How Speaking up on Social Media is Making America Stupid
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Is America stupid? That’s the question Bill Stierle and Tom try to answer as they dissect an article by Jonathan Haidt. Yes, more people are now speaking up but on the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of discourse going on. Bill and Tom then also dive deep into how this divisiveness and lack of debate and civil discourse is only amplified by social media. How does our language impact our message? How can we elevate our communication for learning and turn social media into a platform for the exchange of ideas instead of clash?
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How Speaking up on Social Media is Making America Stupid
Bill, there's so much going on in our society here in America, especially about social media. It seems the timing of things is quite interesting. Elon Musk looks like he's on a path to purchasing Twitter. There's a lot of speculation as to what that means. At the same time, a very interesting article in the Atlantic came out from Jonathan Haidt that talks about largely what social media has done to America. There are so many things to discuss here.
There are great topics to start with this that we are going through an extraordinary revolution about communication and how communication is moved. Our limbic brains are not meant to process this amount of information all at once all the time. It's not meant to do this rate of things. Flipping through whether it's TikTok or little videos that you're watching or if you're flipping through Tinder for dates for God’s sake, it's too much choice to process. It affects a primary need of ours as human beings’ stability that is based on a healthy choice.
It's the same as food. How many different kinds of choices? I can drive down a street right down here near my block. I will never get to eat at every one of these different places. There are five different pizza shops. I got to pick one and then I stick with it or do I go with a brand because it delivers? It's tough for us as human beings. I'm glad you brought up the Elon Musk thing because that one has to do with how that is going to impact. If he's in charge of communication, what will he do? What influence will he have on that company in how they communicate? Different people think he's going to do different things on it. All of a sudden, we're into tribalism again.
That is the thing that I see, not just reading these articles like the Jonathan Haidt article on The Atlantic which is getting a huge amount of traction and attention. This isn't just because he's on a PR tour. That always helps but this article has gotten more reads and shares than anything on The Atlantic in a very long time. It struck a nerve.
Social media very clearly is giving people a place where it's feeding people's biases and they more easily find people that reinforce their beliefs without challenging them. He talks about America becoming more stupid because of this, which is a very interesting choice of words because we're not fostering any civil discourse or debate to learn.
It's more of a team sport cheering on and trash-talking each other on the other side oversimplifying it to an extent. I was shocked. We have someone on Facebook, which you and I both know and are connected with on social media, posting a question about the Elon Musk thing. “Do you think this is a good thing that a billionaire would buy this platform or not?” It’s an open-ended question and he did not expect the tsunami of comments but the comments were very much for or against.
It was very black and white thinking. There wasn't any civil. Any is too extreme. There was a very limited civil discourse and debate. More opinions like either praising Donald Trump that he's going to save the platform or vilifying him that he's going to destroy it. None of the people commenting truly have any knowledge to know one way or the other what Elon Musk is thinking. It's disheartening to see that there's a lack of that civil discourse and I hesitate to use the word and you may put me in the penalty box for this one, Bill but intelligent discussion. I don't know if that's the right word to use.
I appreciate you using the word intelligent at this point because it's an interesting word. It goes right in the face of the three world perspectives that human beings have got to get ahold of. We do have certain biases that cause us to be stable. We think that we're intelligent with our bias because we can validate the bias. We can think we're intelligent because we can validate the fallacy. That's number two.
Number three, we can reinforce the bias and the fallacy to generate a stable belief with no evidence. Why? We just know it's so. The word bias, fallacy and our limiting beliefs, people don't like to poke at. They don't because it causes us to question our reality, as well as what we stand for. It's easier to stand and support that person that's confident and wrong rather than to say, “Maybe this person is not telling me the truth.” That is the wedge that an authoritarian, a fascist or a leader is trying to get the country or a company to go in a direction that they want. With that type of communication, all it's doing is reinforcing where the person is, not trying to engage what's best.
This may be happening in many ways all over the world but I'm not going to comment on that because I don't have enough experience of people's views in other countries. I'm seeing more of what's happening here in the United States of America. It seems that people are not interested to learn the truth. They seem that they're more interested in or comfortable taking a position on something, digging in their heels and being like, “I'm with that guy. I'm on his team. This is my opinion. Everyone else is wrong and I'm right.” They're not interested in having a discussion to learn. Is this true or not?
