Trump with his Fox propaganda media empire is the ideal internet candidate. On social media, ill-intentioned entities--the customers, as it were--use untruths, conspiracy theories, resentment, anger, racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and fear to manipulate the behavior of users (whose private data and behavior are the products). Trump who campaigns and governs with lies, demonization, and fear is a perfect fit. This week's grocery store shooting, synagogue massacre, and Trump fanatic bomber are not exceptional. Indeed, they are perfectly representative of the desired behavioral outcome. As was reported last week in this paper, a shockingly high proportion of Trump's base now supports the various American violent neo-Nazi groups. The folks selling us up the river--i.e., selling out the democracy--are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. Trump, of course, is manifestly unfit to be president. We can vote Trump out. But what the heck are we going to do about the millions who have been sucked down into the squalor of his personality cult ?
15
Recommend ditching your iPhone immediately. Trash being delivered constantly. As it sucks your personal information. Consumes your personal brain time, makes you unhappy and depressed.
4
Yellow journalism was on paper; easy to dismiss and evaluate.
The net uses imagery to convey it's message diabolical.
The impressions thus created are indelible.
That's why I NEVER look at Trump's antics.
Hook line and sinker. Over and out.
3
So, stay off social media, use reputable news sources and use the junk mail liberally.
I don't have social media so I am not sure what must be like being a user nowadays. But, if I had to guess, in pre-SM times conspiracies were spread at a much slower pace than now, therefore these attacks were sporadic. Now SM has enabled fast spread of conspiracies, enough to push vulnerable people to the brink faster, so I opine there's direct correlation with increase in incidents. As someone who doesn't find any value SM, I personally think giving it up is worth it, because supporting the very thing that's pushing vulnerable people to violence faster is hypocritical at this point.
2
Dear Frank,
I agree with your sentiments, but mostly as applied to Social Media. Get off Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Gab and other proprietary "bubbles," and the Internet might not seem so hostile.
3
Just like they did with the Jamal Khashoggi story, the press has gone superlative about the past week and professed that they are now wondering how we got here.
For the record, online communications were basic to ISIS, to heroin trafficking by the Taliban, and to the Tatmadaw. While we're talking about records, al Qaeda means the database.
Tim Cook's wares don't depend on our internet addiction, they create it, that's what they were designed to do. That design philosophy has made them the richest company in the world, and immune from press criticism that has no trouble going after Facebook but loves their iStuff.
Other than that, yes, we have a problem. But we had that problem back when the New York Times' take on technology was writing glowing things about Google in hopes of getting invited to lunch at their new cafeterias in New York City.
The only attempt at a solution I've seen that has much value so far has been the EU's right to forget. But that's not enough.
3
The great prophetic writer Paddy Chayefsky ("Network") warned us about television. The Internet reinforces his every nightmare.
Most have too hard a time thinking without artificial propaganda.
The road to ruin indeed.
2
I suggest that everyone who is on FB cancel your accounts, unless your livelihood depends on it, if you running a business etc...
I watched yesterday PBS Frontline Documentary "Facebook Dilemma" and I couldn't believe how many lies and cover up was going on on this platform, they were unapologetically lying to all of us, since they new about Russian meddling since 2012- 2014. But again the mighty $$$$$ won the day and we got trump.
Dump FB if you can, our democracy depends on this. You can watch part one and two tonight.
Mark Zuckerberg actually had a panic attack during the interview.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/facebook-dilemma/
5
I think this is what they said about the printing press.
3
Mr Bruni, there are already 875 comments posted before me, so I have little hope that you will read this.
In case you do, please know that this is the best column I've ever read in the NYT.
Thank you.
2
If it weren't for the Internet, I wouldn't be reading Mr. Bruni's column or the New York Times at all ...
3
Blaming the internet for human violence is like blaming the car for the drunk who crashed it.
1
In pre-war Europe, particularly in Vienna, there was a plethora of legal anti-Semitic newspapers, and pamphlets, some of which Hitler read in early years. Jews flocked to Vienna in the later 1800s and onwards, many becoming solidly middle class, which raised the ire of the German population. Imagine if the internet had existed then; it probably would have consumed the haters' time so thoroughly nobody could have gone to school, work, or attended to their families.
So now we have a plethora of rabid anti-Semitism online that dwarfs the printed versions. And we have a plethora of unbalanced, but outwardly "normal" men who measure their manliness by the amount of powerful rifles and guns they own.
So tell me, NRA diehards (I am not against all gun ownership, but how many does an individual need, and why does anyone need an AR-15, outside of the police or armed forces?) - how can you ignore the stash of weapons of mass murder owned by virulent racists, anti-Semites, or suicidal people who want to kill themselves after they first hunt down a large number of ordinary people first?
So, an out of control "free speech" internet, coupled with our out of control, and hijacked, right to carry guns, will certainly lead to the destruction of our society. And you know what? If we don't clamor to fix these problems, we will deserve it. Kind of like the undoing of ancient Rome.
4
And radicals used to conspire in coffee houses and bistros.
When you think about it, having all this on the Internet (a vast over-generalization, by the way) is a good idea. Would you rather put police agents in coffee bars? Monitoring hate sites, or even setting them up as honeytraps, is going to be the way of the future if not the way of today. Of course, right now the authorities are too lazy or too stupid to do anything but entrap hapless muslim immigrants, but somebody somewhere will be listening to these rants. Maybe even feeding them to an AI.
1
A view from Canada! Yes we do have criminal code offences (Federal) that define "hate crimes". I will not expand, but you can google them. To those who assert "absolute freedom of speech" remember you can't even shout "fire" in a theatre in the US, but apparently the worse type of racial epithets, antisemitic rants etc.. are protected - please give us a break. This is not akin to what judges in Canada years ago stated about "obscenity/pornography" i.e. "I know it when I see it"! When you read racial and religious hate messages - believe me there is no doubt. It commences with demonization of the minorities - just like weak willed Trump. He learned well from McCarthy and yes Cohn. Hate and racial intolerance will crush your society if you do not back off & change course. Every country is faced with the same phenomena. Vote against hate speech!
1
I fondly recall the good old days when most lunatics and conspiracy theorists were relegated to street corners where they proselytized with sandwich boards advising passers by to "REPENT" because the end is near.
2
Great essay. Thank you!
I am in favor of eliminating social media completely. The internet should be informational like a great electronic encyclopedia only without the open ability to accept postings other than through recognized sources institutionalized by government regulation.
3
I think private companies like Google, Facebook, etc., should make corporate decisions to ban hate speech, not just inciting speech, but hate speech generally. Appropriate algorithms and a small monitoring team would go a long way toward making social media more civil. It would be incorrect to think that this somehow involves constitutionally protected speech because the First Amendment applies only to the government's prohibition of speech.
If anything is going to be "the death of us" it would likely be our mainstream media that is desperately trying to hold on to us, the news consumers, in the face of new competition from the internet. We can now access information actively and directly, cutting out the middleman altogether. Sensationalism and political bias (these days, mostly on the left, some on the right) and corporate consolidation reflect a struggling industry. It convinced many of us, for example, that these pipe bomb packages were more of a national security issue than a PR stunt. It's been so long since we've had a war on our own soil (or that which we claimed) that we do not know what a real threat to national security is (nor do to we appreciate the effects of wars we administer throughout the world.)
2
I found out in 2012 with my new membership on facebook, just how easy it is to be radicalized. I was that left leaning radical, foaming at the mouth. After a while, I got tired of being angry all the time. It had a resurgence during the 2016 election cycle. Post election, I had to defriend people on both sides of the fence because they were just irrational. Now, I temper my comments and have become vigilant about researching information that is spread via that venue. I don't believe everything I hear, and I call out others who seem to blindingly promote misinformation. And, as time goes by I find that social media just isn't that interesting anymore, and I particularly dislike the idea of being manipulated by others who have a hidden (or not so much), agenda. Everything has a life trend, social media is no different. Reading books have become a very nice and peaceful replacement.
3
We have created an addictive monster that has come to dominate our lives and the monster has grown too large and powerful to defeat. We have participated in our own demise (through civil unrest, and possible civil war facilitated by the fact that there are over 300 plus million guns on the lose in this country). And we try to think of ourselves as "rational".
2
I would like to believe that humans are hard-wired to seek truth over lies, as a matter of survival. Our ability to filter out misinformation was an evolutionary necessity; those who couldn't tell the difference were much more likely to come out on the short end of the Darwinian struggle in the long run. The firehose of disinformation flowing from the internet has overwhelmed some peoples' (especially the elderly and less-educated) ability to discern fact from fiction. Temporarily. I have to believe that the less discerning among us will eventually catch on and learn to distinguish between the two, simply as a matter of self-preservation. If not, we are all in deep trouble.
1
The internet also means oppressed people can meet anonymously. It means shared knowledge and shared experiences without the restriction of borders or even language. Essentially, it makes controlling information and public opinion nearly impossible for the traditional gatekeepers of the spread of information (the media and the government).
The hysterical tone in this paper to me sounds to me like nothing less than a gatekeeper realizing the extent to which their power has diminished. And look at the hypocrisy here and in the comments: to "defend democracy" we must curb free expression. In a desperate bid to preserve traditional powers to shape public discourse, the media is now advocating for China-esque monitoring and censorship of the internet.
1
I have been on the Internet in some form or another for the better part of three decades. For myself, I have found that mindfulness and breaks are the only way to keep it functional for me.
I do not know how we can manage that in our modern society, especially when so many philosophies of hate do outreach from the Internet into other portions of the world. The dividing line has gotten blurrier, not sharper, with new innovations.
An Internet version of the missing Fairness Doctrine might be useful, but i have no idea how it would be implemented.
I do not understand this attitude. If you are afraid of the lies and the bigotry, then work to have it exposed. Don't turn it off. Let us all know what it is and where it is. The fear is that it will metastasize. If so, I would like to get it over with. Wallowing in a world dominated by ignorance is not for me. How else are we to know about anyone, but particularly people that certainly seem to be very dangerous.
1
Women are very active on the Internet, and yet no woman is among the terrorists named in this column. And, in fact, precious few women have engaged in any kind of terrorism. The Internet is not the problem. Instead, the problem is disturbed men who inaccurately believe they have been wronged. They will find like-minded people, whether it be word of mouth or via the Internet.
4
@Nancy
It is true that disturbed people are likely to find kindred spirits by any means possible. But social media enables these link-ups with lightning speed and at exponential volumes. The higher the numbers, the bigger the echo chamber, the more emboldened the individuals, the greater the potential for harm.
1
The Internet has exploded forever the stranglehold the Democratic Party's media partners once exerted over the public right to know even the embarrassing things about government.
None of the garbage that we were told by innocent-looking liars like Dan Rather, Andrea Mitchell, or Don Lemon can fly anymore. As a result, America chooses its leaders with far more information, and the Democratic Party teeters on becoming the Whigs.
It was inevitable that a solidly pro-American President like Donald Trump would rise to the White House one day and reap a generation of fury from the people who thought they controlled what Americans thought.
It couldn't have happened to a creepier bunch. I'm glad to tell you this on the eve of All Saints Day.
1
Not to sound flippant, but I’m sure the same was said by the contemporary priestly class of Gutenberg, Cooke & Wheatstone, Bell, Marconi, Farnsworth, and everyone else who created technology that gave ordinary people more control.
1
the general level of nihilistic thought has been rising since the internet conquered the world. Humans were given an official notice a couple weeks ago with the climate being so degraded by the middle of this century that our species may not survive. Now take that with the deniers add the leaders and business tycoons this level of behavior will not lessen. We are collectively headed towards removal from this Planet.
2
So true! Thanks for saying this so pointedly that we cannot miss the point. What have we wrought?
I found it very interesting to read the article in the business section this week about the Silicone Valley inventors and leaders who have decided NOT to let their kids use the internet. play the games or use the websites they've developed. They think it is harmful to their children's development.
Thanks a lot - now that you've caused all this mess you've decided to bail and let the not so wealthy people's kids suffer instead. Really??
1
so well said!
1
Couldn’t you classify feminism as a “rogue grievance “? I was hoping you would touch on it; but that takes courage.
Why isn’t the radicalization of James Hodgkinson and the near fatal shooting of Republicans practicing baseball mentioned in this musing? Or Antifa and their ability to swiftly organize wreckless, violent mobs through internet mechanisms? Here’s why: The leftists who want to “curate” news and information on the internet really want to control the speech of conservatives, libertarians, and religious traditionalists while advocating for Marxism, Socialist restrictions on freedoms and the junk science of non-binary sex identifiers.
Like this author, these opinion pieces always point to anti-Semite’s and white supremacy groups while ignoring black supremacy groups and anti-Christians. It’s all so biased it’s a joke.
Google can do whatever they want but the US government is restrained from censoring the internet as they should be.
1
Though I'm all for civility and truth in public discourse, the anything-goes social media genie is out of the bottle for good. The internet is unstoppable and ungovernable, and perhaps should remain that way. (Who gets to decide what is disseminated and what is not?) What is missing in the truth vs. fiction equation is a widespread capacity for critical thinking and rational judgment.
Unless children learn from an early age to be skeptical and curious, to question, to fact check what they read and what they hear, we are doomed as a species to die by our own hand, through our own ignorance.
5
@JR
The freedom to lie in social media forces parents to train kids to be vigilant about the evil things kids and adults will say when they don't think anyone is watching.
But we already know what kind of job parents were doing with all the other responsibilities they have had concerning children.
1
Concerns about the deleterious effects of technology are longstanding and predate the internet. Long ago, C.P. Snow said, "Technology ... is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other."
3
When social media began its assent over a decade ago, and everyone started to get all ga-ga over Facebook and Twitter, I predicted that such open, non curated platforms would be not only full of non-curated crap, but also rife for abuse. Et viola, my predication came true!
1
If we make a Pareto Analysis about what is happening with the Internet we will find that about 80% of its negative aspects is caused by about 20% of the people or institutions using it. Sooner or later the world will need to create an international organization to take corrective actions. Hackers, harassers, dictators, criminals, and many bad guys can be stopped by using a scientific approach.
In spite of the fact that we the humans are not perfect some international institutions work very well, i.e.: Unicef, BID, Interpol, NATO, Doctors Without Borders, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to mention just a few. Yes, we can save the Internet from the ugly 20%.
1
Long before the internet we had yellow journalism. So the issues of bias and falsehood have been with us for some time. Why should unadjudicated opinions be confined to the Op-Ed pages and only a select few columnists, many of whom have their own political agendas. Yes, so much on social media is garbage, but it is unclear who should be the censor.
19
@LTJ Yes, *long* before the internet. So, should the internet now enable a return to something similar? I don’t follow your reasoning.
3
It seems quite clear who should make the decision about what kind of speech goes out under the auspices of private companies like Facebook and Google, Namely, Facebook and Google. I think social media companies should make corporate decisions to ban hate speech, not just inciting speech, but hate speech generally. Good algorithms and a small monitoring team would go a long way toward making the Internet a better place for both commercial entities and consumers. It would be incorrect to think that this somehow involves constitutionally protected speech because the First Amendment applies only to the governments prohibition of speech.
