Technology Progresses, Human Nature Does Not
An antitrust bill now before Congress can show us how to treat social media.
One of the strongest new influences on my thinking of the past two years, and one of the people whose work convinced me to make my own arguments against faith in progress, is the British philosopher John Gray. His 2013 book, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, is an excellent dive into the ways we humans delude ourselves into thinking we are vastly morally superior to our ancestors. He reminds us that today’s highly educated people with cosmopolitan outlooks in rich countries are not the first to think of themselves as morally elevated beings on a mission to raise the world up to their level.
The first section of the book, “The Call of Progress,” brings us back to Belgian rule over the Congo in the early 20th century, a brutal period even by the standards of European colonization of Africa. Using the writing of Joseph Conrad as a guide, Gray shows how the Belgians believed themselves to be a progressive force, and how they felt justified in their killing and exploitation of the Congolese by their certainty in their advanced state. Their belief that they were moving the world forward convinced them their cruelty was just fine.
In discussing the book shortly after its release, Gray drew a distinction between scientific progress and moral progress. While the former has clear benefits for civilization, it is very easy for societies to believe they have attained the latter even if they have not. Scientific lessons are learned, but moral and political lessons are generally unlearned. It is a recurring theme among Western thinkers – Social Darwinist capitalists before World War I, communists in the 1930s, tribunes of economic globalization in the 1990s – to believe their society in their era is approaching the pinnacle of moral progress. But new forms of barbarism always emerge.
While it might be excessive to call the rage and torment that occur on social media barbarism, the intersection of technology with moral and political debates happening on platforms – sites once hailed by techno-optimists as great liberating forces – makes Gray’s skepticism of progress relevant.
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Elon Musk may not buy Twitter after all. Whether this is a good thing for free speech is anyone’s guess. Musk says he cares about free speech, but when one person effectively controls a company that functions as a forum for many public figures, there is a serious risk that person will use the company to silence political opponents and critics. There need to be clear, fair, consistently enforced rules about who gets to speak, or about what constitutes harmful speech.
Does this mean government should get involved in regulating Twitter, in deciding what the site must or must not remove? Any regulation will have to be done extremely carefully, whether the goal is to prevent legitimate speech from being taken down or to keep online public squares from driving good people away. It’s always tempting for political actors, as well as private-sector billionaires, to use their power to silence speech they don’t like. That’s true regardless of party, ideology, or general belief about the technology of the time – those with power don’t like to be challenged.
In his Atlantic article earlier this spring, Jonathan Haidt calls for regulations to combat fake and toxic material on social media, such as slowing the speed of sharing posts and requiring verification that an account is run by a human, not a bot. He does not advocate limits on what people can say – Haidt has been one of the greatest defenders of free speech of the past decade. In his latest book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, Francis Fukuyama has more confidence in efforts to weaken the concentration of power in major media institutions, including social media. Antitrust, for example, would make the big players pay more attention to society’s needs, not just their own profits, he feels.
Regardless of what rules are forced on social media companies, it is important that a large majority of Americans, across the political spectrum, see them as legitimate. In a society as deeply divided as ours, we need rules that will not be quickly overturned whenever control of Congress changes from one party to the other. As difficult as it is to create a large consensus on anything, that’s what is needed here.
Passing good rules would also help us distinguish between technological progress and moral progress. While it would be futile to try and go back to a time before social media – whatever the pros or cons of doing so – careful regulation can remind us that humans today are just as capable of nastiness and intolerance as we have ever been. Hating each other from a distance, through screens and algorithms, is an improvement over physically attacking each other, but the dark side of human nature that moves us in the direction of wrath has always been there, and will never leave us.
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There is legislation before Congress that, although it would likely not affect Twitter, provides a model of how to treat social media platforms. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) would prohibit major tech companies like Amazon and Google from favoring their own products over those of other producers and creators when customers searched on their sites. For example, Amazon would not be allowed to push users toward movies it produces over those made by other companies. Big tech would be forbidden from taking advantage of its huge economic power to tilt the playing field too far in their favor.
The bill is sponsored in the Senate by Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar and Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley. Dozens of (relatively) smaller tech companies have endorsed it. Although it passed the Senate Judiciary Committee (Democrats all supported it while Republicans were split), it is unlikely to come before the full Senate for a vote this year. Due to opposition from California lawmakers and big companies themselves – and many Democrats’ preference for talking about more tangible issues, like health care and inflation, in the runup to the midterms – there is not much energy on Capitol Hill for a major debate on curtailing big tech.
That’s unfortunate in part because, while AICOA may not affect major social media platforms, if passed it would set a precedent for putting constraints on those platforms’ power. In addition to curbing Amazon and Google’s ability to quash smaller companies without trying to “break up” big tech, it would give reason to believe that government can curb the power of social media without threatening free speech. It would show that careful regulation is possible, and that making the internet fairer need not conflict with keeping it open.
A vital ingredient in the precedent would be the bill’s bipartisan nature. At a time when partisans on both sides utterly hate each other’s guts, and are largely unwilling to trust each other to govern fairly and responsibly, it is crucial that any law affecting a force as powerful as social media not be a one-party affair. Strictly partisan legislation would only enable polarization further, and would put spaces often used for political debates at the mercy of whichever party happened to be in power, even if their control only lasted two years at a time. Bipartisan laws in this area would be harder to undo.
If, by some miracle, the Democrats hold on to Congress this November, they should let AICOA or a similar bipartisan bill come up for a vote next year. Not only would it give them the chance to put limits on the power of some big tech companies, but it could also provide a template for careful, bipartisan regulation of social media that does not undermine free speech. That, in turn, could keep forums for political and moral debate from being at the mercy of one rich person or one political party. It would not end nastiness on Twitter, but it would make clear that there were ways to curb that nastiness without resorting to heavy-handed censorship. It could also show us that, while scientific and technological progress brings sweeping changes to the world, progress in human behavior is much harder to come by.