voter fraud. Local protest groups coalesce around Facebook posts assailing liberals, murderous “illegals,” feminists. (This is basically what happened in France last year with the “anger groups” that birthed the yellow vest protests.) Pizzagate-style conspiracy theories race through these groups, inflaming their more extreme members. Add a population that is, unlike those of France and Nigeria, armed to the teeth, and the picture gets pretty dark.
In other words, though it has already facilitated the election of a demagogue committed to stoking racial prejudice, enriched his family, and sold out America’s national interest, social media may not yet have shown us the worst it can do to a divided society. And if we don’t get a handle on the power of the platforms, we could see worse play out sooner than we think.
This prognosis may sound grim, but it’s not intended to get you stockpiling canned goods or researching New Zealand immigration law. It’s simply to ratchet up the urgency with which we think about this problem, to bring to it the kind of focus we brought to other times when a single corporation—Standard Oil, AT&T, Microsoft—amassed an unacceptable degree of power over the fate of our society.
In the case of social platforms, their power is over the currency of democracy: information. Nearly