1
@LTJ
The problem with the internet is that people only want to listen and commune with those of like thoughts. Newspaper readership is way down , where perhaps a different idea could be commutecated. We demand more entertainment hence television programs are all alike just set up to not disturb us not provoke. And now you don't ever have to leave your comfort zone. And the cowardly politicians don't want to be put on a hit list just to save their jobs. Perhaps someday the Supreme Court could be the Supreme Court again and do the job the way it was intended to and not be robots. remember they are appointed for life so they don't have to be yes men .
1
There are too many comments for me to sort through, so apologies if this fantasy has already been suggested. I am imaging that the internet could have AI fact checker robots. For example, when false information posted, the robots could in a matter of minutes check through a million data points and determine that Jews didn't take down the world trade centers and automatically delete false statements. In this example, Alt Right could try to find different ways to say the same thing and the fact checking robot could wack them down in nanoseconds. In cases where it isn't clear cut, the AI Fact Checker could respond with known facts. Posters would probably just switch to different sites to spew their false comments. AI Robot would in matter of minutes - okay maybe hours find and provide correct statements. Sort of an internet wack a troll.
1
Former McCain strategist speaks up...
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/10/29/1808327/-Steve-Schmidt-does-not-hold-back-in-tonight-s-Commentary
1
The internet has the downside of indulging people's worst sides, like reckless, thoughtless drivers in the early days of the automobile, drunk drivers, drag racers who play chicken, bad drivers who operate recklessly, crash into people, stuff--... the internet's just another technical tool to be used by dangerous people. And there are dangerous people in this world. The internet hasn't solved that problem.
Isn't it painfully obvious that the internet has done major damage to society? Do you not care when you see young children staring at a device, oblivious to the real world and the other children around them? Knowing that their future consists of getting more and more hooked on it, getting sucked into hateful discussions and the horrible one-upsmanship of social media that we never had to worry about growing up? I'm baffled that people can say it's a neutral technology, or that all of the harm is worth it because now we can get sports scores faster or share photos or whatever. It sounds just like an alcoholic making excuses for drinking.
3
I've read a lot of these comments and everyone but me seems to know what hate speech is. Could someone kindly provide a generic definition? Here are my halting attempts to define it:
a) Any writing or speech that has swear words in it.
b) Any writing or speech that I find disagreeable.
c) Any writing or speech that Steven Colbert wouldn't like (because that's where I get most of my news).
d) Any writing or speech that is critical of the .
e) The Declaration of Independence.
f) Any writing or speech that calls into question some set of values, practices, laws or beliefs.
g) Almost anything Frank Zappa ever did or said.
h) Any writing or speech by any group that does not want to do something that the majority of the other groups think they should.
i) This very sentence.
...because if we could rigorously define hate speech, then maybe Zuck could reprogram his computers to filter it out.
1
The internet is overstimulating, and some people are more vulnerable to deception than others. Isn't that the point of education, to develop the intellectual tools to discern the fake from the real, the facts from the fraud, the conscientious from the con artist? Of course, most people are poorly educated, the demographic that Trump feeds off and the one that can be so easily manipulated by Russian bots. Whipping people into a frenzy of fear and hate will always have deadly consequences. But, at some point, we will adjust to this new paradigm, and we will accept the fatalities with the same resignation that we accept casualties of electricity or light rail. It will be the cost of doing business. As for "policing" the web, why not follow the example of Wikipedia, which does a pretty great job of alerting users to articles that appear inadequately researched or excessively promotional. This, too, will pass.
I fear it's all true. Watched the PBS two night Frontline investigation of Facebook. They mean well, but have been behind the 8 ball from the very beginning. Besides Facebook, they also own Instagram. All of the social networking sites are going to have to invest heavily in legions of minders to try and identify the truly evil posts that promote hate instead of ideas, anger that has metastasized into the ugliness anonymity offers.
Heard this all before, and for some time.
To Michael Judge:
Besides “And be kind,” I would add a few other significant statements.
How about adding: “And be honest” How about calling-out blatant deceivers like Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell?
There is no political solution
To our troubled evolution....Sting
There's too many men, too many people, making too many problems....and not much love to go around....Phil Collins
We always try to control it from the top but forget that the power resides in the hands of the individual...always has....always will....
Wow, the enthusiastic desire of Frank Bruni to lose the most important American liberty for very dubious benefits of protection from extremists is really scary. I hope that it is just a Halloween joke.
Bruni is 100% correct. What could be such a huge benefit to people has become a pariah. The level of hate and vitrol displayed on websites daily from both sides of the political spectrum is disgusting. What is worse is the pretense that one side is evil and filled with bate while the other is pure and just. Sorry, both sides pretend this is the truth in our country today. The anonimity of the internet permits people to say things they would never have the guts to say if they had to stand in front of others. The internet allows the worst in us to be expressed and people to agree without being forced to accept the social stigma associated with espousing such hate.
The premise of this article is silly at best. Just think of any war. People, and not the internet beget fights, terrorism and hate. Without technology people are still connected with one another - just not via 0's and 1's but via word of mouth, observation and interpretation etc etc. Wars and terror have existed LONG, LONG before the internet. I see NO POINT in this fear mongering that Bruni perpetuates. His opinions often just make me shake my head, but this was the pinnacle of it all. We do need a free internet ... what we do not need are GUNS.
Hate speech should be policed, controlled and managed. It incites violence. In many European nations (particularly after WWII) governments realized the dangers of allowing every crazy a forum. Free speech is not free; ALL speech carries with it responsibilities. Students figure this out when they incite a fight through provoking violence by harassment or bullying, whether out loud or even more far-reaching, through cyber-bullying. They can be (and should be) punished for inciting violence, just as they would be punished for perpetrating an actual fight. Our weak response to the internet is due to our great fear of anything being regulated. In the U.S. we strangely view regulation as anathema--it's always about "freedom." But the freedom to incite violence (and to own weapons) is only equal to my right to safely walk the streets, worship as I please, and so forth, without reprisal. Currently we care more about the "rights" of sick individuals who want to splay their own hateful words around the internet than we care about the safety of our children, our neighbors and even ourselves. As Benjamin Franklin once said, "The problem with common sense is that it is not very common." Common sense would dictate that anything with such power be regulated in order to avoid bloodshed. And for those who wish to argue this point, may I simply point to the automobile? A tightly regulated machine, driving on regulated roads, insurance required.
3
@Eva Lockhart
With all due respect, the regulation of automobiles -- tangible objects that are by law registered, insured, and identifiable by number plates -- is far different from the proposed policing of electronically generated and disseminated words, often from unidentifiable sources, on the ether.
1
Several years ago, there was passing fad in mental health called primal scream therapy in which clients were encouraged to openly express their suppressed emotions, rage being a principle one. They beat on stacks of telephone books or similar objects to release their pent-up emotions.
I called it a "passing fad". Why? Because we discovered that open expression of rage did not "release" it; to the contrary, it intensified it. They were angrier after the session than they were before it.
The same thing seems to be happening online. As people express their anger, it is nurtured by others, and may intensify into rage. Visitors to sites like Gab are unhappy people to begin with and only become more certain of their right to grievance as their thoughts are reinforced by others like them. Lonely, unhappy men find common cause in an endless, self-reinforcing loop of complaint and endorsement until fantasies that might have laid dormant become obsessions to be acted upon. Such feedback loops may be addictive as the acceptance lacking in life is readily available online.
Trump's hard core followers are akin, as others have stated, to a cult of personality. He acts out on the dais in gestures and rantings their own longings, their own aggrieved selves. I suspect it works the same way for Trump. The more his followers endorse his angry rants and wild fantasies of wrongs to his fragile narcissistic self, the stronger they become.
Not sad. Scary.
1
Like the telephone company or the USPS, Facebook et al are delivery services. They do not originate messages, they send them from one person or group to another.
Yes, they have the right to refuse to carry certain messages if they so choose. They do not have an obligation to do so, however. They have their terms of service. If you do not like them, do not use them. It is as simple as that.
@mikecody Not at all. Simply choosing not to use Facebook (et al.) - an excellent choice, in my opinion - does not protect someone from harm caused by messages that promote/encourage violence. Yes, those services should have a legally-enforced obligation to refuse to carry such messages. And if they can't stay in business on those terms, they should go out of business.
There's one piece missing from Mr. Bruni's discussion. Education. I'd like to believe that with a good educational system that teaches how to interpret what we read and put it in perspective, and providing useful skills for today's work environment, much of this would not be necessary. Unfortunately, the US educational system has become a shambles as it tries to be politically correct and cater to those who have no patience for learning. Remember that in it's infancy the Internet was a tool for scientists to communicate. That first advertisement was roundly criticized. It should have been removed.
We should be extremely disappointed with our intelligence services. We learned some years ago that, post-911, they had been tapping and syphoning our internet data and building a program of surveillance targeting American citizens located in the United States. That, created its own problems and we (include me) still appear unsure if the issue remains resolved or otherwise.
What is the extant 'surveillance' authority relative to our intelligence services? And, what is the current scope? Current events make this news and prompts a question...
What are the FBI (given they are the appropriate body), doing to protect us from radical extremists at home? We have all heard about how our intelligence services work online to infiltrate, understand and intervene with Islamic terrorists and others involved in international crime, but what about our home-grown radical extremists?
It wouldn't take much for the FBI to open and promote an online reporting site where citizens can report 'suspicious' online behavior. Obviously, this could overwhelm and be used for the wrong reasons, but with good management and good standards, it might produce a level of protection we don't seem to have in place currently.
People with differing views and opinions, people who hate, people who fight and argue will always exist. Most can be ignored, but when some talk openly (online) in radical criminal terms, we should be allowed to ask them what they mean... and the people to ask them are the FBI.
I hate to say it but I think the only thing that will help us come together will be if some global catastrophe happens, say a deadly virus mutates to become airborne or we are hit with earthquakes and tsunamis that change the landscape. Then being either right or left wing will mean diddly do.
1
Big problem with the net is it's disconnect from empathic and human emotive tones in "normal" human relations. It is cold and unforgiving. It can never give us intimacy.
It promises what it cannot deliver; positive relationship with significant others.
Therefore because we inately feel this hollow truth that leaves us empty and hungrey for lost love; we distrust everything we receive in this mode and are inclined to believe nothing or everything that serves our world view.
What we "project" onto the world, we find support for.
Thus we drift farther and farther apart.
Having lost our moorings; we are ripe victims for deceipt.
This is all a spiritual problem that imposes upon each of us a great sense of aprehension and mounting anxiety.
Our obsession with our president is built on this mode and we have been sucker-punched.
The only way forward is to VOTE out the man's grossly imoral support by the GOP.
VOTE straight democratic irregardless,
I agree with the author. The internet has deepened divisions. It has also squandered our time just as easily as it gives us access to limitless information and then some. I can't even spend time reading and processing my email, because I spend so much time deleting the junk.
I often wish we were back in a simpler, less accessible era.
1
The antidote to the internet is critical thinking. The antidote is in very short supply. Everybody who cares about this planet needs to help manufacture and distribute critical thinking.
4
And we are merely at the edge of widespread virtual reality...talk about gasoline on the fire.
1
The Internet is a disruption to our society. Like many great disruptive events (consider the Civil War, for example), it will take many, many years to assimilate and adjust to the changes this has wrought. My guess (as a contributor to it's invention)? Sixty years, at least. Unfortunately the rate of change has accelerated. What happens when we get disrupted again before we adjust to the Internet?
1
Worship of any single value, like freedom of speech or freedom of expression, only works for civilization when it is balanced by responsibility. How to make speech and expression responsible?
1
Freud was correct in Civilizations and Its Discontents. People have found their way to go back to a time before civilization placed the social contract upon individuals. The Internet is the Wild West. There's nothing inherently bad about the Internet. Bad people amplify bad beliefs. Social Media platforms give them a place to zero in on their beliefs and find like-minded individuals. A lot of amazing good can also be found on the Internet. But, we as people, have decided to let our basest instincts and disdain for being in orderly society rule over the good that the Internet and its platforms could produce. This problem is not caused by the Internet itself. The companies on the Internet, for the most part, aren't to blame either. Facebook and Twitter want to basically be neutral; that is their platform basis. But people drown in their own, perverse Daily Me (see Cass Sunstein) with their tailored feeds to feed their own specific viewpoints. There is very much a way to balance freedom of expression with "policing" the Internet, and it does not fall on the companies. There is significant jurisprudence on how to determine whether speech deserves protection. For example, inciting violence is not protected speech, particularly the more defined the incitement is. The question comes down to which entities can be trusted to police the internet.
So cries the dissenting crowd, "but, technology is neutral!"
No, friends, technology is not neutral. Science may be neutral, and may carry us on a more-or-less progressive journey toward knowledge... but technology is not science, and engineers are not scientists. This basic confusion about the difference between the roles, achievements, and consequences of science vs. engineering underlies so much of our flawed conversation about Silicon Valley.
Physics is neutral; nuclear weapons development is not. Biology and chemistry are neutral; the process of delineation between "therapeutic" and "side" effects by which chemical compounds are transformed into "medicine" is not. Information science is neutral; search algorithms created by utopia-minded technocrats are not.
When we went to the moon and stocked up on ICBMs, nuclear physicists & rocket scientists (in fact, engineers not scientists) became the Smartest People Alive™. As revolutionary changes of the digital age started entering our daily lives, computer scientists (yep, actually engineers) were given unlimited license to push their monsters on the world in the name of "progress".
Perhaps we should question our tendency to position engineers, who merely exploit science for their own ends, as our most highly regarded intellectual role models. Fair substitutes might include scientists, artists, philosophers... just a thought.
2
Hitler didn't need the internet. Stop blaming the internet. Start blaming us.
5
Time for professional Philosophers to work with the IP world to develop an algorithm to identify content as “Rational Opinion” “Irrational Opinion” “Likely True” “Likely False” or “Fact”. We have thousands of years of discourse to rely on to develop consensus criteria to determine what is and is not rational. Perhaps there is a role for symbolic logic applied to content? Once created, this algorithm could be an option for all searches, thereby avoiding the censorship charge. One would hope that as people utilize the feature they will slowly discover and recognize rational discourse from all sides and begin to understand the difference between rational debate and demagoguery. Perhaps the filters could use colors to identify the 5 categories above.
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October 31, 2018
Or the rebirth of us.
One can say the incarnate word for world media is as such the birth of language idiom that are tools for centuries ahead and so we are witnessing the contemporary adaptation - dare say evolutionary - to the twenty fifth century socio-pollitico manifestation or order in governing. We are in a deep struggle but we must find to conquer living and not death ends....
JJA .
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Like all false religions, the inordinate faith and worship accorded the contrivance we term "internet" is fraught with doom. Particularly its own doom, as inevitably occurs when a critical mass of devotees discover its feet of clay and leave it as heretics. Someday soon tech wizards will contrive something else to beguile the tedium of human existence and to permit westerners and the wealthy to feel superior to others.
