Saturday subscribers-only thread: polls on Facebook and the (gut) wisdom of crowds

The American people overwhelmingly think the social media and big-tech giant is bad for our society

Happy Saturday!

A new CNN poll shows 76% of Americans think Facebook is making society worse. Here’s more from the poll:

Just over half of Americans, 53%, currently say the federal government should increase its regulation of Facebook, with 11% saying the government should decrease its regulation of the platform, and 35% that it shouldn't change.

Among Americans who use Facebook themselves at least several times a month, a 54% majority say that Facebook has suggested posts to them that they found objectionable. Sixty-five percent of regular Facebook users younger than 35 say that they've seen objectionable content recommended to them by the site.

More broadly, Americans also express little faith in the good intentions of big technology firms, with 38% saying they don't trust companies such as Google, Facebook or Amazon at all to do what is best for their users, up from 29% in March 2019. Only 34% of Americans say they even somewhat trust big tech companies, a modest downtick from 40% two years ago.

Finally, my unyielding denial to create an account on the platform has been vindicated by the wisdom of crowds!

I joke, but this polling does raise an important point about what voters bring to the table in a democracy. It is one that I think gets missed in debates over the role of rationality in the political process — and one I talk about in my book. My argument is that focusing on information and rationality blinds us to the other things that guide people's decisions about who to put in power.

The Facebook polling suggests one of these things people bring is a sense of morality, duty to our neighbors, or the pursuit of good governance. Facebook has been shown to increase the circulation of divisive content, misinformation, and extremism among the public. On top of that, social media can also make us depressed and distressed, and it screws with the pleasure-seeking parts of our brains and rewires our ability to pay attention to things that aren’t inherently attention-grabbing. It is hard to look at the evidence and think that the company has a positive impact on society — and the polling bears that out.

Some of the early 20th-century pollsters and public opinion scholars referred to this non-informative role of voters as an expression of “gut” wisdom — some innate sense of good and bad. And I think we forget that this gut check on the democratic process is a separate phenomenon from rationality or some pursuit of self-interest. People do have a sense of right and wrong that makes them useful even if they are not “informed” voters, or what have you.

Of course, the collective sense that we should defend the body politic from both internal and external threats to morality, progress, and safety is not infallible. Jailing Japanese immigrants during World War II was stomach-churningly popular, for example, and hysteria around the September 11th terrorist attacks led many Americans to suspend their morality and sense of respect to their Islamic neighbors. And even while I think we should exclude examples of wartime hysteria from conversations about the utility of public opinion, the broad support for McCarthyism and the general red-scare persecution of “un-American” ideologues is another strike against the wisdom of crowds.

Now, government propaganda likely had something to do with all of these examples — but there are also plenty of examples in American history of people supporting and/or tolerating other violations of ethics. Lynch mobs, the persecution and prosecution of LGBTQ Americans, and broader discrimination against minorities all show how fear and hostility can highjack our collective gut wisdom. They show how a sense of morality extends only to members of the in-group.

But I think it is important to recognize that the human brain is not simply a computer for processing information, evaluating options, and making rational decisions that maximize our representation in government or push us towards the realization of the general will. At least for now, we are much more creative than any computer or artificial intelligence program, and we should leverage that creativity and the millions of years of evolution that produced our modern form. That means acknowledging that people are worth listening to even if they don’t know everything you do about politics and public policy.

Here’s a relevant poem:

For You O Democracy
by Walt Whitman

Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.
I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!
For you, for you I am trilling these songs.

I hope you all had a good week.

Elliott