Two Antidotes to Social Media Proposed by Yuval Noah Harari
To solve the issues of bots and algorithms
Historian Yuval Noah Harari has talked a lot about social media in his books and interviews. He is not completely against social media and acknowledges it can help connect people who otherwise couldn’t find each other—He himself met his husband in an online community.
However, there are two major issues that make social media a “chaos machine” that keeps spreading misinformation and polarizing our society: bots and algorithms. Malicious actors can create thousands of bots to efficiently poison discussions. It’s pointless to try to persuade bots, but bots can slowly change people’s opinions by flooding them with misinformation. In the real world, it’s hard to be manipulated or influenced because it’s rare for everyone around us to have the same opinion and talk to us endlessly. Yet, in the digital world, we can be constantly surrounded by bots repeating misinformation, creating the illusion that most people disagree with us, which makes us very vulnerable to manipulation.
We should ban bots on social media because, as Yuval argued, “bots don’t have rights.” Humans have freedom of speech, but bots don’t. Therefore, it’s neither a legal nor ethical issue to ban bots on social media. In an interview, Yuval half-jokingly suggested that people should bring their ID to the town hall and wait in line to create an account on social media. Sure, it would be slow to create an account, but in this case, slowness is a feature, not a bug, making it almost impossible to create bots.
Another big problem with social media is the algorithm. To maximize profits, social media companies train their algorithms with one goal: to maximize user engagement. After analyzing vast amounts of data and conducting countless experiments, the algorithms have learned that moral outrage is the most effective tool to increase user engagement, so they keep promoting such content, which harms our mental health and polarizes our society.
To solve the problem of the algorithm, Yuval proposed holding social media companies accountable for their algorithms. For a long time, social media companies have tried to confuse the public by mixing user-generated content with the algorithm itself. Whenever misinformation goes viral, they blame the user who created the content and argue they shouldn’t censor users. Yuval agrees that we should be cautious about censoring users, but it’s the algorithm that decides to promote such content. If an editor from The New York Times put hate speech on the front page of their newspaper, even if someone else wrote the content, the editor would still be held liable. The editor can’t say, “It’s not my fault because I didn’t write the content; I just put it on the front page.”
Similarly, if misinformation is amplified by the algorithm and causes harm, social media companies should be held accountable and punished. They may argue that it’s unfair because the algorithm is so complex that even its creators can’t fully understand it. However, if they hadn’t trained the algorithm solely to maximize user engagement, it would behave differently. They should train their algorithms with other goals as well, such as promoting truth, if they want to avoid severe penalties.
We’ll have a much better internet if there are no bots and the algorithm stops exploiting our negative emotions.
Recommend Yuval’s new book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI