Social/Antisocial

Social media is often more like anti-social media

Social media is the newsstand in the grocery checkout line—nothing but sensational (and largely false) headlines. Transparency is the antidote, but the Powers-That-Be hate transparency. We come, belatedly, to learn that Princess Catherine has cancer. Like Israel, Buckingham Palace should have gotten in front of the narrative and soaked up the world’s sympathy, but instead, they closed ranks and went silent, allowing social media to control their narrative.

Sally Bedell Smith writes the Royals Extra Substack. She is worried about the British tabloid press, but wrote, “I think they’ll have to leave her alone. The palace will make sure they leave her alone…I hope they will show common decency, which maybe they don’t have in great supply. I hope they will stop speculating on all sorts of dire and ludicrous things.”

But her real concern for Kate Middleton’s privacy is of course social media, where all sorts of outlandish speculation and conspiracy theories take root. The palace can squeeze the tabloids by employing various laws and withholding the actual access they need to survive. Not so with the social media hounds. They thrive in anonymity, and are beyond the reach of the government both due to geographic location—they may not even be in the same country—and also due to their hidden nature. You can’t search every mother’s basement for posters and hackers in footie PJ’s.

It made me wonder why Buckingham Palace chose to duck the issue and use opacity as its shield, rather than being transparent and letting the light and accompanying sympathy in. I’ve been asking the same question about Israel, and still can’t understand why Prime Minister Netanyahu chose to roll into Gaza before basking in the world’s sympathy and buying political capital that he could spend in Riyadh and Doha, seeking a coalition of Arab states against their persistent, common, antagonist, Iran.

Spiritual/religious commentator, David French, has written about how Christian nationalism, a hot topic of debate online, registers with fewer than half of Americans, which is to say that more than half of us have not even heard the term “Christian nationalism.” A raging online debate is not a national debate. Its only participants are social media users. It’s yet another example of our fractured public square.

Commercial radio started the trend toward fragmented media when towns went from have a news station, a Top 40 station, a “Middle-of-the-Road” station, and a Country and Western station (my dad used to say of his favorite station, “They play both kinds of music: Country and Western”). When FM radio came to the automobile in the 70’s, programming fragmented into smaller and smaller cohorts. We went from Elvis-for-all to Lithuanian-Clog-Dance-Music-for-the-few.

So, as cable television fragmented us further (The Golf Channel, The Scotch Tape Channel, etc.), and our cohorts shrank, we began to lose the theme. Then came the internet, and with it, social media, and poof—the theme was gone altogether. Sure, certain cat videos and TikTok dances get tens of millions of views, but in truth, political arguments are engaged by a small minority on either side, and that dead horse is beaten mercilessly to the exhaustion of the rest of the populace.

French makes the point that the disengaged two-thirds are not indifferent, they’re just uninformed. The arguments coming from the engaged extremes have so alienated the rest of us, that we are tuned out. A recent YouGov poll shows that 45% of us either don’t know or aren’t sure whether Donald Trump was found guilty of sexual assault (he was), 41% aren’t sure or don’t know that he is facing criminal charges for possessing and refusing to return classified national security documents (he is), or that 45% of us don’t know or aren’t sure that he’s been criminally charged with making illegal hush money payments to a porn star (he has). Would most agree that he’s a person you would not want to hold up as a role model for your kids? Certainly, but only if you’re in possession of those facts, so the answer is no for about half of us.

It's easier—and more protective of our sanity—to just tune it all out. I recently surprised a friend by saying I don’t watch cable news or listen to talk radio anymore unless I have to for work, even though I spent a large percentage of my professional life making those very shows. It’s just hard for most people to hang on every twist and turn of what has become an uncivil, unhinged argument that goes on without end. To paraphrase David French, it’s a shame that more and more members of the jury have left the courtroom.

It does seem to me that social media has the ability to inform with little bias, but it’s clear that is not the path we are on.

©2024 Jon Sinton