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The phrase "promise and peril" is particularly apt. Human kind has always adopted a "Just Do It" attitude concerning new technology well before Nike built its brand around it in 1988. Rarely is sufficient consideration given to consequences. It almost as if the race as a whole is afflicted with ADD. One of the primary symptoms is either to ignore or not carefully to assess the consequences of given behaviors. The Internet is only one of thousands of examples of technology run amok. I think Murphy's famous set of laws needs to be amended to include: "If we can screw it up, we will!" The Luddites--a non-organization to which I belong, philosophically--had it right all along!
1
Funny how he doesn't mention any left-wing hate groups or clearly documented Antisemitism from Democrats. What a strange coincidence!
3
Rumor has it that movable type is a tool of the devil.
(*ahem*)
Computers and the Internet have been a boon for me, because they allow me to speak more immediately and directy to my readers. Some even respond in kind!
Whoever said that liberty is easy and fun? Frank, it's a new technology forcing us to face ourselves with greater clarity: that is all.
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@Lance Jencks. Exactly! The telescope showed us how small we were. The microscope showed how vulnerable we were. The internet is showing how stupid we are.
1
After reading this beautifully written but very scary piece, I thought to myself, much as I do every spring, at the approach of Lent, would I be willing to give this up? Or that?
Would I be willing to go back in time, give up the convenience of all things digital? I don't know. It sure is handy, the internet. But I'm old. I acquired my basic social and communications and research skills long before OKcupid and email and ancestry.com. I don't have a account on Facebook or Instagram of Twitter. My life isn't that interesting to anyone other than myself.
It wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing for me to have my freedom of speech curtailed, because I'm not a person of strong opinions, and when I do have strong opinions I generally keep them to myself. This is a fairly antique modality, to be sure.
My clever online dictionary defines the "social contract" as "an implicit agreement among the members of a society to cooperate for social benefits, for example by sacrificing some individual freedom for state protection."
It is getting frayed around edges, our social contract, honored perhaps more in the breach than in the observance. It's a very scary situation. What have such people as Frank named to gain from NOT promulgating hatred? The immediate consequences are virtually nonexistent, the ego boost almost immediate.
Heaven help us all. It's unlikely the government will.
2
The Internet, from day one, should have been regulated --was and it was a form of communication, (FCC), it utilized advertising and business practices (FTC) and most importantly it immediately impinged on privacy. Congress didn't and still doesn't understand the technology and corporate interests wanted no regulation. Most importantly, citizens didn't care -- it was all new and fun..But Congress' job is to protect all our rights granted under the Constitution -- which they do not, while protecting their own self-interest.This applies to every new technology, invention, genetics, artificial intelligence. This is the 21st century-- Congressional members cannot have all the knowledge in all these areas -- it is their job to form working groups of experts-- to provide them with information to make decisions before damage is done. Given even the hacking of a presidential election-- still no regulation, nothing -- while other countries have plenty of regulations and fines. Really?Congress is impotent -- serving corporate interests and it's a Corpocracy we have. Truly, where is the federal oversight on self-driving cars ?--- a technology that has the potential take human lives -- prior to its utilization-- the oversight will come only after the damage, lives taken, litigation, costs increase, etc. Blind capitalism rules over the possibility of increased deaths, impinging on citizens' Constitutional protections --is freedom only for the corporate investor.
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In my opinion we have to do away with algorithm platforms. Facebook, Youtube, Google, almost everything and anything judge the quality of content based on "user engagement". Nothing engages people more than content that inflames them.
So everything should work similarly to DuckDuckGo. It shows you what you search for. And nothing else. Make "recommendations" illegal. They may increase ease of use, but they are also key in feeding people more of the same every time they go online. Google "climate change is a hoax" and you will not find the most popular websites best matching the search. The same goes for almost anything other search, on any mainstream platform.
One person watching health videos on youtube will be hit with recipes for sourdough, high fibre meals, and nutrional info. Another will be hit with ridiculous unsubstantiated untruths based on a different click pattern. That is dangerous. Especially because the most gullibe will be the ones to hit the most flawed content.
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@Jonathan Bormann The fact that you are hit with ads, posts, or tweets does not mean that you have to respond positively to them.
When I watch a music video on Youtube, it recommends other music similar to what I watched. I do not have to follow the recommendations, and if I choose to do so, I can critically evaluate the music as to whether it is something I like. I have found some great artists I would never have heard of at times, I have also heard some really bad music that I promptly ignored.
The same is true of politics, social constructs, or sourdough recipes. You, the reader, have the choice of following them or not, and the choice of believing them or not.
Bla, bla, bla...
I am 71 and I remember my grandfather's warning that television will be the death of us. Along with his opinion that "this younger generation" will amount to nothing.
A tragically necessary call to clean up this act.
1
Would Mr Bruni would prefer a printed world, with censors to decide what we all read. With limited editors that are all white men?
Would he prefer a highly censored Chinese firewalled internet where everyone gets a social media score and the paper he works for is not available.
Would he prefer that facebook decides that the deaths of Americans is newsworthy, but the deaths of foreigners should be unseen? (Facebook today)
What sort of censorship does Mr Bruni propose?
People have had bad ideas since time immemorial. People have also banded together. The British were perfectly willing ro go after pamphleteers and revolutionary Americans, even when their actions were non-violent. It might be said that the lack of engagement might have fanned the flames of rebellion.
The klan managed far more than today’s racists ever did because of an accepting white populace. It didn't take the internet to lynch people, and it didn't take the internet for pogroms against jews.
I don’t trust Mr Bruni’s authoritarianism any more than all the groups mentioned above. Further, when one looks at that sort of control today, it is not regimes that any decent person would support.
Paternalistic man always looking for an excuse for him to control others. There is no freedom and r equality in this, and no safety either.
Free speech and critical thinking are the corner stone of democracy. I do not believe in censorship; it leads to fascism. However, free speech that is anonymous and unaccountable it not free speech. It's yelling fire in a theater; it encourages behavior that results in condemnation or worse when it is anonymous. That is the difference between getting a permit and staging a protest (no matter what or who is doing the protest) where people are seen, identified, and can be held accountable should they incite violence and walking around with bed sheets, where no one knows who is preaching. The Internet seems to have become, for a very loud, small minority, the new bed sheets of the 21st century.
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Well said Mr. Bruni. Unsurprising that you/NYT did not cite the recent examples of James Hodgkinson - who opened fire on Congressional Republicans playing baseball, Kori Ali Muhammad - who stalked downtown Fresno one afternoon and killed three white men, and Micah Xavier Johnson - who rampaged in Dallas. killing five white police officers...all three of whom had a well documented social media trail with the extreme left. There's lunacy and radicalization on both sides of the spectrum and both need to be addressed.
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Recent PBS Frontline story on FaceBook is required viewing.
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I lack Mr. Bruni’s Terror of the unrestrained Internet. My reasons are many, but I’ll just toss out a few here. First, I disagree that the Internet is making people worse. It is just revealing how widespread humanity’s essential evil is. We are greedy, self-centered, bigoted and ignorant in the main. Many of us care about our families, certainly not all, and a small fraction of us try to make the world a better place. The Internet helps them too. It also allows for extra-legal, rapid retribution against the vilest of us, who might otherwise never be exposed. Just ask that now unemployed “hot” white woman who supposedly made $125,000 a year, or so she yelled when engaging in a bigoted attack on two black women waiting for AAA because of car trouble.
I limit my Internet footprint, but still put enough out there to be easily profiled. So do many millions of others. That provides a database that can be used by fascists, bigots, but also their opponents.
Before the Internet, we had television; before that, radio; before that, print. Humans, much as I abhor our species in many ways, adapt. They will to the Internet as well, and, undeserving as we are in my view, we will probably survive it long enough to destroy the planet, exterminate ourselves, and allow the cockroaches to resume their rightful place as the rulers of the earth.
For me, after decades as an atheist, now newly religious, the reckoning will come on Judgment Day. I find my final consolation in that.
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After spending untold hours removing divisive and hateful political comments from my FaceBook page over the past several weeks; I've decided to close my social media accounts as they appear to be out of my control.
I feel much happier today as a result.
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The ignorance run amok in the darkest corners of the internet speaks to the education crisis in this country. No one's been taught how to think, analyze, research, empathize. This leaves brains open to the nearest loudmouth filling them with oddball beliefs cultivated from fear, inexperience, and reality TV.
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The introduction of new communications media is always disruptive. Without Gutenburg, it is hard to see how the Reformation would have occurred, which resulted in hundreds of years of dreadful wars and persecutions, but also contributed heavily to the Enlightenment and the French and American revolutions. McLuhan argued persuasively that Hitler would not have been possible without the radio. But, Churchill used it to great effect too. And so it goes. The genie is out of the bottle. Don't imagine that it will be put back in. We are adapting to this new condition. Don't demonize it. Use it to fight for a better world.
The internet is a tool. A technology. A process. A resource. A range of connections. At a distance. It can and does help. It can and does harm.Temporary and more permanently. When used in certain ways. For certain purposes. By many, many violating people. It can be, and is, a mixture of both. Causing... Associated with... but not being THE "cause" of. Or being part of the "scape" when something happens unexpectedly, with us not adequately knowing, or understanding why. Whatever ITS' functions,IT is not likely to be the root and anchor of everpresent complacency by many. About...Nor active as well as passive complicity. Nor what appears to function as willful blindness of transmitted violating words and done-deeds, which should never have been voiced or written.Twittered. Willful deafness about human-produced unnecessary experienced physical, psychological, spiritual pains. In those whom we know. In strangers; feared as well as not. Willful ignorance about generalizable, believable facts which are exchanged, freely and daily, with harming alt-facts, "goulashing" fictions and fantasies. Each of US has a role in pushing THE BUTTON. Or not. Each of US can choose to BEcome accountable for what may or may not be. At some level. In some way(s). An important step, along the way is paying attention to reality's basic dimensions. Learning to function reasonably, whatever that can mean, with uncertainties.Unpredictabilities. Randomness.With no total control, whatever our efforts.
This is the second (and last) comment I'll post on this site, before I go back to my life of reading print media, novels, and drafting letters to friends and colleagues, the latter of which I began doing only recently. I eschew all forms of social media and have never had any account (under duress I once created a LinkedIn Profile, which exists now solely to harass me with emails ad nauseam). I know, I am an anachronism...but I am able to sleep at night secure in the knowledge that I am decidedly not part of the problem. Write letters, have tea (and beers) with actual people, linger over dinner and discuss ideas...imagine? It isn't hard to do.
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@Jaybird
You're not an anachronism, you're just still normal.
Technology changes everything. Time to change with it, but until we re-write the constitution here are few suggestions:
Suggestion 1. No more anonymous postings - the host of the site needs to have a verified identity, even if it allows posting under an alias. If not, the hosting platform needs to be penalized financially and criminally. NYT can implement that policy tomorrow. I realize that creates a problem for 3rd world revolutionaries, but they will just have to get around it.
Suggestion 2. No more "free" - hosts can allow X thousand emails per account free (notice "X" single digit). After that charge per email. Use proceeds to enforce Suggestion 1.
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Very simple:
Hate speech is not free speech.
Free speech has been defined both by the courts and by societal thinkers as pertaining to the free exchange of ideas/opinions, artistic expression, critical thinking and logical argument in the public square - the real or virtual one - without infringement by the state.
Threatening people with violence, and ad hominen attacks, especially attacks based on ones gender, religion, race or sexual preference, are not fee speech and don't deserve protection by the 1st amendment.
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@Mikeweb I agree, that is the law today. Therefore those who post such things should be prosecuted under the laws against them.
That is not a call for Facebook, Twitter, et al to be held responsible for them, unless they originated the hate speech. If I receive a screed from the KKK in the mail is the USPS responsible for that? Should they be shut down for allowing such things to be sent? If not, then why go after the carrier for the posts he delivers on the Internet?
Modern society will have to deal with the rampant spread of lies and misinformation through the internet. Spreading blatant lies and conspiracy theories in not freedom of speech. There must be some accountability. Accounts that spread lies to millions have no value; they do more harm than good - and that includes Trump's Twitter account.
The First Amendment doesn't give anyone the right to holler "Fire!" in a crowded space, and it doesn't give anyone the right to spread lies and gin up hatred and bigotry that encourage evil acts. As usual, our "president" is among those leading the charge in The Great Ginning Up that we suffer daily.
Vote 'em out.
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The best antidote for hatred is to shine the light of day on it. The internet does precisely that.
For at least a century, newspaper copy desk editors have pored over reporters' draft stories not only for spelling, grammar and clarity issues, but for potential libel issues. Newspapers, historically, labored under the "publish at peril" concept. If a reporter quoted Bob calling Frank a communist, the paper had the greatest financial liability, way more than Bob.
Facebook, Twitter and the smattering of right-wing internet hate segments should face the same peril--the liability of allowing slanderous and/or libelous material to be "published." Of course, that would inhibit their profiteering, so there's that.
1
The sad fact is that as long as we have a junior high bully in the white house, spewing insults and inciting violence, we won't solve this problem. People are empowered by him. It used to be you could avoid exposure to this type of crazy, mean spirited vitriol (don't read FB posts, tweets, comments, etc.) but now it is in the news everyday thanks to "our" POTUS. (Still can't say that without choking on the words.)
ALL TECHNOLOGY has the potential for good uses and bad uses: cars, guns, airplanes, communication channels, drugs, etc... We are always sold on the good potential, but a fraction of humanity (sociopaths like Trump?) seem unable to resist exploiting technology in ways that harm others. When the potential for harm is great, government regulation has traditionally been the solution (medicine and transport are perhaps the most highly regulated industries in the US). It is time for the US government to regulate the internet and create barriers to its misuse.
It is pretty hard to put the genie back in the bottle, once it is let out.
We need to hope that all of the genius in the Internet world can figure out how to monitor it and save us from ourselves.
Or maybe the real answer is we need more willpower to stop ourselves from checking 24/7. Constant contact like this is not healthy.
It would also help if companies did not expect their employees to at their beck and call 24/7.
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In the early days of "technology" each new advance helped solve one or more problems we all experienced. But in the last 15-20 years much of the technological advances has been for the sake of technology and the addiction people developed started to hurt the individuals and the society. Make no mistake about it, there is a large scale technology addiction, the new phone calls, the new camera beacons, the new platform allures the users with no real benefit.
The best technologies are those we use without being aware of. Yet, much of the world uses technologies just to get a fix, a shot in the arm, to help alleviate the shivering they develop because their phones, tablets, earplugs, etc. have become ancient at 18 months old! The Internet is only one facet of this addiction although it surely is a large part.
This may be more destructive than drug addiction. Beware!
I agree, Frank. Free speech should never be an excuse for piracy and anarchy. But there is hope.
To some degree, we've been able to solve the "everything is free" Internet problem that was destroying the creative businesses.
The Times, as well as musicians, actors, directors etc. have been able to convince consumers to pay again for their services. Europe is leading the way in addressing endless copying and 3rd party profiting in visual arts (the infamous meme ban).
Now, we must face the biggest problem i.e. people hiding behind anonymity and servers in lawless countries to post harmful and/or deceitful content.
For a long time, we have given our big tech companies a free pass on their operations (no privacy limits, destroying regulated businesses with unregulated competition like Uber, AirBnB etc.), allowing oligopoly scale and scope because we were afraid to lose American dominance over the Internet.
