The fatal consequences of Twitter's simplistic, linear moralism

How could it be that wearing masks (often even outside in the fresh air) became 'one of the most effective instruments' to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, why were lockdowns suddenly an indispensable policy that almost no one anywhere in the world dared to question? How was it that, in summer 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement's slogan "defund the police" became so popular that, in fact, many cities in the United States began cutting police budgets? How could it be that sometime in March of this year, the idea of 'sending heavy weapons to Ukraine' gained such momentum in the Western media that the number of heavy weapons delivered each day became the main indicator for evaluating governments' performance on the war?

One could argue, and many probably do, that the answer to these questions is: because these are meaningful and important policies, and because social media, and Twitter in particular, has allowed activists to make their voices heard and put pressure on governments to do the right thing.

I do not believe that this is the case. I believe that all these ideas and measures became popular for reasons that have little to do with their effectiveness in solving real problems. I even believe that some of them could and have done serious harm.

I am talking about a phenomenon that is still poorly understood, but which has enormous negative consequences for human well-being and is in the process of destroying our democracies and possibly our entire civilisation.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt attracted much attention with an article published in The Atlantic earlier this year describing how the most extreme ideas go viral on social media and how young activists label anyone who expresses even the slightest dissent from those ideas as racist, transphobic – you name it – and ultimately stifle all dissent. Haidt concludes: "Thanks to enhanced-virality social media, dissent is punished within many of our institutions, which means that bad ideas get elevated into official policy."

I don't disagree with Haidt's arguments. I see young activists using social media as a weapon in the ways Haidt describes and that the momentum created by shaming and silencing dissenters on the internet is one of the core problems of our time leading to extreme ideas becoming received wisdom and – most worryingly – finding their way into law.

However, I believe that there are additional dynamics at play here that need to be explored further.

My hypothesis is that certain dynamics that are now very common on Twitter are leading to a situation where highly simplified and linear moral stories become very popular and then go viral and eventually infect the whole world. Our age of social media promotes a simplistic linear moralism. A story that seems morally coherent at first glance spreads quickly and becomes entrenched.

Journalists, politicians, academics and activists spend many hours on Twitter every day, often checking and tweeting quickly on their smartphones between other activities. When a new issue comes up – be it the pandemic or the Russian invasion of Ukraine – some people start tweeting about what should be done about it. Those moral stories that are simple enough to be captured in the short attention span that Twitter allows, and that appeal most effectively to people's moral intuitions, go viral. That everyone should wear a mask to protect the elderly and vulnerable from contracting the coronavirus is one such story that went viral very quickly in March 2020.

I see the dynamic that unfolds on Twitter in the moments when a 'new current thing' goes viral as a kind of hypnosis, where people involved in the process start to firmly believe that it is of utmost importance to follow the new moral imperative. Once a critical mass of users on Twitter is 'hypnotised', i.e. a 'consensus' on what is 'morally right' is established, the Twitter mob imposes the new Twitter morality on the rest of the world by shaming and blaming. Thus, the moral stories about lockdowns, masks and vaccine passports became the 'established consensus', even if they were incompatible with the lives of many ordinary people and did not take into account the complexity of the real world.

Because most of the journalistic elite participate in this process, the traditional media reflect what happens on Twitter and almost uniformly communicate the same simple moral story to ordinary people, the vast majority of whom do not use Twitter but do consume traditional media. When ordinary people see most mainstream media repeating the same story about an issue, they tend to believe that it must be based on sound reasoning, also because most people still trust the mainstream media.

Clearly, social media is far from a peaceful consensus-building (and enforcing) apparatus. The bitter battles between different tribes (and bubbles) are a permanent feature of social media, including Twitter. Yet even in the United States, where the polarisation between the two tribes, Democrats and Republicans, is most pronounced, Twitter is dominated by the liberal elites, who also dominate most institutions (universities, media, big business, NGOs, etc.). In Western Europe, the liberal/progressive elite consensus is even more powerful than in America. The antithesis to the elite consensus that emerges on social media on all issues is relatively marginal. Many accounts are anonymous or come from brave individuals who put up with being attacked and cancelled.

