Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. That 180-page online rant by the alleged shooter in the Buffalo massacre is one of the latest examples of the dangerously divisive products of social media in our time. Not that racist massacres didn't take place before social media, before the internet, but it's a factor today undeniably in things like the spread of the hateful ideology of replacement theory that the alleged shooter referenced, the false conspiracy theory that there is a plot to replace Whites and Christians in America.

That is a fringe theory, but it's spreading more widely, largely because of how easy that spread is to accomplish. NYU social psychologist and professor of ethical leadership Jonathan Haidt has an article in the May Atlantic magazine that takes a deep dive into how social media went from something people first thought would be culturally unifying as people shared posts with each other to the highly divisive thing it has become.

The article, of course, was published before Buffalo and Jonathan Haidt was already scheduled for the show today. We'll talk about the Buffalo massacre in the context of this piece, as well as the themes that it now connects with that Professor Haidt writes about. Jonathan, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jonathan Haidt: Thanks so much, Brian. Great to be back with you.

Brian Lehrer: Your article begins with a biblical Babel. Why Babel?

Jonathan Haidt: Well, because it just felt to me like something had gone terribly wrong in the 2010s. I've been casting around for metaphors to explain how everything seemed to change. When I reread the Babel story, it's just this short little story from early in Genesis, and the key line is God sees the humans building this tower and he says, "Let us go down and confound their language, so that they may not understand one another."

I think that's the best metaphor I found because we have a lot of metaphors for tribalism and why our hatred across partisan lines is rising, but I think the real hallmark of what social media has done to us in the 2010s is that it has shattered any sense of shared meaning, any sense of shared narrative and it puts us in these fragments, it turns us against each other, it makes us fear each other. That's what life was probably like in the days after Babel was destroyed.

Brian Lehrer: You suggest that Babel isn't a story of tribalism, it's a story about the fragmentation of everything. What's the difference you're getting out there?

Jonathan Haidt: The American culture war has been going on since the '60s or '70s, as various political actors and parties get more geared up towards fighting the other side rather than cooperating. That's been going on my whole life. I was born in 1963. What happened to 2010s isn't just an intensification of the left-right war. It's that people are now afraid of each other, even-- This is actually very important before we get to the Buffalo story. When you look at a morally homogeneous institution, that is someplace where almost everybody is on the right or an institution where almost everyone is on the left.

Now, if this was just tribalism, those places should be happy places. They should all be exalting in their shared vision of what's going on, but in fact, it's in those morally homogeneous places that we actually see a lot of fear, a lot of internal conflict, a lot of division. That I think is something that's newer and that can be explained by the fact that social media gives people an incentive to shoot, as it were, shoot with dark guns is the metaphor, to shoot people on their own side. We're not just attacking the other side, we're actually attacking moderates on our own side. We're attacking leaders. We're attacking everybody.

Brian Lehrer: You look back, and this was one of the most interesting things about your article for me, to the years around 2003 or so with the early social media platforms like Friendster and MySpace, in the more optimistic context of a theory called nonzero. What's nonzero and how is it connected with early social media?

Jonathan Haidt: Nonzero is this really brilliant book by Robert Wright. It came out in 1999. I read it and Bill Clinton read it and wrote about it. It really captured the zeitgeist that was clear in the 1990s. The Cold War was over. People were saying, "The end of history." What Wright pointed out is that there actually is a direction to history. Even if you look at biological history, from the first single-celled organisms to multicellular organisms, there is a direction in which systems find ways to cooperate at higher levels.

That's very hard to reverse. That's human history as well. In the 1990s, there was a great deal of optimism and, with the arrival of the Internet, it was clear like, "Wow, no more long-distance charges and say nothing about paying for long-distance telephone. You can see each other and you can talk to anyone in the world for free instantly." It was quite amazing.

I'm not saying that the thesis of Wright's book was wrong because Wright does say that there can be some huge declines, but he does say in the long run, over time, we get more cooperative. That probably is still true. It's just that right now, I believe, social media has taken us on a very large downward jag.

Brian Lehrer: Well, Facebook really became dominant around 2008, you remind us in the article. You cite the year 2011 as a high point for social media techno-optimism. It's hard, even barely a decade later, to remember that there was a high point of social media techno-optimism. Why 2011?