We can't afford this anymore. I hope a Democratic House can work together with the EU Parliament and responsible leaders like Tim Cook to start regulating the Internet. The vast scale of the US and EU Internet market can force these changes onto the world.
It could also be a modest restart of our moral leadership alliance.
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I was on the Internet (DARPANET) back in 1972. Having been an early user and adopter, I saw the evolution of all the electronic communications. Email. Messages. Chat rooms. Then the Web. More chat rooms.
When FaceBook came out, - i will say I saw it as a danger for the two now obvious reasons. No privacy. Everyone is now an expert.
Both have been proven to be dangereous to Democracy - everywhere.
Mankind has a long long road ahead to flush out this initial paroxysm of Social interactivity. I give it 20 years, unfortunately.
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An excellent article. I have a simple solution: Make internet companies liable for what appears on their sites. Newspapers and magazines are. Why shouldn't Facebook, Twitter and Gab be also? If people can sue Twitter and Facebook for libelous content posted by a third party, much of this problem would disappear overnight. It would be an effective and Constitutional way to get these companies to take responsibility for the content they host.
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@Christopher Hoffman
I agree wholeheartedly in principle.
Unfortunately, your simple solution misses some very complicated underlying problems: social media companies are entirely unlike newspapers, and Internet content hosting / messaging platforms (which nowadays usually includes "stuff we see via a phone app" that may or may not be anything like an actual website) have nothing in common with print media beyond their ability to carry text and images.
This is not a trivial issue.
How does regulation differ between what appears publicly on Facebook (in some user's public wall, say) versus what is semi-private (restricted to friends/followers), versus ostensibly private messages (via Messenger)?
How does regulation handle what is published on the Web - that is, what is accessible via HTTP, typically on port 80, and intended for viewing in a browser - versus what gets sent by a variety of standards and protocols to a client-side phone app?
If one thinks that social media could continue to exist if we made those companies liable for user-generated content (I don't, though I wouldn't shed any tears for the demise of social media)... how? It's simply impossible to sort and sift significant amounts of content at real world scales.
Sorting out all this is a nightmare for anyone who thinks deeply about Internet law and policy, because easy, simple-solution analogies to physical media & their publishing economies ALWAYS fall apart under minimal scrutiny.
Surprised at this reaction from Bruni. Skeptic in me reads, "old-guard newspaperman threatened by social media." I suspect the ruling elites once regarded the printing press and books as dangerous technologies giving voice to radical elements. Amazing to me how educated people -- just a few years ago (properly) railing against the excessive Homeland Security apparatus -- are flocking to the command and control side on this issue. Not to excuse the despicable hate speech that shows up on newfangled platforms. But suggest we aim for the long-term historical view. Especially in our new, high-tech world, every short-term crisis seems like Armageddon.
@Joe If hate speech were where the problem stopped, you'd have a point. But it clearly fosters violence, which not only must be addressed not only immediately, but pre-emptively. Aiming for the "Long-term historical view" is extremely dangerous.
What would you do?
@Alexis Hamilton (Assuming the question is meant for me?) Require all outlets which allow opinion posting to hold posters to a "No 'Fire in a crowded theater' " standard, and to employ a sufficient editorial staff to achieve that. And heavily fine those that don't adhere to the rules.
Heavy-handed? Yes. But no one's safety should be jeopardized to protect someone else's right to post messages which are racist, etc.
Americans are far too much in love with the idea of free speech while ignoring the framers' idea that all rights presupposed an understanding of civic virtue and an implicit agreement to comport oneself in the public square in conformity to it. Responsibilities accompany the exercise of rights in a truly civil society. Unfortunately, this one isn't it.
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Kinda makes me nostalgic for the 1970's and 1980's. Simpler times.
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@Thomas Penn in Seattle
Ummm the 1970's and the 1980's were not simpler times nor was there anything to be nostalgic about.
That's just the gauze of time making it seem to be simpler.
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@Thomas Penn in Seattle
Let's remember the 1970s:
- a wave of political assassination attempts, several successful, in the US and Western Europe, against policemen, university professors, judges, military officers, corporate leaders;
- 1000s of bombings each year by a wide range of domestic terrorist groups, including the one that Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dhorn proudly belonged to;
- inflation that reached 13%
- interest rates that hit 18%
- unemployment at 9%
- oil prices tripled in 18 months
Sound like fun?
Then in the 1980s we had a Republican president.
According to his many critics and enemies, this president was
- a "reactionary dunce"
- a "dumb entertainer"
- a racist, a woman-basher, a homophobe
- a "warmonger" and a bloodthirsty "fascist" "hell-bent on launching World War III"
There was mass "resistance" and rallies of literally MILLIONS of people in New York, London, West Berlin and elsewhere during the first term of this president.
Have you forgotten this?
Do you really think that our discourse was better then? That the public was more rational in the 1970s and 1980s?
People have always been zealous, foolish, misguided, too trusting of their own very flawed ability to judge events and people accurately.
Nothing new here. Chill a bit, and get some perspective.
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This is one of your finest columns ever, Frank. As a marginalized gay man I benefitted from the internet as a means to meet friends scattered around the world. They are still friends. As an enthusiast for the more obscure end of the pop music spectrum i benefitted from the internet to discover and source a more vibrant and satisfying array of sounds that i ever would have managed locally, even in cosmopolitan Los Angeles. I have musical friends scattered around the world as well. I never imagined that this wonderful portal could lead to where we are now.
It seems that the internet is a magnifying glass. It exaggerates whatever we are. We need to think about this.
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@Flaminia
I agree but it's also a place where folk with real and perceived grievances meet and inflame each other.
As with most things there's good and bad.
I lived most of my life without the internet and WiFi I am happy they are here as they have given me access to things I would probably never have discovered.
I keep wondering if Critical Thinking and Objective Thought and rational reasoning are taught in schools and colleges.
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Faceback, instagram, twitter are not the internet. They are on the internet. The internet is a waaaay bigger place with lots of interesting stuff, you just have to know how to separate the wheat from the chaff.
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"Democracy is at stake"? I would argue it's already been destroyed. When a presidential candidate can lose by 3 million votes amid conclusive proof that a hostile foreign power manipulated the election while claiming without proof that millions of illegal immigrants voted for his opponent, and remain in office as if nothing unusual has happened, then it should be apparent that you're through the looking glass.
Is it the internet's fault? Not entirely. But it's becoming clear that democracy doesn't work in a "post truth" society where everyone feels entitled to their own facts, and that has been the internet's unique gift to humanity.
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@JDM Everybody has their own truth that they live by, it has nothing to do with the internet.
@JDM Popular vote is not how we elect Presidents in America. Sorry. The rules have been in place for hundreds of years. Sore loser Democrats...they pack NY and CA with immigrants who predominately vote Democrat and it still doesnt help them as it should not. Otherwise, CA and NY will be picking Presidents forever.
@JDM
Unfortunately it seems many folk like to believe in conspiracy theories and outlandish claims.
It's easy to research things on the internet and using the gifts G-d gave us (intelligence and the ability to use that intelligence with critical thinking) to ascertain what is the most likely a truth.
It's good to question things.
It says a lot that Russia and China censor/block the Internet for their citizens and use it to manipulate ours to their benefit.
2
Remove anonymity from the internet. If online forums, twitter, etc required participants to use their own names those individuals would act a lot more responsibly. No hiding behind an avatar. No more pretending to be someone/something else.
I don't go into deep political sites on the internet. My own participation is rather limited. Yet, even on a seemingly benign site that promotes the use of wooden boats there is conflict, bickering, and outrageous behavior. Sometimes I want to scream at someone myself. But I've chosen to post under my own name, and because I do so I always am asking myself: Would you say this to the person's face? The answer is often, no I would not. This calms me and allows me to temper my response or forget it all together.
The old cartoon joke of the dog, sitting at the computer, saying, "On the internet, no one knows you're a dog," is very true.
3
I'm a millennial and I decided to delete all my social media accounts in 2007. Back then I explained to anyone who would listen to me how dangerous social media was. It wasn't as bad as it is now and it will only get worse.
The reason is simple. The moral rules that societies have to live under for millennia were meant for a physical life. Growing up, a kid would know he did something wrong by the way the parents would look at him.
On the internet, it's just you and your screen, with no one there to judge you.
I will paraphrase the French Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre " Le Regard de L'autre" is what makes us "behave properly" in society.
My point is, rules have to be adjusted to fit the digital world we live in now.
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@Chaks
I'm a boomer and I'm absolutely gobsmacked by your astute and concise analysis of human interaction with the internet. I do believe you've nailed the essential component of both the addiction and a rational approach to address the solution. It's obvious.
Observe: the "like" button, invented by social media,which feeds the user's need for approval. (In NYT comments, this is upgraded to "recommended") Since there is no "dislike" or "disagree", these signals only heap approval, not disapproval. Similarly, the number of followers or friends dose our gullible, bottomless egos with emotional junk food. No amount is ever enough, similarly with addiction.
Are we finally reaching a tipping point/overdose with the appearance of readily traceable, deadly results of internet-enabled madness showing up in headlines the world over this past week? Perhaps the epidemic has become undeniable. But are we capable of achieving either treatment or cure when we depend on the likes of Zuckerberg et. al. and toothless government to do it?
During my lifetime, the rapid deployment of communications technology under a capitalist system has completely enabled the worst of us to overtake the rest of us. Only the most obtuse, unfeeling and greedy can thrive in their bubble castles today. And they are thriving. It's not that they can't see out; it's that they found a way fill the expand the moat and fill it with and endless supply of alligators. Good luck to the rest of us.
2
Internet needs to be treated like other tele/communicatoin platforms- telephone /smart phone , print media and talk aloud public forums . The same rules of civilty need to apply to all . The smart screen is certainly not personal anymore if it reaches out to so many people . Civility needs to be incorporated into the socail platforms otherwise we are to our savage selves , thousands of years of civilisational learning thrown away in less than 20 yrs .
If you cant threaten someone on the phone or in print so you cant on the internet either , in personal capacity or as a group.
Time to rein in internet social platforms
101
@ruchi bhatia
Thank you for your cogent comments.
1
@ruchi bhatia
OK. How?
1
"I’ve come to feel that way about the whole of the internet."
I have come to feel that way about most technology. It is hard for me to say we are better off with the highly technical world we live in, and I am certain that if we look at the planet holistically, it and all the life on it, things are definitely not better. I am not sure our species is well equipped to deal with some of our technical innovations, such as fossil fuel technologies (global warming), the green revolution (massive population explosion), WMDs (we've been at 11:50 or so on the Doomsday clock for decades), social networks (spreading of hate), genetic engineering, and quite likely AI.
The irony here is I am a physicist by training, a software engineer by practice, and used to love high-tech. Now I am leery of where I see us heading. We are seduced by the cool stuff our brains cook up, we love the jobs they create, but we really have little idea about the future implications and are way too willing to brush concerns aside.
6
Our libel laws contain the definition of "malice" -- publishing something that is a known falsehood, or with reckless disregard for whether or not it's true. We have no problem with saying that this is a civil violation. I don't see why this standard could not be applied to websites or social media feeds -- if they publish falsehoods, those harmed by those falsehoods can sue them and the platforms that carry them. A few successful lawsuits and I suspect Facebook and Gab would soon find effective ways to avoid fostering terrorists.
2
Whatever the techno-scientific creators of the World Wide Web thought its benefits would be, the Internet has become an international, for-profit sewer system. If we can't sanitize it in the public interest, shut it down and fill it with concrete. If service providers weren't making money hand-over-fist hosting neo-Nazis and other reactionary sites, they'd soon shut them down. It's long past time to tax them and their Wall Street brokers to the fullest extent. And let's be sure to take it off the top. Don't wait for clever corporate tax lawyers to cook the books before the IRS auditors get to work.
3
Yes, lets blame the internet while completely ignoring the recent bomber went to the orange idiot rallies, listened to his hate speech, decorated his van with hate ideology spread by the orange idiot yet I am suppose to take Frank Bruni seriously as he claims the internet is to blame. Insanity and mindless. Just because YOU are addicted and have little self control over your time on your computer does not make it a death sentence for everyone. That would be like saying well some people have shell fish allergy so everyone should be careful because shellfish will be the death of us.
Don't get me wrong there are some valid points in this but attempting to throw a blanket of accusations and claim that it effects everyone the same is insanity.
2
"Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master." -- Christian Lous Lange
We are all now slaves to the algorithm. And it will no doubt accelerate our annihilation.
5
The internet is the same as anything else in print or on video...the words are there for the consuming by whomever chooses to engage. Geppetto's task is still the same....but did Geppetto get the job done?
1
Whether those "worst human tendencies" which are "magnified" by the internet can be harnessed by reason seems to me to be at the heart of whether we survive as a civilized democracy.
I read a piece in The Times yesterday about Trump voters (I think it was written by Jeremy Peters) where a woman he interviewed was obviously in existential fear of the "caravan." If fear buttons are so easily pushed, then it's not the one-off madman who poses the greatest risk to our democracy, it's the everyman.
3
Stupid people will always do stupid things with even the most intelligent tools. We can't change things because of the stupidest among us. The internet has given me more pleasure then I can describe. It's a wonderful invention.
2
There's no question that the Internet is an effective hate delivery system. But not all hate speech is protected. If the speech incites its audience to violence, it should be silenced. But where is the will and funds to monitor these websites to do that while we have a president who is guilty of this very crime?
3
The internet is merely the current equivalent of another invention that facilitated the spreading of lies, the printing press. But its advantages far outweighed its disadvantages. With the instantaneous and unbridled nature of the internet, it is really more like the printing press on steroids. The key is not regulation or policing, that is what totalitarian governments use to deal with unfavorable content. The answer is much simpler- education and knowledge. Think about why so many special interest groups discourage data collection: the NRA opposes gun death data from the CDC; the new EPA is suppressing climate data; religious groups oppose many science courses; and food companies want to restrict dietary information. With knowledge their positions are weakened. The threat is not the internet, it is the ignorance of the users.
3
Gutenberg’s 14th century invention of the printing press begot the wide distribution of ideas and information both dangerous and enlightening. Books could not be “turned off”.
In the end, and not without dreadful cost, it contributed a pathway out of the dark Hobbesian world of oppression, cruelty and ignorance.
A similar paradigm is now occurring with digital social media.
1
The problem is not the "internet".
The problem is FACEBOOK.
4
So log off.
I keep hearing these complaints about the toxicity of Facebook, Twitter, etc., from the same friends and family who spend multiple hours per day mindlessly scrolling through the narcissistic trash heap while claiming "I only use it to stay in touch with family," "I need an account for my job," "It helps me keep up with old friends," etc.
People act as though social media is like the water we drink or air we breathe. It isn't; life goes on just fine without it.
5
But it's really not "the Internet" doing all of tnis. 99% of all these issues are from that USE of the Internet called "social media." The same Internet carries my phone calls, gets me the weather, lets me Enail my best friend in California and brings me the New York Times. Lets focus the blame very tightly where it belongs.