They want simplicity and create pockets of certainty. All of a sudden, I'm having flashbacks here. Let’s say I go into a different state or city and I say the following sentence. “I grew up in Florida.” “You're one of those Florida men.” “I live in California for over 30 years.” “You're one of those California people.” “I went to college in Kansas.” "You're from Kansas.” I gave three different locations and it immediately activated inside your brain some supposed evidence about the way I think. All of a sudden, what I got to do is stick something on there.
I vacationed in Bali. What does that mean? I scraped together some nickels, flew there and had my birthday. Do you see what I mean? It's either inside people’s worldview, not inside their worldview or has gained a little bit of information about so what happens is they are ready to put me in a box. “Florida man, California man, Kansas City man, a vacationer in Bali, he must be rich.” We have no control of the narrative.
The only way to get control of the narrative is to come back to a base language of speaking from our values, which are things like fairness or what does consideration, cooperation and mutual respect look like? How can we gain equity here? All of a sudden, with all of those terms that I said, the conversation changed. It's like, “He's interested in what I'm interested in. I'm interested in fairness.”
I've obliterated time and space by changing my word choice. What's fun about doing this show is that we're trying to get people to know choosing a language shift and a word choice. If a company wants to focus on efficiency because they haven't been efficient very much to save a couple of dollars, that might be a common value that the company chooses to go after.
All of a sudden, things start to go better because they're paying attention to a value that they can all stand by. You can't get there from biases, fallacies and limiting beliefs, by using labels and diagnoses or from criticism, defensiveness, contempt and withdrawal. Our society is in that other tragic language place. What's so nice about the article is it goes into that a little bit.
It highlights the challenge of modern social media. It is a challenging space. It is not serving as much as the free exchange of ideas and this debate. It is more of just a place for people to hang out with people that support things you already believe. It's not meant to challenge what many of us are thinking or to help us learn from each other. That's not what the algorithms are reinforced to do.
It's reinforced to either stoke your fears about something or your beliefs about something. They don't feed you things that intentionally challenge your view. Bill, at one point, I forgot if we talked about this in an episode or you and I talked about it but there was this study done where they took a significant number of FOX viewers and paid them to watch CNN. As people were forced because they were being paid and that motivated them to be willing to do what was asked of them, they viewed CNN for some time. I'm talking like certain hours a day for weeks.
The thoughts were challenged. They were forced to be exposed to other messages and it changed some of their thinking because they weren't just sitting in this place of team reinforcement of messages. Nothing is forcing people to do that. If we're not curious to learn, this is why Jonathan Haidt says that America over the years has gotten more stupid. Drawing a parallel to the rise of social media platforms and doing this, it's scary. To me, it also explains why.
What happened in Washington, DC on the January 6th Committee on the insurrection is that Kevin McCarthy is the House Minority Leader, the number one Republican in the house. He has repeatedly said that he never thought about asking Donald Trump to resign and all those sorts of things. He specifically has come out making statements himself verbally and in writing that he didn't do certain things.
He didn't talk to Donald Trump about this but didn't say to other Republicans, “Enough is enough. We're not going to follow Donald Trump anymore. We need to push him out of the party.” A recording comes out that is a fact. He didn't challenge. He said that it was a fake tape. Nobody seems to be caring as much as you would expect that we have proof.
Even he, when asked about it, quickly flexes it and puts more attention on the Southern border crisis pivoting, which as a communication tactic may be good for him but it's amazing even when we have facts and proof, it doesn't seem to get people's attention as much as what gets their attention or things that reinforce their beliefs, which social media is doing.
The new narrative is that if you don't own what you said, then you leave it to others to interpret. A reporter one time when a person goes into a deflective sentence says, “Lions, tigers and bears are also coming across the border. We got to put a mode up to prevent the alligators from coming out over the border. I'm glad you and the senators are down here to keep alligators from coming across the border and create extraordinary nonsense to put a spotlight on the craziness of the distraction language.” I love that.
That is my funny communication self talking but the most powerful way to do it is to go, “You are scared of immigrants. Your party is interested in not letting any more immigrants come in here. You don't want any more immigrants to come into the country. I wonder what's going to happen to our workforce because of your choice about keeping immigrants. More Americans are going to have to do lower-wage jobs. Is that what you're looking for?”
Can you imagine if a reporter attempted that?
