A free-speech absolutist (and trolling enthusiast) angles for control of Twitter. At the same time, Spotify defends its cash-cow podcast pugilist even as he regularly sends his audiences down disinformation rabbit holes. What might these two recent developments say about the future health of our digital lives?
Little that would support optimism. Instead, they confirm that our continued fetishizing of free speech rewards bullying and demagoguery while making it even more difficult for the rest of us to work toward a digital environment that encourages empathy and healthy engagement.
In their own ways, the billionaire troll and the entertaining pugilist are simply the latest symptoms of ongoing moral concerns with digital media. In seeking to gain control of Twitter, his favorite platform, Elon Musk, has suggested that controls intended to curb abuse and harassment are worse than the problems they address.
Musk’s bullying behavior is well-documented (McGregor, 2018), and even Twitter’s former CEO, Jack Dorsey, lamented the popularity of “dunking” on the site or mocking or denigrating one’s enemies (Wagner, 2019).
One observer noted how Musk “seems to have a compulsive need to belittle people and burp out his least-considered impulses and stoke bullying by his legions of admirers in a way that both reflects and shapes how Twitter is” (Giridharadas, 2022). But we know that having an anything-goes attitude toward online speech stifles voices of the less powerful and exacerbates the worst features and effects of social media. Musk’s Twitter vision is arguably a morally stunted one.
Spotify’s defense of the wildly popular The Joe Rogan Experience podcast is a vote of confidence in the power of a virtuoso conversationalist and a move to protect a lucrative brand. Rogan, however, has repeatedly vilified trans-gender identity and has featured the likes of Gavin McInnes, leader of the Proud Boys, and twice hosted Alex Jones, the head of InfoWars, who lost defamation suits after claiming the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax.
The resulting massive amplification of disinformation by Rogan’s show underscores the reality that, until our biggest voices online learn to be as responsible as they are freewheeling, they will remain part of the problem of corrosive discourse rather than part of the solution.
Musk and Rogan raise questions that are unique to their cases, but both illustrate a confluence of four ethically challenging trends in the uses and effects of social media: platform architecture, “engagement” as the metric of digital success, the proliferation of “cheap speech,” and low levels of news literacy.
These factors have helped create James Madison’s nightmare: the power of strong partisan factions that threaten to “inflame men with mutual animosity” and make them forget about the common good. Madison hoped the vastness of the country would protect us from this. But here we are. The web has left us with what moral psychologists have described as a “flattened hierarchy of credibility” and digital talk that is dominated by “moral grandstanding” (Haidt & Rose-Stockwell, 2019).
Platform architecture. It’s no secret that the very design of the digital tools we use has influenced how we communicate. Sure, we share information and opinions with other people through our posts on Snap, TikTok, Facebook, and other sites. We may even learn something new or gain a deeper understanding of people who are different than us.
But social media design privileges “monologic” communication, not dialogue: what I like and think. It invites us to issue proclamations and declarations rather than encourage a genuine exchange of ideas. It’s built for opinion-lobbing rather than true engagement.
Engagement as a metric. The goal of digital media is to keep our eyeballs focused on a site for as long as possible. The most effective way is to provide “emotionality” – content that taps into our emotional responses. But by far, content that creates the specific emotional responses of anger, outrage, indignation, and shame are the strongest drivers of engagement.
Researchers have found that, on Facebook and Twitter, the type of posts resulting in the most engagement by far were those expressing “out-group animosity” (Rathje et al., 2021). A 2017 study showed that Facebook posts exhibiting “indignant disagreement” received nearly twice as much engagement as other posts. So by default, we’ve engineered “success” as that which creates the most outrage responses. While the occasional adrenaline shot of such content is fun, a digital world defined by this narrow set of emotions will continue to erode our politics and our social lives.
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Cheap speech. Eugene Volokh coined this term in 1995, predicting changes in communication that would allow audiences to “receive speech from a practically infinite variety of sources unmediated by traditional media institutions that served as curators and gatekeepers.” He thought was a good thing, but we are awash in cheap speech – emotional and titillating opinion-mongering that has arguably drowned out much of the speech we actually need.
“Cheap speech lowered the costs for like-minded conspiracy theorists to find one another, convert people to believing the false claims, and organize for dangerous political action at the U.S. Capitol,” wrote one political scientist (Hasen, 2022). Feeding people reassuring lies (or validating willfully ignorant opinions on a podcast) satisfies the craving for simplicity over ambiguity and creates a vicious cycle that encourages anti-intellectualism.
News literacy. We know that younger generations simply are not habitually reading good journalism and are consuming far less news than older adults (Schomer, 2018). They often practice “news avoidance.” They are more likely to rely on their social media feeds for their news. As a result, they are less knowledgeable about current events, less politically active, and more susceptible to misinformation. And the digital environment in which we live encourages us all to presume opinions rather than reporting, which matter most.
We misunderstand the concept of free speech when we, like Rogan and Musk, presume it is an “absolute” right, that it means we can say whatever we want. It does not. As one First Amendment expert cautioned, freedom of expression can be “self-destructive” when used to undermine our respect and capacity for rational deliberation (Fiss, 1996).
Rogan, who has repeatedly allowed his podcast to become a megaphone for fringe theorists, illustrates these trends. So does the libertarian mindset of Musk. If these two are allowed to shape the vision of our digital future, it will likely be one of pervasive dunking, moral grandstanding, and rabbit-holing – hardly a digital future most of us would want to spend much time in.