5
FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, etc. should all be entirely shut down until the software, business models and companies are entirely restructured and reorganized. The founders of these companies were all young, naive technologists eager for wealth and recognition who do not have the knowledge, experience, seasoning and/or national security threat perspective to understand the potential implications of their wowee, geewhiz new capabilities. They were quick to use advertising-based traditional media business models to grow their customer bases and wealth quickly, without giving any thought or consideration to the potential downside implications. They have fought discussions of regulation a la traditional media outlets fiercely by claiming to be "technology companies". In fact, given that their customers actually create the value-added to their platforms by their individual actions and/or addition of personal commentary, they become de facto media companies when they elevate posts, shared fake news stories or popular views using algorithms based solely upon numbers with no human editorial intervention. They now represent a viable national security threat to the Western democracies, and should be completely shut down by Homeland Security and NATO before far more and potentially worse damage is done to our countries, targeted groups, prominent individuals and/or ordinary citizens just trying to exist and survive in this increasingly terrifying world.
3
I'm sick of hearing this argument, so easy and so unhelpfull. Blaming a neutral tool of communication is nonsensical and deflects from the real problems of its misuse. It's like blaming the telephone for crank calls or its use by criminals while ignoring the lives that its use saves every hour of every day. Blaming the internet for evil uses of it is like blaming Guttenberg for Mein Kampf— though, since you can now find a PDF of Hitler's opus online, maybe we can blame the internet for that, too.
3
@Roger Evans
I'm sick of the argument that the internet is no different than the printing press. Of course it's different, radically so. The printing press didn't turn people into helpless zombies. I have a friend who can't even follow simple directions to find a place anymore, he HAS to be able to program it into Googlemaps or he can't figure it out. The printing press made people smarter but the internet unqestionably makes us dumber.
Apes with tech. As my mother used to say, “it’s not Star Trek, it’s Star Dreck.”
1
leave the internet alone
1
People who generally exercise bad judgement or lack the mental skills and capacity to evaluate a site and its content are doomed to be drawn into the world of fake news, lies and false information. I don't think there is a solution for that other than taking away their TV's or at least blocking Fox, their cell phones and computers.
3
Mr. Bruni,
You describe perfectly the problems we as a society and as an entire world are facing thanks to social media such as FaceBook and Twitter. Platforms such as these give people the ability to say anything at all to a huge audience, and to do so with no consequences to themselves. The danger is real and well-documented. I don't know how to solve the problem, but some great effort must be made to curtail hate speech, conspiracy theories and constant, never-ending lies designed to split people apart. All the talk about "sharing" and "coming together" thanks to the internet is pure baloney. For the sake of all of us, the internet needs to be strongly curtailed. Free speech is one thing. But you still can't shout "Fire!" in a movie theatre. Thanks for your excellent article pointing out the dangers.
2
I worked in tech for 30 years and personally don’t think the internet has helped this problem at all. In fact, I think it’s made it much worse. Sadly, though, this stuff was always there. The internet has just acted like a giant amplifier, making it all bigger and louder. Social media has become the worst offender of all. But there is also no doubt that in recent years people have just gotten meaner, less civil, and more quick to go on the attack. I remember when I was younger that you generally made friends with your neighbors. These days it seems like it’s nothing but turf wars and who can be the most rude and annoying. No one has any concern for anyone else any more - it’s all “me, me, me” - and I don’t think you can put complete blame on the internet for that.
79
@WesternMass Very true about this stuff always being around. Back in pre-Internet 1970s and 1980s, I remember people saying all sorts of crazy things -- paying federal taxes is voluntary, the New York Times dictates the front page of every newspaper in the country, oil companies are dumping oil in the desert to raise the price. The difference was these things could never gain purchase. They remained urban legends or appeared only in hand-typed, mimeographed newsletters put out by paranoids. Today, wacko stuff with no basis in fact can be mainlined with ease thanks to social media.
7
@WesternMass
But wouldn't you say that if you sit in front of a computer talking nonsense all day with others doing the same, your sense of reality is warped? Not to mention the fact that we no longer see people as human beings but only as obstacles or obstructions to be eliminated.
4
HIstory has shown us that some of the first people to take full advantage of new technology are destroyers and people at the bottom of the humanity pile. One radio host laughed that the internet, when it first came out, was used for pornography and other forms of sex. We now know pedophiles love to hide in it.
The military funds much of it, in the name of national security, and uses it for new means of destruction.
Mr. Bruni, you say "I don’t know exactly how we square free speech and free expression — which are paramount — with a better policing of the internet, but I’m certain that we need to approach that challenge with more urgency than we have mustered so far. Democracy is at stake. So are lives."
There was no problem squaring free speech with privacy when strict rules - with severe consequences - were put in place for OUR U.S. postal system. There was no problem squaring free speech with privacy when strict rules were put in place to control invasion of OUR landline phones.
The Socially Conscious Women and men we hire/elect November 6 and in every election in the foreseeable future can use those templates - which Reagan and other "conservative" presidents and lawmakers gutted - to rein in the internet and protect OUR privacy and freedom of speech.
They can start by passing laws that make HATE speech that is not true and only foments hate-anger-fear illegal with severe punishment.
WE THE PEOPLE must DEMAND it.
2
Finally, someone says it! I am hardly a luddite - like many, I use and depend upon the internet each and every day in my work as an intellectual property attorney. It is an amazing and addictive convenience. And yet . . . I have long been worried that we have adopted and become dependent on this technology without thought.
Shouldn't we consider putting the phone down, the laptop away, and making our lives a bit more analog? After all the hacks of our personal identifying information from banks, credit agencies and the U.S. government, after the scams, after the use of the internet for political and criminal deceptions, after the culling of all of civilization's accumulated knowledge from libraries and bookstores to digital media where its preservation is dependent upon a live electrical source?
This is particularly troubling to me in view of the fact that the miracle of instant communication via social media with both friends and strangers around the world comes with a dark price - where every voice, no matter how twisted, is equally loud and has an equal shot at becoming legitimized - of "going viral"? And where every eye is a target for armies of hackers, frauds, marketers, and tin hat radicals of every stripe -- making us all susceptible, manipulatable, rash, excitable, incitable - and ignitable.
For me, I have decided that social media is an unnecessary evil - but I suppose I still cling to the New York Times website.
2
I've been thinking about this a lot lately and am reminded of a grade 8 teacher I had (this is almost 50 years ago) counselling the class that humans do not seem well suited to predetermine the risks of a new technology. This appears to be so true of the internet.
2
It's not new. Think printing press.
2
I came to see the internet, and social media specifically, as a bad influence on rational, critical thinking, so I have cut way backon using it. I believe it's had a negative influence on our politics and our ability to understand all sides of an issue. Long ago, a psychologist recommended not spending more than one hour per day online. I think that's an excellent suggestion.
Good column — especially the part about the problem of squaring free speech with better policing of the internet. What’s true of the internet is equally true of mass media in general. How do you muzzle the hate speech of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Fox News without violating the principle of free speech? Limbaugh and Hannity do their fair share of breeding negative views of The Other, just as surely as the internet.
5
It was a matter of time before the world would globally connect. I don't think a tool can be the blame of mankind's predisposition.
2
The only absurdity here was the inevitability, and the complete surprise people have when they discover what they've done to themselves.
We have less sex, suffer more anxiety and depression, are easily provoked to hate one another, and we are getting stupider and stupider and stupider by the second. And everything around us contributes to this, and we eagerly buy into it all, even though it cripples us.
meanwhile, all around us, trees are still beautiful, children still play, music sounds nice, flowers flower, every prospect is beautiful, but only the people are vile.
2
What is terrifying is censorship imposed for partisan reasons.
Who can we trust to be an honest censor?
The Democratic party?
The Media?
Put it all out there , the populace can choose what to believe as it always has done, the smell test.
Censor your own divisive if you want, I would encourage you to do so.
Leave my freedom to chose commentary I believe to me.
@Onelove
Why, then, should we pay for our children to be educated? Why should we attempt to quell hate speech anywhere, at any hour, against anyone?
If no one can be trusted to censor anything potentially harmful to the citizens of our land, then where can I be safe?
We all know that what progressives call "hate speech" can be as innocuous as disagreeing with the racism inherent in BLM or the totalitarian aspects of progressive political thought.
The Supreme Court has done a good job of determining what speech should be illegal, and if we really want to remove illegal speech, as opposed to speech that most people don't like, we can start prosecuting illegal internet speech.
But we don't need a government censor to tell us what is good speech and what is hate speech. Adults should be able to determine that themselves, which is the premise of the First Amendment -- even if the ACLU seems to have decided to reject the First Amendment in favor of suppressing progressive-defined hate speech.
We regulate truth in advertising. Federal law says that ads must be truthful. Why doesn't this apply to political ads, Fox News, Facebook and the Internet in general ? Why don't we have an oversight committee devoted solely to this task?
3
Commercial speech versus political speech.
Boy, is this what happens when there are no civics classes?
@Duane Coyle They are mostly one and the same these days.
"The internet is the technology paradox writ more monstrous than ever."
There's no paradox. The internet is only bad, there is no plus side to it. It doesn't bring people together, it drives them apart. Whatever things we might learn on it or time we might save are not worth the price our society pays for simply losing so many people to screens. The damage to our social fabric is inestimable, and never taken seriously enough. Add to that the loss of nuanced, intelligent discourse, the loss of privacy, the increase in obesity, the increase in distracted traffic accidents, the increase in bullying and depression and isolation and suicides, all caused by addiction to the internet. I think of the loss of innocence and wonder. Everything now must be looked up immediately and understood in detail; there is no more mystery in the world, and the saturation of information makes us all less creative. I keep waiting for people to wake up and realize what a shallow, dehumanizing fad all of it is, to see everyone collectively toss their phones into the gutter in disgust and liberate themselves, but instead things keep getting worse.
1
@Samuel Russell To me it is a positive thing to be able to read the NYT and my local paper with the click of a button and without the stack of papers needing to be recycled.
1
@Samuel Russell
And I find the internet a useful tool as well as entertaining.
The dumming down of society started way before the internet. Just look at the status of primary education standards from 50 years ago to today.
It seems folk have forgotten or have never been trained in critical thinking and objectives reasoning that used to be taught in primary middle and high school. It was further refined in college and university schooling. Now it's just consuming what ever is out there without research to see if that information or opinion is based on reality.
Devise a bulletproof system whereby anyone who posts a comment is always clearly and correctly identified by name and city; no anonymity at all. Good manners will make a comeback. The people in the shadows of society will have to go back to pen, paper and postage stamps.
8
I’ve trained and worked as a journalist and a librarian. This is about the gatekeeper function that editors used to play. It’s also about information literacy, which librarians teach. Society has seen an explosion in the varieties of information that now permeate it. And huge numbers of people utterly lack the skills to process it, to differentiate between what’s valid and what’s not. So we have a toxic stew of deceivers and the deceived. A society of suckers. Education still hasn’t caught up.
8
Yes, Democracy and our lives are at stake. It is past time for folks to permanently delete their social media accounts. It is also past time for the social media giants to put the brakes on their platforms. It is obvious their platforms are beyond control and it seems Congress needs to limit their platforms. FB could start by removing all “Pages” and “Groups” to turn it into a truly “friends” platform. They can also ban links and political memes.
Social media is addictive- I am an example of someone who originally joined FB over 10 years ago and enjoyed following family members and friends. It all changed in early 2016 when the political and socially divisive issues became the prominent posts in my feed. I took the bait to the point of trolling the NRA and Dana Loesch’s FB pages. I got sucked into the vortex.
When the revelations of the Cambridge Analytica and Russian meddling scandals were uncovered, I knew I had been played. I jumped ship and permanently deleted all my social media accounts.
I don’t miss them and still have contact with my family and friends.
Delete your Facebook and Twitter accounts now! Be part of the solution.
3
Internet sites like Facebook are private enterprises. They can, if they wish, enforce terms of service that would exclude "hate speech" or incitement of violence or recipes for bombs. This wold not abridge free speech - the First Amendment deals with the government imposing limits on political speech, not private enterprise. The dark corners of the internet, which don't want to limit this kind of speech, likewise depend on platform providers and payment systems, private enterprises which could easily and legitimately decline to provide services to these sites. However, these enterprises could also deny service to folks advocating for voting rights, or human rights just as easily. No, the fault is in ourselves, aided by poor education and lack of critical thinking skills and Faux News.
2
The internet would be a very different place if participation were only allowed under one’s actual and verifiable identity. Anonymity brings out the worst human traits.
3
Huge over reaction by newspapers fearful of the internet. In the 1600's bomb making information was handed out by angry religious folk. In the 1880's anarchists sent all kinds of angry messages through the telegraph and then the telephone. In the 20th century all kinds of books and even cassette tapes offered incendiary messages. Crazed fools attacked the Russian Czar and an unidentified person set off a real bomb near Wall Street. The Internet seems dangerous and for a very small group of troubled souls it is. Three billion human beings use the web every day. So a hundred thousand abuse it's freedom? That is the price for freedom. What is needed is a modern rational software that detects certain activity and allows court approved monitoring and if warranted arrests for making threats or encouraging violence. Angry kids bitter old guys and just crazy people will find a way to meet and spread their hate. A hundred white nationalist can meet in the parking lot of any sporting event or just call on a landline. Yes there is danger here, but this danger is always with us in a hundred different ways.
1
@David Fairbanks
Yes, but in the old days of print and cassettes, the message was cumbersome to get out there. With the Internet and all of us glued to our devices, it is easy to spread the hate and disinformation. Faux News and other alt-right conspiracy sites must be reined in and controlled. Hate speech has no place in social media or anywhere.
"I don’t know exactly how we square free speech and free expression — which are paramount — with a better policing of the internet..."
Fake news on the internet is an arms race. The purveyors of fake news can and will become ever more sophisticated in selling their product. Con men know that it helps to interject some elements of truth within their con to throw off the marks. So, the level of fakeness will vary, making potential policing difficult.
Education is one answer. The educational curriculum should include critical thinking much more than it does. How to discern fact from fiction. Even many college graduates would fail that test, though the primary followers of fake news on the internet are the less well educated.
Reality is that we can never eliminate all fake news on the internet or elsewhere. We have to depend on the citizens to sort out the fake from the real. If the average citizen can't do that, then society is in real jeopardy. And at the moment, that does seem to be the case.
If you have the ability to sort the real from the fake, then please remember to go to the polls on November 6th and...
VOTE OUT ALL REPUBLICANS
3
@rumpleSS
Your post was brilliant right up until the end. Why would you consider the capacity of citizens to use their brains and sort fact from opinion or fiction to be a Democrat only trait. It's sad that somebody who is as astute as you would determine that people who value facts are only Democrats.
You've pointed out a societal problem that purveys across all politics. People don't ask enough questions or critically examine their sources. We need more of that from everybody. Democrats are no better educated than Republicans, no better at discerning fact from fiction.
@Elliot
Sorry Elliot, but I have to disagree with you. In the age of Trump, substantially more Democrats are able to sort fact from fiction that Republicans. And Trump is cheerleader for Fox fake news, besides all the lies he pushes.