Jonathan Haidt: There were a bunch of different platforms that all launched around 2003, 2004. Facebook, as you say, it emerged by 2008. It was the dominant platform. Originally these were just things to share posts and photos, but gradually became more about the newsfeed. Then it's you opining on the newsfeed and then it's you criticizing someone else for their comment on the newsfeed.

It becomes much more about political conflict. The key innovations are, 2009, Facebook adds the like button, Twitter adds the retweet button. This just makes everything much more viral, much more explosive. The dynamics change because of those architectural changes. Even still, in those years there, we still we're thinking, most of us, like, "Wow. This is the best thing ever to happen to democracy."

The key events in 2011 are the Arab Spring. What an amazing year. The year starts with the Arab Spring where we're thinking, "Okay. The communists failed in the '90s and now democracy is going to come to the Arab world," we thought. It ends with Occupy Wall Street. Wow, income inequality has been rising for so long, but thanks to social media, more egalitarian movements are now powerful.

There was an extraordinary optimism in 2011 that social media was God's gift to democracy and equality. That's where things begin to turn around. After 2012, and especially in 2014, is when we begin to see the first signs of the new and much more vicious social media.

Brian Lehrer: Let me go back to these two tools which are so easy to think of as simple and benign tools that you cite as at the core of turning things from light to dark on social media, the like button and the retweet button on Twitter. What's so sinister about liking somebody's post on Facebook or somewhere, or retweeting a post that you find interesting on Twitter? What's so sinister about that, that it could have turned the whole thing to the dark side?

Jonathan Haidt: Well, nothing is sinister about them if by sinister we mean that there was some plan to-- that Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey had a plan to destroy the world. No, of course they didn't.

Brian Lehrer: I didn't mean that. Maybe sinister is the wrong word, but I guess inadvertently destructive.

Jonathan Haidt: Inadvertent sinisterism, sure. What happened was once users are able to like things, well, that's a huge amount of information about what you find engaging. Facebook was all about increasing user engagement. They literally gave bonuses to engineers if they could find a way to keep people on the site longer, if they could find a way to get them to post more content, give us more data. That's how they make their money.

The like button allowed them to know exactly what engages people and then they developed algorithms. The algorithms weren't really there beforehand, but they become ubiquitous after that, algorithms to give people more of, well, what they want or certainly what engages them. The retweet button, and then Facebook copies it as the share button, is even more powerful if you think about how information spreads.

It's one thing if you tell me something and then I call up five friends and tell them on the telephone. That takes a long time. Whereas if I can just touch a single button and it goes out to my 3,000 followers, each of whom has an average of a few hundred or a thousand followers. With just a few clicks, millions of people can see something. This becomes extremely important when we talk about people who otherwise would be isolated and alone with their strange beliefs and they would die out. Now, it's very easy for people to find each other and create these communities of shared belief.

Brian Lehrer: For you as a social psychologist, you must either believe or believe that you're observing with the way people use like and share and retweet, that human nature gravitates toward liking and retweeting the most divisive possible things.

Jonathan Haidt: Yes. What the research shows is that people especially love to broadcast things that display anger at the out-group, anger at the group that your group hates. Of course, you could have lots of positive stuff about your group, but  bad is stronger than good is a general psychological principle.

Yes, it is the divisive information. I'd like to steer people away from the obsessive focus on information. Everybody's looking at fake news, information, where do people get these bad ideas? I'm a social psychologist, and I'm not as interested in information as I am in social dynamics. This is what is extremely powerful is that we're really good at sussing out what do people think around here, what is the called the common sentiment we want to fit in? We want prestige, we want people to respect and like us.

We evolved to live in small community, small groups in which our social senses can do that, but then you put us into this distorted funhouse of social media where you have no idea what the average person thinks. All you know is what's going viral at this moment. All you know is the things that come through your feed, which have very little correlation with what people actually believe. What you know, for sure, is that it's much more radical, much more extreme, much nastier.

Most people are quite nice. Most people don't want to attack others, but you wouldn't know that from being on Twitter or Gab, or many of these other platforms.

Brian Lehrer: Replacement theory, as one example, and the way it's spreading as we tie this now potentially to the Buffalo shooter.