If this is the process, it does not fully explain how it is possible for the whole of Western civilisation to become dysfunctional through the use of an internet app. How is this madness even possible?

The blogger BJ Campbell put forward a model that I think is useful in this context. He believes that we are outsourcing the part of our brain responsible for morality to our smartphones (and social media), much like we have completely outsourced the portion of our brain we used to devote to reading maps, learning street names, etc. to Google Maps.

Campbell argues that social media users behave like mindless neurons that together form a higher-order entity, an egregore of our collective thought and morality, that we don't control but that controls us.

This phenomenon is not as new as it may seem. Culture has always been the software that gave people moral direction in ways that individuals could not control. And cultures have changed, sometimes violently and sometimes because a culture collapsed when it could not cope with the problems of the time.

Memes of morality have always spread and updated our moral systems. But what took months and years in the printing age, now spreads in hours or minutes. While in the past the educated elites used to read books with complex tales and instructions on morality based on many years of experience and deep reflection and analysis of the functioning of society, in the social media age morality is reduced to small snippets devoid of any complexity, to a simplistic linear moralism.

One factor that may contribute to these dynamics is the sharp decline of religion in Western democracies in recent years. The void left by religion has led to a crisis of meaning. People try to fill this void by engaging in activism for what they perceive good causes.

It is remarkable that the Green Party in Germany is the most radical on most of the 'current things', whether they are particularly woke or pro-lockdown, pro-vaccination passport or pro heavy weapons for Ukraine. These positions are often in stark contrast to the party's traditions, such as its affiliation with the anti-war movement or its earlier staunch defence of civil liberties. My interpretation is that the party, more than any other in Germany, now represents the desire of many in the progressive elite to find new meaning in doing good in the world and to be seen as morally good by their fellow human beings. It seems that the simple linear moralism of Twitter fulfils this function. Anyone who goes along with the established consensus is seen as morally superior by their peers, anyone who expresses even the slightest deviation is accused of having potentially evil intentions, such as (supposedly) accepting that the elderly or the Ukrainians die.

Another likely factor is the atomisation of modern life and the fact that the internet age isolates us from one another more than ever. During the pandemic, this was especially the case for the well-educated cosmopolitan class – now sometimes called the "zoom class" – who could afford to work from home and have little interaction with other people in real life.

Mattias Desmet, a clinical psychologist, argues that the meaning crisis and social isolation also increase the rate of depression in society and lead to what he calls 'free-floating anxiety'. He believes that these conditions make people susceptible to manipulation through propaganda and lead to mass formation: When people collectively find a cause that gives new meaning to their lives, they go from social isolation to massive social connection, feeling they are waging a war against the cause of their collective anxiety.

All this has fatal real-world consequences.

In many countries, schools were closed for many months, in some even years, during the Covid 19 pandemic, even though children were hardly at risk from the virus. The consequences of these policy decisions are devastating for the well-being of children in the broadest sense.

The lockdowns increased poverty in poor countries and had a huge negative impact on the economic, psychological and physical well-being of people everywhere.

The fact that social distancing became the sole moral imperative made it almost impossible to discuss any trade-offs in public discourse. Centuries-old traditions of weighing trade-offs during the legislative process were thrown overboard without batting an eyelid.

In the wake of the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020, the “defund the police” slogan virtually became a moral imperative. More than 20 major American cities — including San Francisco, Portland, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Philadelphia and Baltimore — cut their police budgets by a total of $870 million. Partly as a result of this, following the George Floyd protests, the homicide rate in the US soared – in 2020 the increase was 30%.

These are just a few examples of the fatal effects that simplistic linear moralism has when these dysfunctional ideas become law, which has unfortunately become normal.

I fear that if we continue down this path, our societies will not be able to find workable and stable solutions to our biggest environmental and social problems, nor can democracy survive.

I do not pretend to have the solution to this problem. However, it seems obvious that still too few people in our highly educated elites are fully aware of this dynamic (and its consequences) in which many of them participate. I believe that greater awareness and understanding is a first step to finding sensible solutions.