Obviously, I can't pretend that every Democrat carefully examines the facts and sorts through the media to find the truth, while republicans do not. But on average, Democrats are more aligned with the truth and truth tellers than Trumpublicans.
I will list climate change as just one example, though a lot of noise about health care is coming from the republican camp in their political ads.
Real conservatives are not happy with Trump, but the republican party has decided to hide behind him and his lies. They need to be chastened. The best way to do that is to...
VOTE OUT ALL REPUBLICANS
1
As other commenters have mentioned, it's time to bring back the Fairness Doctrine.
Tech companies must also be regulated so that they're held accountable for their content. They aren't going to do it on their own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
3
Police the internet? Is that akin to shooting the messenger?
1
Unbelievable twice in one day. Two opinion pieces that make sense. First the piece on how Congress chooses which bills to pursue in spite of the people’s wishes, and now this. Really what can one expect when you open the faucet, everyone gets to use it. This is why our government is a representative form which in theory quells the immediate passions of the moment the internet is just the opposite. Passions, rages, dark conspiracies, crazies all have equal space. When everyone has a equal voice, no one has a voice. Hang on folks it will get worse.
3
We Americans are navigating our complex world with a map created 230 years ago by men who lived in a newly-created small, rural nation. Every time our attention is drawn to the ways in which our current technology simplifies - and magnifies - our ability to communicate and eradicate, I think how even those framers of our Constitution might argue for its revision. Just as a 230 year old map would be a ludicrous guide to navigate through today’s literal landscape, such a guide to navigate the complexities of our large, diversely populated, interconnected and technology-driven world makes no sense. And yet we twist ourselves into knots in attempts to do so, and further yet, celebrate “originalist” judges for their efforts to find 230 year old answers to present-day problems. Our map is no longer adequate, and until we begin the very difficult but necessary task of updating it we fail to live up to the underlying hope of the framers... “to form a more perfect union.”
4
These fake "originalists" don't even know what an "establishment of religion" is. They are truly the phoniest people in all of jurisprudence.
2
I read this piece on the internet. It occurs to me that the internet gave Bruni an opportunity to share his fears through this piece that I chose to read online. Then, I read through the comments. Clearly, I or anyone reading the piece can choose, in response to its assertions, to also be fearful of the internet, or not. I continue to be grateful for our opportunities to make such choices, and pray that each of us becomes better at it over time.
Until and unless the internet companies, whose main business is profit making are responsible for the consequences of the use of their platform they will have no incentive to regulate themselves.
They need to see who is using the platform for seeding discord and spreading misinformation.
With their own monitoring, and also promptly investigating any user complaint, and if found credible should be able to shutdown the source of misinformation and propaganda quickly before it gains critical mass.
Severe liability both economic and criminal is probably the only recourse left to control the harmful use of their platforms that are tearing down our society.
2
"More speech" as the solution to the propagation of internet garbage will never suffice as long as 30% of the populace are complete idiots (as evidenced by surveys on any topic susceptible to fact-checking). We the public must not cede our right to establish meaningful standards to the fox guarding the henhouse. It's past time to start the 1st Amendment dance to determine when internet speech is the equivalent to yelling, "Fire!" in the crowded theater.
1
Every internet site should follow the example of The New York Times and monitor and regulate commenting.
1
In the United States of America all us are guaranteed freedom of speech. Nazis, Jew haters, anarchists and the list goes on;
They are entitled to express themselves. The last thing I want is for Google and Facebook to edit and prevent the free exchange of ideas. When the Nazis marched in Illinois the ACLU defended them. That is our country. Editing and suppression of ideas and speech is a very dangerous slippery slope.
Frankenstein is the perfect metaphor.
If the US government attempted to censor hate speech from the news media, including the Internet, lawyers for the ACLU would be in court the next day claiming that it had violated the first amendment to the US constitution. You can't have it both ways.
In the 1920's, the German government tried to shut down the antisemitic newspaper "Der Sturmer" but was unsuccessful under its very liberal Weimar constitution. The paper ceased publication at the end of WWII and its founder was hung at Nuremberg in 1946 as a war criminal for having done more than anyone else to promote the Holocaust. An Internet version of this newspaper would be banned in today's Germany, but not in the US where "The Daily Stormer" web site spouts antisemitic trash on a daily basis. There is no commercial advertising on this web site but there is on at least one other web site where very antisemitic reader comments are tolerated every day and well known American businesses advertise.
It would be good if we could stop using the first and second amendments to promote our demise. Both amendments were created within a set of human rights intended for the betterment of American lives. Where these constitutional provisions are being exploited, hijacked for the betterment of a few, calls for REGULATION. That is the duty of the LAWMAKERS in the US congress. It is truly astounding that the very legislative body that could start to reign in this misuse has declared a war on regulations of any sort. Watching them sit in hearings in wonderment as Silicon Valley executive nerds baffle them with technojargon, leaving them overwhelmed and speechless, one has to believe there is a better way to operate this country.
140
@Alan B. Nothing establishes how fake Constitutional "originalism" is than its mischaracterization of a "well regulated militia" as an unregulated and un-drilled mob keeping unregulated weapons at home.
29
@Alan B. There IS "better way to operate this country"...with elected officials beholding to no one other than the citizens they represent.
14
True enough about the baffling nerds.
4
Oh, please, take a breath.
It's not the internet. That's like saying the invention of the telephone is responsible for robocalls.
The inventions and technological advances of the internet, digital communications, social media software are simply new technologies and delivery vehicles.
What's causing the "demise of democracy" is the uneducated masses who have access to this new communications vehicle and their misuse of it.
It's like letting chimpanzees pilot 757s because of auto pilot.
Educated healthy individuals - physically, mentally, emotionally, and morally - do not misuse this technology.
2
Someone once said that anonymity is the last bastion of the coward. Would the flow of bile be diminished if its disseminators were somehow required to use their real names or email addresses? I have long pondered this and am interested in the thoughts of others, particularly those who are much more tech savvy than I.
The internet is merely revealing what has always been. A large slice of all societies have always been ignorant, misinformed and gullible. The internet will not change this just as the printing press, radio, TV and other media did not.
Solution? There is this thing called the liberal arts education developed over the centuries but still accessible to only a few. We need to make it available more widely. Yea, I know, college educated women voters already know this.
1
Facebook et al will bow to public pressure when the public applies pressure. Delete your social media accounts and don’t get a new one until social media is re-structured to reflect norms of civil decency.
Perhaps Justice Jackson was mistaken and the First Amendment IS a suicide pact.
Maybe it has more to do with guns ? Imagine not what happens, some guy shows up and starts shooting, but instead ... some guy shows up and starts shouting a lot of incoherent drivel.
Until somebody tells him to shut up.
It seems to me that the biggest defense against online manipulation and misinformation is both fundamental and obvious: Education. Critical thinking skills are sorely lacking in modern American society, especially in public schools, which have been woefully underfunded for generations. It may not prevent every act of violence or avoid all instances of manipulation, but critical thinking is an essential skill and one of the best arguments in favor of "higher education," which, at its best, means much for than vocational training.
So, instead of investing $700 billion in the military, we ought to be investing in improving access to quality education.
2
The Laws of Thermodynamics posit that the Universe is headed inexorably to an information-less state: a uniform distribution of mass and energy with no discernible features. The Internet is headed that way too, towards meaningless “noise”, only faster and soon.
The internet has removed a safeguard against the oppression of factions, by turning our country of over 300,000,000 into a virtual small town.
In Federalist #10, James Madison argued that the sheer size of our republic would safeguard against "violence of faction". One cause of factions is "an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power", which has "divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good."
Remind you of anything?
He went on to explain that our republican form of government, combined with the size of our country, was a safeguard against this evil: "[T]he smaller the compass within which they [factions] are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression. Extend the sphere, and ... you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; ... it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other."
This line of reasoning no longer applies -- technology has removed the safeguard Madison spoke of.
1
As I look back at my long life I tried to find something like the Internet that influenced politics to the degree seen today. I concluded that when television came along it radically changed everything and probably cost a candidate an election. There were no means to "steal" an election that I ever heard of or even influence so many people like the internet. Obviously it is in need of some rules and regulations because it is being used for "malign" purposes in an ethically challenged world. The Democrats will have to promote this idea since any other party is no longer viable.
Are we back to the Garden of Eden? Lots of good and helpful stuff on the web, but equal if not more content that's bad (or that brings out the worst in us). Are we able to make the right decisions about what to do? Seems like that's what it comes down to.
1
Tim Cook says “Platforms and algorithms that promised to improve our lives can actually magnify our worst human tendencies.” But does he really care? Or, for Silicon Valley, is unleashing our worst tendencies just the unintended collateral damage of the free market?
I’ve said this elsewhere and will repeat it here. Technology has always been focused on potential. They gave little thought, if any, to the perils of what they were doing. Their focus was on profit. The naïve mission that fronted the internet was “to bring us together,” but it turns out the real mission was to mine and sell personal data and to manipulate our desires and opinions.
Tech developers create products because they can, because of the challenge, because they perceive some esoteric need, because they want to make money. Too often they are young and driven by the “cool” factor. Considering the multi-level consequences (psychological, sociological, and ethical) is not part of their tool-kit. They’re engineers not philosophers.
This is why liberal, critical-thinking based education is so important - as opposed to just job training. Did Harvard give Mark Zuckerberg a real education, or just enough ability to unleash a giddy dorm-room experiment on the world?
It’s the nature of capitalism to plunge blindly and naively ahead, and society is left to pick up the pieces. There is nothing “free” about the free-market. The cost can be staggering.
2
Unfortunately, what is missing in our society is the ability for too many people to discern truth from fabrication. Maybe we should have laws which hold politicians to the fire for telling outright lies and, as they say now, falsehoods. Maybe the POTUS should be treated as if he is under oath 100% of the time. When he out and out lies, he's treated as lying under oath and subject the penalties for such an act. He can be wrong, as he often is. It's just that he'd have to go before the public and admit, plain and simple, that he had lied and then he'd have to atone for the lie by having to say what the truth is.
Just think if people could be prosecuted for lies and hate speech? Freedom of speech is part of our constitution and I've been a supporter of the ACLU for 20 years (?), but with changing times, do we need to define more narrowly what we are free to say and not say? Just having said that has me see that it would present a problem, one which would come back to bite me, as someone such as Trump and his followers would use such a law to their advantage . As they say, the solution to today's problems will be tomorrow's problems. I guess they also say to be careful for what you wish. It's complicated!
@The Sanity Cruzer: The Trump coup d'état is now populating the federal judiciary with fools who equate "sincerely held beliefs" with establishments of science. The US is undergoing forced intellectual regression.
It's terrifying times. School shootings, mental illness and hate crimes proliferating. None of us over 50 recognize the world we grew up in. Watching the news feels like we ARE on the edge of dystopia. There are many days I don't watch the news, because my psyche can't take it.
3
@SecondChance: US public policy is conducted with complete disregard for its effects on public mental health.
The freedom of speech never included the right to be published by someone else at no expense.
We do not have a problem of free speech, we have a problem of social media's quest for profit above all else.
News organizations employ editors. Where are the editors for the social media sites? There really aren't any. Their belief that they can cheaply create algorithms to police the crazies is absurd and clearly failing.
We need legislation that allows civil law suits for any social media that allows unfiltered hate to be published that results in death or injury. These organizations are not the fifth estate and must be held responsible for the injury they are creating.
@John Armstrong: Social media revenue derives entirely from the information users volunteer about themselves.
It's not the internet, Frank. It's social media, an oxymoron if there ever was one.
But, the internet of knowledge-sharing or facts-finding is the most remarkable inviention in centuries. Sure hope you gave a few bucks to Wikipedia. I don't know what my aging memory would do without them.
But one-sided reporting and the lemming-like social media will become the death of many, driving us further apart to the point of hating one another. Want an example, watch the political commercials on TV. How low can we go?
1
The spear. The wheel. Radio. Television. The atom bomb. The internet. All game changers, all borne out of a better way to do things but all carrying with them disturbing new possibilities and outcomes. This is what we do. I'm naive enough to believe that the answer is in emphasizing people's critical thinking skills, common sense, and accountability when it comes to adopting new technologies along with their downsides. But I'm not naive enough to think I know how that can be accomplished, aside from pleading with people to just be smarter. And how's that working so far?
1
Can’t the blame largely be placed on the social media interactive sites, not the internet per se? While there is a lot of inaccurate information on the internet, I find social media more problematic at many levels. Too bad more people don’t unsubscribe from all of social media. I did. There’s still plenty of news to be had via NPR, NYT, etc.
1
I too am appalled by the hate, the lies, and the foul rhetoric. But we won't solve the problem by casting the entire internet as a cesspool. The internet is vast. Yes, it's social media networks and the home of some truly noxious web sites. But it's also an incredible network that connects people, businesses, devices and more. We use it to educate, for safety purposes, and for healthcare. On the internet, you can also find plenty of love, truth, and wisdom.
Yes, we have an enormous problem that is ripping at the fabric of society and upending the existing world order in a horribly detrimental way. But indicting the entire internet will get us nowhere. What we need instead is a clear and unflinching focus on the truly problematic areas, with a unified application of remedies from regulators, technologists and the public.
1
Frank, it's rare, but I disagree with your premise. Internet is magnificant in providing an even playing field for information (so far). What's going to be the death of us is the public school system that has failed to teach America even the basic principles of critical thinking. It's like saying the automobile is going to be the death of us because of how fast cars go compared to horses. Jeez, just educate the people to understand that just because it's on TV, in the newspaper, or on the internet, or whispered into your ear, doesn't make it TRUE! In fact, just because it's called "News" doesn't require it to be true, as was born out in the 2002 Florida Supreme Court trial where Fox sued and for won the right to broadcast totally fabricated information and call it "news". One big problem is that there is no regulated definition of the word "news" when used commercially, and no law that politicians must actually tell the "truth" when making their claims to their constituencies!
Under those conditions, the internet is the LAST thing we should be worrying about.
1
I think the only effective control is to try and educate the non-skeptical, gullible electorate in ways that reduce their tendency to get swept up in fringe groups. This is a Herculean, and perhaps hopeless task, but maybe more effective than trying to police the internet, which runs into the free speech issue head on. If we could somehow induce people to question their ideas through the prism of counter ideas and think thru their consequences , I believe we would be ahead of the game.
But, with a president who exemplifies the problem of non-skeptical behavior, we will never make progress along these lines. Perhaps infiltrating the most radical sites with people presenting challenges to their most radical and damaging ideologies would help them think more clearly.
1
Just as conspiracy theories that can never be proven nor disproven provide an emotional catharsis and justification for animus, the internet's anonymous component provides the same type of catharsis. I resisted joining Facebook for many years because I was wary of the potential for evil doing. Seems I was right to resist. We have to clean up this wild west of cyber communications before we face a real civil war.
The Internet's takeover by lowest common denominator profit motives is the real problem, Mr. Bruni. Social media is more or less explicitly designed to appeal to humanity's baser instincts because that's a surer way to the Dollar Almighty. Mass mediated consumerism has, in effect, turned the Seven Deadly Sins into capitalist Virtues, especially Lust, Gluttony, Wrath, and Envy. It could be otherwise, but we'd probably need to abandon capitalism.