Jonathan Haidt: That's right. I heard just a few minutes of your previous conversation just before the hour and of course, as people know, this sort of thing has happened, the Pittsburgh shooting was almost identical in its ideology. I study moral psychology, and I've been very interested in extremist moral movements.

Back when the Oklahoma City bombing happened in 1993, well, Timothy McVeigh, when he was caught, he had a book on him called The Turner Diaries, which is the Bible of this sort of movement, written in, I think, the late '70s. It is all about the great replacement theory and how Turner the hero flies a small plane with a nuclear bomb into the Pentagon, and so on 9/11, I thought, "Oh, my God, the right-wing, these people, they actually did it." It's a similar idea.

Previously, you had to somehow find a copy of the book, and you had to know people, and you had to maybe needed a meeting where people traded copies of the book because you couldn't buy it in bookstores. That was the dynamic for a long time. Now imagine that you take the connectivity of whatever the connectivity of people susceptible to these beliefs were and you multiply it by 1,000 so that rather than having to get your way to a gun show, where maybe somebody had the book, you just go online, and they're on your newsfeed is somebody offering you a PDF of the book, and every book on great replacement theory.

It's really the connectivity. That's what has changed things. In fact, I just started reading the manifesto this morning, and look, what does he say? Here's a couple of quotes from him. He basically says that he learned everything came from the internet. Let me just find to find the quote. It was Q&A.

Brian Lehrer: I'll just resay it for our listeners. If you're just joining us, my guest for another few minutes, Jonathan Haidt, Professor of ethical leadership and a social psychologist at NYU, and he has a big article in the May Atlantic Monthly about social media contributing to the fragmentation of everything, as he puts it. Go ahead.

Jonathan Haidt: Just in the first few pages of his manifesto, he has a Q&A. Question, "Where did you get your current beliefs?" Answer, "Mostly from the Internet. There was little to no influence on my personal beliefs by people I met in person. I read multiple sources from all ideologies and decided that my current one is the most correct."

Now I sincerely doubt that he actually read multiple ideologies and certainly, the fact that he live-streamed his attack, he live-streamed mass murder, indicates that he thinks his followers agree with him. Here's one other quote. Question, "Is there a particular person that radicalized you?" Answer "Yes, and his name is Brenton Harris," et cetera. His live stream started everything you see here. In other words, we have this kid, like many boys, today.

There is a boy crisis. I just read a wonderful forthcoming book by Richard Reeves on boys and men. Boys are increasingly disconnected. They're doing badly in school, they're doing badly in the job market. You have a bunch of disconnected boys spending all their time online, and boy, are they easy to recruit for these causes. I think social media and the internet are going to give us many, many more of these kinds of shootings.

Brian Lehrer: Listener on Twitter asks, "Please ask Haidt why this ripping apart of society can't be attributed largely to the rise of a massively funded right-wing propaganda empire with no equivalent on the left?"

Jonathan Haidt: If we look at the broader culture war, it is true. I think the questioner is correct that there's a much more organized effort by a right-wing groups that goes back to the '70s, really, and it increases in the '90s, so that's definitely a part of the culture war. Now, there are a lot of asymmetries in the American culture war. On each side, people can point to the terrible things that the other side is doing, but they don't see the things on their side that the other side is pointing to.

The listener is correct that there's an asymmetry, but of course, people on the right point to well. The left controls most of the dominant parts of our culture. They control most of the knowledge-generating institutions, the universities, teachers, unions, news, the journalism in general. Yes, all of these contribute. A culture war needs two sides, and the sick and sad thing about a cultural war is the harder you hit the other side, the stronger they get. There's a lot going on here that's gotten us to our current state of conflict.

Brian Lehrer: On the mainstreaming of this, some of this what we would normally call fringe stuff on the right, where does QAnon fit in to your theory and the made-up child sex ring accusation. We remember it was once leveled at Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, and then somebody actually went to the pizza place where she was allegedly doing this in the basement and shot up the pizza place.

There's a tweet that's in the news right now by upstate New York Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who's part of the Republican leadership in the House now talking about the baby formula shortage. She tweeted, "White House house dems, and usual pedo grifters," that's pedo as in pedophile, "White House, house dems, and usual pedo grifters are so out of touch with the American people that rather than present any plan or urgency to address the nationwide baby formula crisis, they doubled down on sending pallets of formula to the southern border."