Go like, "It's good because then you can suppress the wages and keep the minimum wage down so people can’t make a living here. You could choose to do this and we don't have a steady flow of immigrants that want the opportunity of being an American and work at a lower wage job. It seems like you want to cut out the workforce that's coming in to help certain companies. You're not interested in the new workforce. You want Americans to do lower pay jobs and keep that lower. Is that what you're asking for? That's why you want a wall up? That's what it does.”
This is the reporter getting in the game of challenge. Why cable news is exploded is because regular news people are just reporting what the person is saying, not calling the person to task about what they're saying. When you said the word intelligence, that's what's happening. The person is reinforcing beliefs and biases and that's what all the politician is doing. There is a crisis on the border as if there's a huge crisis.
There is a problem down there. I'm not naive and have rose-colored glasses. There are problems when you either constrict immigration or work with the process of people coming and healthily going across the border. There is a big problem with demonizing immigrants. We're in a very challenging situation because of the way things are being communicated.
That is the point, Bill. Not only does there seem to be a lack of curiosity, in general, among our society to seek the truth or a lack of curiosity to seek it or expand your thinking on things, consider their perspectives and arrive at what you believe is true. We see this in social media. Social media is not helping it because it plays into our biases and beliefs. It amplifies them and gets people more enraged because that keeps people's attention on social media.
They want more eyeballs to stay in the app and spend more time. They don't go to other places. How do you do that? You reinforce your beliefs. You either feel comfortable or get more enraged and all these sorts of things. This whole Kevin McCarthy thing is so interesting to me because it was a bombshell.
We're getting to a place where integrity may be a word that ends up needing to get removed from the English dictionary because politician like this is not being held to account for the things that they say. They're not being held to be responsible for having integrity. It's like, “It doesn't matter.” He said this thing back on January 6th, 7th or 8th, 2021 and it's recorded. We can all hear it. He's been saying something very different ever since. It shows you that he’s not interested in being accountable for anything. He's interested in whatever he needs to do to get more people to be on his side at any given moment, leaning whichever way the wind blows.
The word accountable falls away because of loyalty to a party or team like, “This is the brand I'm fighting for and this is where it's sticking. I don't want to shift.” The Republicans had a chance to keep their party alive. The chance that they had was to let Donald Trump know that he didn't have the votes to overcome. “You're going to be impeached. There's nothing I can do about it. You've pissed off enough of the Republicans. There's enough walking across the line. I can't hold it together. You've got to resign or you're going to get thrown out. Do you want to get thrown out or would you rather just resign?” Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy never had the courage to deliver that message and say, “We don't have the votes.”
Donald Trump would say, “Who? I'll call every one of them and ruin every one of them.” They didn't keep their lists tight. They needed to have it be a number that was too big for him to overcome. He would have fallen like a star that shoot meteorite and burned up in the atmosphere but they didn't take that course. They said, "It's going to fade naturally. I want to keep my peeps together and stay after the muckety-muck of overtly gerrymandering and changing the voting rules.”
Immediately it's going like, “As part of America, we're not supposed to be doing that.” It's almost like the slingshot to go back to having people standing for that next set of values, whether it's mutual respect and being able to have healthy relationships with Republicans and Democrats together. Newt Gingrich in 1994 when the Republicans were coming discouraged people from moving to DC because then their families would have gotten to know each other like the wives of each party and the families. It would humanize the other side. “They're the same as us.” No, he's the first person that started the process of the separation between the US.
Trying to keep the teams separate and not getting to know each other, not having relationships, mutual understanding and respect.
He disrupted the social ties and all of a sudden, it's us versus them, instead of what a collaborative experience looked like. You've got to be able to stay in a relationship and go, "That was a good thing. I don't agree with it but the two wives like each other. Sometimes I'm going to vote with them and sometimes I'm not going to vote with them.” That's the thing that's challenging and problematic.
There's a lot to talk about in this area. One of the things we can pull a thread on next time is how you restore accountability in the process and how to step into accountability in a new way with the language of compassion and empathy. What does that do when you ask somebody, “I'd like mutual respect between the two of us?” You have to have a safe, vibrant and intelligent discussion about what respect would look like because screaming at each other sure isn't going to get us there.
I'd like to continue that discussion, Bill. It ties in to not only each of us individually with the people we interact with but also, it comes back to this whole question of social media, Twitter, Elon Musk and what happens with that type of platform going forward. It all relates to our government and how we are going to hold our leaders accountable for being truthful and all that. Thanks so much, Bill.
Thanks, everybody.
Important Links
- Jonathan Haidt - Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
