• by Kaila Colbin , Featured Contributor, August 14, 2020

The world is falling apart, it seems.

The pandemic continues, barely abated; this Wednesday the U.S. notched its highest daily death toll since May, and researchers revealed that the death rate from COVID-19 is comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu.

The economy is in the toilet, even while the stock market continues to bounce back. Last quarter the GDP contracted by 9.5%, the worst on record; compare that to the decline of 7.2% during the fourth quarter of 1937, at the height of the Great Depression.

Our politics are more polarized and fragmented than ever, with grave and valid concerns about the integrity of our upcoming elections amid health concerns and the active destabilization of the U.S. Postal Service.

And -- despite the news cycle getting a bit bored by it all -- protests for racial justice continue, with police officers in Portland this week teargassing a crowd of several hundred people. Each of these situations will provide fodder for decades of Ph.D. theses. But there is at least one question that carries a critical urgency: Is there anything we can identify right now that is clearly making things worse?

Dr. Matt Boyd, who researches health, technology, and catastrophic risk, put forward a thesis that “the business model of social media has played a critical causal role in the deaths of probably hundreds of thousands of people due to COVID-19.”

His argument? One you’ve heard me and others make before: the optimize-for-outrage, reinforce-existing-biases, eliminate-the-possibility-of-shared-facts nature of social media.

“We know that people follow public health guidance when they believe that officials understand the public’s values and that ‘people like me’ can help make decisions. When everyone scrolls through a highly individualized social media feed, there is no such thing as ‘people like me’.”

Boyd references a study on public opinion and algorithmic bias, published in ERCIM News (ERCIM = the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics). From the abstract: “[O]nline platforms can favour fragmentation of opinions… [which] leads also to polarisation, where the distance between the opinions of the people is larger compared to the situation without algorithmic bias… [C]hanges in opinion are much slower when the bias is in operation… These results bring important evidence that algorithmic bias may affect outcomes of public debates and consensus in society. Thus, we believe measures are required to at least stop its effects, if not  reverse them.”

What can each of us do about this right now? Boyd suggests following tech guru Jaron Lanier’s advice to delete your social media accounts. But if you’re not quite ready to be a digital outcast, there are still actions you can take.

Here are a few:

Slow down. Do not instantly like, share and retweet headlines that shock, offend, or titillate. Ask yourself, “Am I certain what I’m sharing is true? What evidence do I have? And will I be making the world a better place by sharing this?”

Intentionally puncture your filter bubble. Follow people who live in a different ideological world to you. Go down the rabbit hole, as New Zealand journalist David Farrier did this week.

Finally, ask genuine questions, and truly seek the answers. Leave the rhetorical questions to those who don’t care about facts, and let your aim be not victory but progress.

As the saying goes, you’re not sitting in traffic, you are traffic. Each of us is accountable for our own role in creating the society we live in. It’s urgent that we start acting like it.