Have you heard of Netflix’s documentaries The Social Dilemma and The Great Hack? The first exposes our dependence on social media and shows how Silicon Valley has exploited it and the second shows that social media has been used globally to change people’s behavior on a mass scale for political ends.
What I got from watching The Social Dilemma is that Facebook was invented by young, white, male Americans who thought they were making the world a better place by connecting people. Young, white men and women created Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and many other platforms so that people could make friends, share interests, spend more time with friends even while apart, and help people increase their relationships. One early creator admits that he was part of creating the Like button to bring more friendship and happiness into the world. He couldn’t have foreseen a generation so hooked on the dopamine hit they get from each “like” that they can’t walk away from their phones. Ever.
It was all supposed to make life more fun, but monetizing those platforms required advertising, and advertisers wanted more eyeballs on those platforms. So designers came up with ways to increase our attraction to platforms, things like the Like button and being able to reply and being able to see when someone else was typing a reply and so on.
But advertisers always want more and platforms were too ready to cooperate and it wasn’t enough to try to keep us on Facebook or Twitter. There were still times when a person succeeded in closing the app and walking away. People were still closing the app and going on to live their lives, so designers came up with ways to pull us back into the platform. Notifications beckon, as well as emails or texts that inform us that someone has posted a photo of us or has just joined us on a platform, etc.
Maybe this started out as your usual marketing, but it trained us to psychologically need those platforms. Anything that causes a dopamine hit can eventually alter the brain so that it craves that hit and will work to get it. Even the Refresh function is part of it. Sometimes refreshing the screen gets you new information; sometimes it doesn’t. That’s called intermittent reinforcement.
While it’s powerful to get a reward each time you perform a certain behavior, it’s even more powerful when the reward doesn’t come every single time. If the screen sometimes refreshes with new information and sometimes doesn’t, we’ll keep hitting refresh even after a string of failures. Intermittent reinforcement means the reward can happen a tiny amount of the time, but if it happens at all and randomly, we’ll never stop trying.
In these ways and many more the designers of social media platforms changed the way we interact with our computers and with our phones, not to mention with each other.
Both films show that social media no longer works only with advertisers to manipulate its users, but with organizations that want to alter our behavior in bigger ways. They show that political entities will buy information about social media users and use that information to target users who are vulnerable to being influenced. A platform can be paid to show certain users the images, videos, opinions and posts that reflect the “reality” the entity wants users to believe in and react to. This is how foreigners influence elections, nations turn on their own people and outside entities divide us against each other.
For years I and many other Americans have wondered what happened to us. How did past generations get along in spite of political differences and why can’t we do that at all anymore? Why does it seem like the 2000 election — when George W. Bush was declared president after he did not win — ended our ability to be friends with people who had a range of beliefs and values? Why has the U.S. Congress become decreasingly able to work together for the past 20 years so 
that legislation has become an often fruitless exercise in vindictiveness?
I think I know now. Americans haven’t become increasingly small-minded and intolerant all on our own. We have been divided against each other by social media, or rather by the organizations and political entities that use social media to turn us against each other.
And it’s been easy. Americans love money so much that we happily sell each other for parts. There are no brakes on our buy-and-sell culture where animals and natural resources are often worth more dead than alive, and the programming of a person’s mind looks more valuable than fostering independent thinking. This is American culture. This is who we are. Social media occupies the entire planet and programmers all over the world are working on what they hope will be the next TikTok or Instagram, but we started this. We Americans did.
In this state our society was hopelessly vulnerable to a virus that could only be contained with communal action and prioritizing the greater good. After 240 years of American hubris and 15 years of social-media-driven division there was no way we could have put our personal beliefs aside and acted in unison to effectively deal with the coronavirus. 
We were effectively sitting ducks for COVID and still are. I can’t remember where I heard the theory (hey, it’s my first conspiracy blog post) that Russia wasn’t so much meddling in American affairs to get El Idiota elected. They just wanted to stir the pot enough to make us a dysfunctional nation, so mired in our loathing of each other that our legislators couldn’t pass a bill. Contributing to the election of Cheeto Jesus was a wonderful bonus for them. I’ve also heard the theory that the coronavirus was cooked up in a lab for release in the U.S. But it doesn’t matter if either of these theories has any truth or none at all. What’s happened is that the U.S. was an effectively dysfunctional nation by 2016 and the coronavirus has done us more damage than any other country on the planet.
End of conspiracy theorizing.
I could go on about exactly when the U.S. started falling apart, but my point is that our failure as a nation was sped up by social media. We were heading in a bad direction, but our hatred of one another was exacerbated by those seductive platforms.
In The Social Dilemma one expert says she believes we will eventually fix the state of social media but it will take a long time. I don’t think we have that much time. We’ve reached the point at which Americans will vote against our own interests if it will cause those we hate to suffer, too. I believe that’s not even childish because most children won’t willingly hurt themselves just to also hurt someone else. I’m grappling for a metaphor that illustrates the size of the United States’ self-destruction. It’s as if we all have the power to give each other a serious disease and we keep doing things to spread it.
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