The NY Times censors its comments section and this is a good thing. It is a moderated forum and that's the key to making it work. You can't come here and just post any random brain infarction you had overnight; you can't post racist screeds or post half crazy conspiracy theories.
Quora and Linkedin are online forums that seem to work much better than Facebook. Quora, in fact, is more of a public forum for people who want to use their brains rather than just vent their anger. The site bills itself as "a place to share knowledge and better understand the world". How refreshing. This is what other sites should aspire to.
If Facebook were a moderated forum, it might require spending tens of millions of dollars. There go the profits. It would likely be possible, however, to have subcategories within Facebook that are community moderated.Specialized sub-sites might be part of the answer. Those whose only goal is to shout out their beliefs and rile up others wouldn't like this and would probably go away to some place where there were no standards. Then they could just shout at people who agree with them, leaving the rest of us alone.
Whatever is done, the goal has to be to reduce the amount of space given over to mindless screeds and the re-posting of "facts" that have nothing to do with reality. The internet will continue to be a wild and wooly place but the primary forums widely used have to be tamed at least modestly or they cease to have any useful function.
1
It's becoming clear that we can't handle free speech. Like a child given too much leeway, we have gone overboard. I'm no longer sure that countries where speech is regulated aren't on to something. Canada, England, France, Germany, The Netherlands, South Africa, Australia and India all ban hate speech, but none of these countries have become totalitarian states. The purpose of laws that ban hate speech is not to avoid offending prudes, as some anti-"PC" advocates claim. No country bans speech merely because it causes offense. Rather speech is banned because it attacks the dignity of a group — a practice the U.S. Supreme Court called “group libel” in Beauharnais v. Illinois, (1952). The court upheld an Illinois law making it illegal to publish or exhibit any writing or picture portraying the "depravity, criminality, unchastity, or lack of virtue of a class of citizens of any race, color, creed or religion". This standard could easily be applied to Facebook, Twitter and the rest. These platforms already ban hate speech in the countries where it is illegal. I'm beginning to think that, just as parents take away a teen's car keys when she can't be trusted to drive safely, so Americans should have their free speech rights restricted, because it's clear we can't act responsibly with the right we've been given. When all citizens are free to express themselves without fear of intimidation, the country becomes more free, not less.
There are 95 million Instagram posts per day. 12,000 posts, even if they occurred in a single day, represent .0001 percent of that total. If 1 percent of those posting are radicalized enough to commit a violent act, which is doubtful, we're talking about an army of 120 violent anti-semites in the entire world, which has a population of over 7 billion people.
Also, on the flip side, there have been over 5 million Instagram posts, just counting those using the hashtag #Pittsburgh, showing sympathy and support for the victims and relatives of the Pittsburgh attack. That's over 400 times the number posting anti-semitic posts. Hardly Germany in the 1930s.
Let's keep things regarding the dangers of the internet in perspective.
1
Yes, free expression and free speech are “paramount,” as Mr. Bruni says, but “free” does not mean “unrestrained,” nor does it mean, to an individual, the right to do anything one wants. Free speech and free expression have an institutional structure. What is paramount is an “objective” understanding of freedom.
Newspapers in America have historically been the bedrock of what we call a free press. Newspapers have editors. Editors are not policemen and policewomen, nor is what they do “policing” the communication that gets printed. They’re charged with upholding, best they can, what are called objective standards, to which reporters are also obligated.
Today’s “media platforms” have no such standards. These standards must be forced upon them, by the American public. The communication revolution we’re talking about here is not with respect to what is true or false. The revolution is the movement from Gutenberg printing presses to electronic media. The same institutional commitment to objectivity is what is paramount. Truth (small “t”) is complicated and difficult and it can’t be dismissed by those who claim there is no thing called objectivity.
140
@rjon
You are absolutely correct.
2
@rjon: "Free speech" has never encompassed lying to create panic, as in crying "Fire!" in a crowded theater where there is none.
3
@rjon The American people must also invest time, energy, and resources in the pursuit of truth and understanding of the media they consume. Allowing your core beliefs to be informed and formed by a single, often biased, self serving stream of information is an abdication of the pursuit of knowledge, understanding, and ultimately, something closer to the truth. Too many Americans have stopped challenging their beliefs. And why? Fear of being replaced. Ironically, ignorance will guarantee replacement.
3
We need to weather the currrent storm and start training the next generation to handle the idiocies of the internet better.
34
@htg
I agree with you but not the other NYT Picks who advocate government regulation of speech. Government regulation of speech, even awful hateful speech, is the beginning of the end of a free, liberal (in the traditional sense of the word) society. The way incivility on the internet should be addressed is teaching our kids (and other adults) that the same manners that you use when talking to someone should be used online. We need to teach values, not legislate speech.
2
It is not so much the internet as it is Social Media. I have been saying for the better part of a year, that Social Media is the bane of a civil society.
Perhaps its time for the court to get involved and extend libel laws to posts and sites on the Internet somehow. We have to find a way to validate sites, otherwise people will believe what they want to believe and they can find it on the web. Just like they believe ridiculously outrageous political television commercials on both sides. Unfortunately the Internet is not going away and provides a lot of benefits as well.
This is indeed serious. It is another symptom of our society failing to keep up with itself.
Our technology is far outreaching the education of the general public and this - lack of education - is what will be the end of us.
People have always been gullible but now, with the power of technology, this gullibility is dangerous, not just to the gullible but to others.
Weapons (guns, bombs, poisons, etc.) in the hands of so many uneducated people is not good in itself. Add to that the manipulation of these people by others skilled in persuasion and the efficiency of the internet in delivery of their twisted ideas and we have serious problems.
The public's love affair with the military and glorifying everything military is government and military industrial complex manipulation of the ignorant public. This is extremely dangerous to society with the kind of weaponry governments have.
We are not going to stop the proliferation of weapons so we must educate the public if we are to have a chance of existing in a world so fraught with ways to harm people and the planet and so efficient a delivery system for misinformation as the internet.
I don't quite know what Mr. Bruni might be getting at. He looks only at the dark side of the internet, the side that incites a few boneheads to commit violence. If used properly, the internet is a powerful tool for the dissemination of information. Should it be abolished because of a few violent misfits? In my opinion, social media is the problem. I have looked for something of value on Facebook but haven't found anything as yet. I certainly don't look to social media as the basis for forming an opinion about anything. Apparently a lot of people, the boneheads, don't know when they are being played. We shouldn't shut the system down because of them.
This is one really, really weird column ... given the fact that many people are reading it via ... the internet.
I want to say that the internet is like any other human tool since the invention of fire, capable of being used for good or ill.
On second thought ... that's exactly what I'll say.
That's exactly what the unhinged and violent lunatic fringe in our society, the disenfranchised, are looking for, a platform and some societal approbation for their hate. This makes them feel that their violence toward others is okay and they then act upon it with mass shootings.
Many of these people and their supporters remain anonymous under either silly or hateful pseudonyms. I say that the actual names on all these accounts should be used and not some silly tag they hide behind.
This will most definitely stop a lot of them at the source before they bleat out their hate and have their family, friends, co-workers, and neighbors take offense or action against them. Exposure is one key weapon to use against this horde.
1
The internet not only allows us to react instantaneously to others on the net, but often requires us to do so. It is as if every thought in our reptilian brains can appear in front of in the twitch of a finger, no thought required. Indeed if you do not react fast you are left behind in the discussion. In this we often fail to enjoy the internet, but become a slave to it. The idea of moderation in all things is lost and polarization applauded. Sitting down with others, looking into their eyes and listening is passe, and I seek it out when ever I can, but the internet has become norm. How can we slow down and just take breath?
A thousand hate filled persons living prior to the internet hardly knew of one another and life was fairly safe. Take those same 1k people and give them the internet and you have a coordinated movement - one that terrorizes, upsets and divides.
1
The evil doers take advantage of our ignorance. Therein lies the problem. But I will say it again, we have Ronald Reagan to thank for this when he, along with his Republican collaborators, that the Fairness Doctrine, which governed the use of our airwaves, was put to rest and opened up broadcasters to say or do whatever they wished without the need to air the opposing view.
That was the beginning of what Mr. Bruni now describes so accurately.
1
The internet and Facebook connect the world. These things are the final expression of democracy, an idea feared by the founders of the country. That is why they limited the vote to men who possessed certain property attainments and created institutions like the Supreme Court and the senate and the presidential executive which were designed to limit the power of the more democratically responsive House of Representatives
The internet bypasses these institutions Now we see how this internet expression of democracy is “utterly terrifying”.
Yes a “policing” will be needed. Free expression will need to be contained. Perhaps this will require a very strong central authority. Napoleon fulfilled that role for France years ago when democratic chaos led to anarchy.
Trump is not responsible for the hate in the world, the internet is. He and his people have truly learned how to use it for their own benefit and to the detriment of democracy around the world. Obviously I am using the internet. I checked my email and sent a few. After reading the Times I will shut my laptop and not open it until tomorrow. In my purse I have my little flip phone in case I have to call AAA. If there is one person alive who just doesn't get it and never will it's Mark Zuckerberg.
1
You don't "police" the Internet. You counter and challenge bad ideas with good ideas.
But you can't do that unless you listen and engage.
Leave the cocktail party. Stop down at the bar.
The real issue is here is that our traditional news outlets are, themselves, creating this "nightmare of manipulated biases and metastasized hate". This is as a REACTION TO the now widespread availability of news and information on the internet, of both high and low quality. It's not just 'tabloidization' in order to hold onto marketshare. I think non-passive autonomy that the internet allows the news consumer is a threat to mainstream media. It's all about control. Just look how they cover a pretty pedestrian bomb stunt by Mr. Sayac, an event that should NOT dominate news coverage in a country of 300 million people. It's not the internet blowing this blowing this out of proportion. With ALL this coverage, why haven't we heard anything about the nature of the actual bombs - how serious of a threat to our national security (or even the recipients) were they? Odd, isn't it?
2
One could probably have said the same thing about written language and then the printing press...
In olden days a King James edition
was looked on as church sedition
“Now Heaven knows, anything goes”
@Bruce
"I dream of an internet where users of all major social media sites are verified. "
That would effectively bring an end to free speech.
Imagine me as a teacher exposing Trump's lies while working in a deep red district. All the students read my posts. The parents would be out to lynch me. I would lose my job in a heartbeat. The only solution I would have is to move to a blue district, thereby further polarizing the country, or shut up and give up my right to free speech.
The same could happen to you, potentially. We would all end up locked into echo chambers or forced to convert. That would make us the ultimate drones.
Because if we don't comply, a ruthless dictator a la Trump could bring down the power of the government on those who are critical of him. It will only require a few draconian examples for the rest of us to fall in line. And then journalists like Frank Bruni would lose the protection of public opinion. He would be next.
As of now, people who want to get a visa to enter the US can already be forced to give up their email and social media passwords. It is totally at the discretion of the state department. For them, free speech is already dead.
Are you really sure you want to go there?
No, anonymity is the ONLY way to ensure that we in fact will continue to have free speech in the future.
My first ISP in 1995 offered the best advice about the Internet, "You'll stay safe if you remember NOTHING on the Internet is real". He knew the platform allows charlatans to masquerade as brilliant bloggers, journalists, politicians or hawk snake oil.
1
The Internet is not evil or innocent, it is quintessentially a tool to magnify the mind. It creates neither terrorists or saints, but magnifies the evil, or saintly, characteristics of our own minds - to the extent that we ourselves allow it.
Those people that you cite were not created by the evil Internet. They were sick; and their sickness was magnified by the input they sought from the mind tool that is the internet. Blaming the internet is like blaming the megaphone at a hate rally - doing so does nothing to solve the root cause of the problem.
If a a way could be found to move people towards embracing acceptance of others and therapy for their sickness,. the destructive consequences of their sickness would not manifest.
It's possible that the Internet could serve this purpose as well.
Without the internet, I would've missed this sane, sobering piece.
To fully appreciate the situation, I highly recommend watching PBS Frontline story on "The Facebook Dilemma" https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/facebook-dilemma/
The bottom line is people and companies will do whatever they can to make money. Facebook knows full well the harm they have done in the world but they ignore that in favor of revenue, profits and stock valuation.
Politicians are not going to go after Facebook in a meaningful way because they either are using the platform to further their cause (think Cambridge Analytics) or they fear the power that Facebook has over their political life.
Politicians should always endeavor to reward good actors and penalize bad actors. Instead, they protect their wealthy donors who give them political life, and increasingly, a lavish lifestyle.
Will the internet be the death of us? Of course not. Was Hitler and the Nazis the death of Germany? We should be more concerned about how many lives will be lost before the government does its job. History suggests it will be an appalling number.
1
Twenty years ago we (middle school teachers) were teaching kids to be skeptical of all information on-line; that e-mail was not confidential; that not everybody on the internet was who they said they were. We still teach that, and both kids and adults continue to get suckered.
1
The common profile of the Internet radicals is that they are lonely, isolated, and angry men--mostly white. Living out of a van? Living in a crummy apartment, alone? The Internet becomes their family when they lack the wherewithal to create or maintain ties with friends and relatives in the real world right outside their doors.
Churches, families, community groups, all used to make space for lonely people. See Robert Putnam's book, Bowling Alone. Community has broken down, replaced by the Internet "friends". Lonely, potentially violent men need to interact with real people, grapple with differences and similarities in views of everyday life,
I love the Internet, but it's not my life. Why do some people, mostly men, choose to go down the Internet hate rabbit hole, then surface to blow a hole in the real world that the rest of us inhabit?
2
"We’re ridiculously overfed and ruinously undernourished."
Great line.
It is no accident that many of those who oppose Trump are more educated than those who fully support him. The only answer to the demons unleased by the internet is to educate our students, from the earliest ages, to read critically and analytically and to teach them to decipher fact from fiction and to see hate speech for what it is - depraved and deplorable. This is a skill that must be taught. It is not easy to teach those skills. When I taught AP Literature, students often had difficulty determining if a piece of writing was ironic or satirical. What are we doing wrong in our society that people actually believed Hillary Clinton was running a sex ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington D.C.? I know of people who fully believe George Soros is funding the Honduran caravan. How do we teach students to question what they read and to drive home to them the importance of vetting what they read to find the verifiable facts?
Our only hope lies in the future. Those who are already addicted to conspiracy theories and who subscribe to hate speech are a lost cause. The internet is here to stay and we need to educate future generations about how to access its positive qualities and to guard against the dangers that lurk in a free-speech marketplace where lies, misinformation and hatred abounds.
This is so true, I have rational, intelligent, friends who adhere to Trumpian birther conspiracy theories, believing things that are clearly false, but what they wish were true. As GW Bush demonstrated in his run up to war, if one repeats a lie often enough, it becomes the truth in some minds.
Orwell warned us about this.
1
The internet has become all things to all people, and one of its worst aspects is that it allows lunatics whose views were frequently on the fringe in isolation to come together to validate and amplify their collective lunacies.
