Should we get off most social media – Facebook, Instagram, You Tube, Twitter, Google?

My wife and I just read the book The Chaos Machine, The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World, by Max Fisher, 2022. Available at Toronto Public Library

Our question: Is it worth staying on and using so-called free social media for social justice and environmental purposes even if we are aware that the A.I. algorithms being applied to us are harmful to many of our neighbours and kids, even causing murder, and may destroy what is left of democracy and our civilization? 

In this book there are horror stories about how the algorithms of Facebook and You Tube in particular, which are really artificial intelligence machines, caused genocides in Myanmar including the killing of men, raping of women and burning of Rhohinga Muslim villages, driving the survivors out of Myanmar to crowded refugee camps in Bangladesh. Also false rumours that caused the Sinhalese to kill people and burn the villages of Muslim and other groups in Sri Lanka. The algorithms are designed by the engineers of these companies to keep a viewer’s eyes on the screen so that they are exposed to more ads. The algorithms will start someone on You Tube for example on a fairly innocent topic and then shove more and more extreme videos at them, called ‘going down the rabbit hole’. Viewers are also encouraged to join groups that become an ‘In Group’ that becomes violently opposed to an ‘Out Group’.

Many of the mass killings in the U.S. – of Black citizens in Buffalo and many others, and the 2019 Christchurch, New Zealand mosque attack where 50 worshippers were murdered, recorded on Facebook Live by the killer; the attack on the Quebec City Mosque. All were caused by men who went down the rabbit hole of hate online and then acted upon it. The anti-vaxxer movement, pre-Covid is an early result of this phenomenon, noticed by one of the researchers described in the book. This has also resulted in murders in Canada – the young man who drove his van into people, especially women on Yonge Street, Toronto belonged to an extreme online group. An extremist president of the U.S. is a likely result of the social media algorithms, a much more powerful force than Russian interference according to the authors. The Trucker Convoy in Canada and Qanon are other examples. Of course human misery and resentment are forces as well, but they are all amplified by the ‘algorithms’. Spoiler alert – the end of the book compares these A.I. algorithms to the HAL 9000 computer in the film 2001 Space Odyssey where the on board computer HAL in following his instructions from two different programmers begins to kill off the crew. The only solution was for the surviving crew to ‘unplug’ HAL.