Okay, if she wants to make an issue out of whether scarce baby formula should be used for people who are crossing the border illegally, that's a policy question that people can discuss, but she threw in there pedo grifters for House Democrats and White House and their colleagues.

Jonathan Haidt: Conspiracy theories like this have been around for a very long time, they're not new. Don't look at the conspiracy theory, look at the dynamics. The fact that a conspiracy theory like this can spread so massively that it can change the course of the country, this couldn't happen without social media, without the newly viralize social media.

Even more important, what I want to call attention to is, this is a US representative. This is an elected member of Congress behaving in this way.

That could never have happened without this new viralized social media. Here, I point to a really brilliant center rate commentator, Yuval Levin, was a book called The Fractured Republic, and I've heard him speak on podcasts where he points out that America's institutions used to be formative, they shaped us, they created us. If you worked with New York Times, we'd assume that you are a Times man, you are shaped by the high standards of the New York Times, et cetera.

Levin points out that now our platforms are performative. That is, thanks to social media, you can get elected by spreading outrage on social media, and then once you get to Congress, wow, now you've got a really big platform. Congress isn't an institution that you owe something to. It's not a crucial institution of the country. It's just a big platform for you to tweet from, and eventually you'll lose that you'll just be on Fox News and other programs.

This is my main point in the article is that social media has changed the social dynamics in ways that make us perform, not communicate, it doesn't connect us. It gives us a platform to perform, and our performance ends up intimidating people into silence, subverting our institutions, and basically tearing down the essential structures of a diverse secular liberal democracy.

Brian Lehrer: Rufus in Brooklyn. You're on WNYC with Jonathan Haidt. Hi, Rufus.

Rufus: Hi, Professor Haidt. Given the new dynamics and the connectivity, do you think that there should be a redefinition and maybe even a legal redefinition of incitement and hate speech? Thank you.

Jonathan Haidt: That's a really good question. I guess my broad answer would be yes, that we need to reconsider each of our key legal and moral constructs each time the technology changes and so what was reasonable in the era of news  of early slow newspapers might not be reasonable in the era of your radio and television, and then that might not be reasonable now.

In general, yes, I do. I also think that efforts at content moderation, which they're certainly necessary, but one thing we learned from Francis Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, is that, even Facebook, which does spend a lot of money on content moderation, even they can only get, I think she said a statistic, something like around 1% of speech that might count as violence and intimidation.

It's more moderation, trying to catch all the horses after they've left the barn, that is a hopeless task, whereas what Haugen suggests is changes to the architecture so that bad stuff doesn't go so far so fast. It really changes to the architecture, or what we need to slow this stuff down rather than trying to please billions of posts.

Brian Lehrer: That's so interesting, because Governor Hochul, after the Buffalo shooting, said this. I'm going to play just a seven-second clip, and I want to get your reaction to it, and then we're going to be out of time. She says social media companies need to take ownership of the fact that things like this rant, or what some people call a manifesto was sitting there online, and the shooting was tweeted live and live streamed.

Governor Hochul: They have the resources to do this. They need to take ownership of this because otherwise, this virus will continue to spread.

Brian Lehrer: What does that mean? Maybe it's what you just said.

Jonathan Haidt: Yes, I think she's absolutely right, but I would put it in an even broader context. These companies grew up in a context of, "Hey, let's not regulate them much, because they're American companies, they're innovating. Let's let them grow. Let's see what happens." That made sense in the late '90s and early 2000s. It does not make sense now.

I think, as I've been arguing, and I suggest at the end of the Atlantic article, we need to rethink this from the top to the bottom, there needs to be a federal regulator that can put some fear into them that they actually are accountable, not just for content moderation, but for the dynamics and especially for sucking onto them underage users, luring in 10, 11-year-old kids.

As a society, we have to rethink what we've let these companies do. We have to put pressure on them, legal pressure. There are lawsuits brewing, there are State Attorneys General, all of this is good. Of course, we're not going to ban the technology, but we can't let it run roughshod over us, our democracy, and the rights of people, there are going to be a lot more of these shootings coming up.

Brian Lehrer: NYU social psychology Professor Jonathan Haidt. He has a major article in the May issue of the Atlantic about the fragmentation of everything, and now tragically relevant to the massacre in Buffalo. Thank you very much for joining us.

Jonathan Haidt: Thank you.

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