The Masters of the Universe who are behind Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al., know this, but will not do anything meaningful to stop it because to do so would cost them money. That they already have obscene amounts of money matters not at all.
I don't do social media of any kind; nor do I have a Smartphone. My information consumption online is limited to sources I've thoroughly vetted. These habits place me squarely in a very small minority.
This situation is going to get much worse before it gets better, if in fact it ever does.
But only weakened, addled people buy into this baloney. Only a paranoiac believes Pizzagate!
What we need to deal with as a country is how we are rearing children to be so scared, anxious, and paranoid as young adults that such trashy theories are even considered.
We are raising paranoid and anxiety ridden people who cannot handle democracy and pluralism.
That points to early childhood.
That points to group care.
2
The old guy predicted all this. We all said he was crazy. And he was. But he was correct.
Ted Kaczynski, the unibomber, he was saying something like this.
"I don’t know exactly how we square free speech and free expression — which are paramount — with a better policing of the internet..." That's easy. Facebook, Twitter, instagram are businesses that have no legal requirement to accommodate all sides. They can exe resize judgement and establish restrictions that government can't do. These companies should get a backbone and stop worrying about what the lunatic right wing fringe feels.
1
As much as I abhor some of the practices on social media, I believe this columnist's other big issue, education, is the real problem.
As FDR stated, "Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education."
Suppression of access to education over decades allows for ignorance to flourish. While those of us fortunate enough to have received, at the very least, a solid K-12 education wonder how some people believe the nonsense that they read online, we don't completely understand what they truly know and don't know.
1
@Steve C: The right-wing coup d'état we have experienced with Trump began with corruption of local school boards by a cabal of plutocrats. They sent science and civics education packing.
About a year ago I Googled "Martin Luther King." and near the top of the list was a website called "Martin Luther King. org."
The site was/is run by a white nationalist organization devoted to sliming Dr. King.
This year, under pressure, Google finally adjusted it algorithm. The hate site isn't there any more, at least not among the first several pages of search results for MLK.
But it makes you wonder how many impressionable people. including kids researching MLK for school assignments, clicked the site and had their minds poisoned.
Cyber racism has been around as long as the Internet. It's illegal in Australia, but not in any other country that I know of.
Meanwhile Google, in its newfound socially responsible zeal, has also started suppressing material from legitimate sites which it deems not to be "mainstream" enough.
This censorship is a double edged sword, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, to mangle a couple of metaphors. lt's like randomly installing spike strips on a freeway. Reckless drivers and careful drivers alike are indiscriminately stopped in their tracks. Many of the reckless drivers get away anyhow by finding detours, while many careful, responsible drivers become too leery even to venture out, lest driving "be the death of them."
Since (to use another cliche) you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, one solution would be to teach children, beginning at a very young age, how to think critically and to separate truth from lies.
1
On the list of things I should be terrified of on this Halloween what is the priority order?
The Internet
Climate Change
Inequality
Women's rights
Health Care costs
The value of my 401K
How to pay the rent
How to pay my credit card bills
Food
FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt)
I don't do social media, but sometimes the newspaper worries me. I really can't afford to be afraid every waking moment.
It is a relatively clear pattern in history that many new technologies are used for destructive purposes before they are ever used for constructive purposes. Take nuclear fission, for example. The first nuclear bomb was dropped in 1945. The first nuclear power plant came on line in 1954. And it is also clear that our leaders, especially our political leaders, are not behaving in a manner that shows any recognition of or a desire to accept the fact that the world is ever more dependent on ever accelerating technological change. Those out there who want to cling to the belief that technology will always save us might want to also ponder the possibility that it will destroy us before it ever has a chance.
Blaming the vehicle for mass communication seems to miss the point. That's like blaming a library. Just as the Founders envisioned with the 1st Amendment, the task of "policing" the Internet is fraught with danger.
The problem we have is in education. Americans are poorly educated, especially when it comes to critical thinking skills. This is because Americans do not value education as a public good, essential to a democracy.
How do we know this? Look at the lack of support for education from those who allocate our tax dollars. If the public truly valued education, the politicians would respond with publicly-funded higher ed and quality training and pay for teachers. Instead, we have privatized funding of higher ed through student loans, and "Teach For America".
The irony is that we devalue education because... we are poorly educated!
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Climate change, loss of wildlife and forests, constant battering of "information" are feeding global derangement. Remember the old Walt Kelly Pogo comic strip with the truism "We have met the enemy--and he is us!"
"Enclaves of the internet warped the worldviews of these men."
Yep. Men. Always men and mostly white men.
On the upside, Frank didn't have to threaten violence to get his unabomber weltanschauung published.
History shows that Bruni has things backward. Racism and anti-Semitism used to be the reigning philosophy of governments and institutions such as Harvard. Mass media like radio and television were one-way propagators of racist and sexist ideology. Acts of terrorism and mass murder were committed by governments.
The growth of human freedom and the opening of channels for people to hold the powerful accountable for their actions helped to reduce institutional mass terrorism.
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I believe it was the Swiss writer Max Frisch, in his novel “Homo Faber,” who declared, “Technology is the knack of so arranging the world so that we don’t have to experience it”. Donald Trump, a twit(erologist), so arranges the world that neither he nor many of us know whether he or we are coming or going—itself a kind of death, or, as Rick Wilson recently put it, in his recently published book, “Everything Trump Touches Dies”. Happy Halloween.
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Genetics, life experiences, close family contacts and general environment will make or break a person.
The internet never was, and will never be necessary to sow the seeds of love or hate. Beer Halls worked well for Hitler.
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While Bruni makes good glass half empty points, it’s worthwhile pointing out that slavery was perpetrated, 6 million jews were murdered and Hitler and Musollini rose to power long before the internet..We’re in dire straits for sure, but things could be worse.
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Dissemination of inaccurate or outright false information, knowingly or not, needs to be criminalized and the penalties need to be harsh. If we pass information on as true the burden of fact checking must be on each of us. With great power comes great responsibility and every idiot with a smart phone has power that was unimaginable 30 years ago.
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Time was a Robert Bowers would have to do a lot of work to find a compatible echo chamber for his hate. Now, you can sit in the comfort of your own home and do the same. It has all become far too easy.
The New York Times is on the internet, and I, along with all the other commentators, am reading and commenting on the internet. Thoughts?
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No technology is value free, and the problems around hate groups, fake news, and social media bubbles are real. However, until we place due weight on the problem of toxic, white masculinity and irresponsible gun access in this country, we're not going to get anywhere. Ask yourself--why aren't black women radicalized on the Internet? queer men? trans people? Is the Internet the problem, or is toxic masculinity the problem? The extreme hate and violence I'm witnessing is dominated by angry, entitled white males. Period.
Frank, this is glorious. You complete me, at least in print.
Seriously.
Smart phones don't subvert people; people subvert people.
(Thank you 2nd Amendment Legal Experts)
Doug McKenna - You mean held accountable like Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Beibert, Trump, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter etc. are held accountable? How is that working out so far?
@Ava: Pundits are bloated up to credibility by the money they garner here in the US.
The true nature of the internet: a visual electronic system comprised of algorithms designed to both stimulate, and manipulate individuals towards like-minded thinkers.
In essence this sounds noble. But when commercialism is applied, it can lead to unforseen consequences.
Gone are the days when one could harmlessly "flick the channel", or purchase another paper, being directed inevitably towards contrary viewpoints and ideas...i.e. exposure to different audiences and hence a richer discourse. This time however, when you flick the interactive channel, it reinforces what you believe...no matter how absurd. Keeping you hooked in your own narcissistic pursuits, feeding you more and more pap - until you are satiated and ready to purchase.
Here lies the rub; how to break off unhealthy channeling towards the absurb, while still maintaining the legacy of choice provided by our belief in the enlightenment? A tough nut to crack!
@Paul: The "Enlightenment" was an intellectual awakening to the reality that nature operates without any divine intervention at all.
Eliminate anonymity online.
@Carolyn C: It helps to practice what one preaches.
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Thanks to the internet, Swedish public TV (SVT 1) could show me what a few Americans out west could teach me about my country of birth. A skilled SVT interviewer held out her microphone and asked "Will you be voting next week?"
The standard answer: "No, I have never voted." You a Times reader can easily guess some of the justifications.
The USA seems, as seen from afar, seems to be a marginal democracy where less than have of those who could vote do. And of that less than half, what percentage do not believe in climate change, do believe in such fancies as reincarnation, white supremacy, and the daily tweets?
The Internet is just one of many blips that will bring us down; much more serious are ignorance and belief in the words of a dictator in waiting
Only-NeverIn Sweden.blogspot.com
Citizen US SE
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Facebook, Google and Twitter should be required, just as the Mainstream Media, to be under the guidance and restrictions of the FCC. They are too big and failing us.
The NY Times, the networks all have to have their commercials vetted and comply with the rules of the FCC.They have editors and editors-in-chief scrutinizing for truth and accuracy.
Facebook, Google and Twitter must now start complying. They don’t get to have the excuse that they’re too big to look at all posts. Then they’re too big! Either they must change their business models and hire all the people required (not AI) to review these messages, or reduce their footprints.
It’s not “just” democracy or our country at risk, it’s the planet and the ensuing World War that will come next if we don’t. It’s just a matter of time.
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@Barbara Franklin: The whole concept of "truth in advertising" went out the window when Reagan abolished the "fairness doctrine" in media. That opened the door to entire media empires based on outright lying.
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On the internet, everyone’s an expert so no one’s an expert. Who has authority these days when online is where all the answers are?
There was no Internet when the Ku Klux Klan saw a massive populist resurgence in the 1920s.
There was no Internet when fascism spread throughout the 1930s.
People marginalized as "other" -- black and brown people, Jews, Muslims, etc. -- were targets long before the Internet.
Regulate or even eliminate the Internet and hate will find another vehicle. It always has. It always will.
Uh ... is this like an Andy Borowitz satirical piece? I don't get it. I mean, humans have been finding ways to do each other in ever since there have been humans. The Internet is just today's iteration of the stick that cave man picked up and started hitting the other cave guy with in the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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Haha. You may actually have a good point.
Frank, I love you, I do. But you are feeding the rage machine.
The Internet certainly lets more of us see ugly ideas that were previously harder to find, but I think reality is that it is still like a bell curve: the vast majority of humans are in the middle. We are a little right or a little left with a few wack jobs out on the tails.
Regrettably, many in the media — this paper included — glom on to that fringe and amplify it. (I sickens me when The Times dutifully prints Trump’s every absurd utterance as a headline.) Some of this is motivated by profit, of course, but much of it is a world adjusting to a new media landscape.
It’s true: Trump is a boor and he is spectacularly incapable of executing the pledge of his office. We need to rebuff that with a vision of our own, elect responsible leaders one-by-one, but let’s not give the evil and misguided among us more power than they are due.
Our republic is resilient. Vote!
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One suggestion for partially reforming the internet: require users to use their full names. I know it’s not possible everywhere, but why, for example, has the Times always required full names and location in its print version of letters to the editor but not in comments, such as here? Admittedly, it would be a small step, but at least make commenters more careful about what they post, and in forums that do allow anonymity, readers might become more septic all of commentators who post anonymously.
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The internet is a double edged sword. We are able to text people tens of thousands of miles away and get an instant response. shopping, banking, managing finances,paying bills, and doing our taxes is much easier than in the early 1990s. But the internet suffers from some serious drawbacks. One is the lack of security. Our identity, email, bank accounts, credit cards, and personal information can all get hacked and fall into the wrong hands. The biggest shortcoming is the lack of censorship. So Trump can use twitter to spew hate and vitriol-directed at immigrant and his critics, and so can extremists, racists,religious fanatics,other politicians, criminals and white supremacists.
If you don't protect hate speech and forbid it instead, you'll be no less free
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We cannot police everything or we will have big brother managing our lives. The cat is out of the bag and we will have to take personal responsibility for believing or disbelieving and pushing back against outrageous rants and lies.
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I always thought reality TV would be the death of our civilization.
Trump's Celebrity Apprentice White House is proving me right.
People don't think, they just react.
@Chuck: Reactionaries are a political minority. In the US they mislabel themselves "conservatives".
What this country needs is LESS FREE TIME.
Many Americans waste their lives & hours away on line because their lives are so easy and life in America is cheap to buy.
These problems do not exist in countries where people must work hard to provide the basics for their families.
Social Media is a DISEASE it tears the fabric of society apart and should be abandoned by all. I have never had a SM account and spend 30 minutes per day on a SCREEN and am very happy about it.
I browse the headlines, read the important stuff and am thankful that FB data breaches and the like do not apply to me.
Get out enjoy life and get off your screen!
Social media is like Anakin Skywalker turned Vadar. it was supposed to unite, not destroy us.
@Mixilplix: social media is supposed to produce revenue by selling personal information volunteered by users.
True but our Dear Leader has found Twitter as a great tool to express his 'thoughts" about various subjects as it reacts to right wing conspiracy theories or FOX/TRUMP STATE TV pundits whispering in his ear. Of course the price our country is paying for this new style president who is unfiltered seems to be mailed bombs to former presidents and enemies of the people media folks. Raging about bad people invading us this week although they are a month away meets his need to demonize brown folks. Using the military to repel this horde of women and children without shoes was approved by Mattis . Getting us into a war with Iran might be Bolton's menu and boost Trump's popularity who care how many soldiers die as long as Trumps ego gets massaged . Problem is as a malignant narcissist there is no way that need to be worshiped could ever be enough without adopting Kim style tactics. The stock market might be booming but there is a dark cloud coming over America that hate will fester and violence will happen nationally and domestically that could end with Martial Law and internment camps ala 1930's .
"Smart" devices don't make you smart.
If only.
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The internet is a tool. It has educated countless and the trade-off is that dark, unspeakable applications exist. Just as in war, the mending portion never quite seems to catch up to killing portion--but that is mankind........
“Nora Ephron once wrote a brilliant essay about the trajectory of her and many other people’s infatuations with email...”
Intriguing. Why not state where it was published so we can read it? Better yet, a link to it if available?
With great power comes great responsibility. They know what to do, but they aren't going to willingly kill the Golden Goose. From the NYT less than a week ago Frank:
A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley https://nyti.ms/2JkjOdJ
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Why not require actual identities vs user names? Many, if not most, anonymous on-line racist, bomb-throwing zealots and trolls would remain under their rocks if they faced the opprobrium of their communities, fellow workers and families. (BTW, angus is not my real name.)
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The internet is simply a tool, a disseminator of information and communications. As such, it is neither good nor bad. The real culprit here is our education system, which has failed to equip many Americans with the critical thinking needed to distinguish fact and fiction. An uninformed electorate ready and eager to be brainwashed by a lying demagogue is what will be the death of us.
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If John Lennon is alive today, he would be singing:
Imagine there’s no facebook...
On the internet, one voice has the same volume as a million. This can create communities or destroy them.
Before social media, you had to deal with differences of opinion in your personal relationships and in the news. With the Internet, you just hang out with and read what you agree with. Do you watch Fox News every day ? Why not ? I do. And I also read the New York Times every day. The stories are selected differently, they focus on different things, and gives you perspective. Challenge your opinions always.
Oh...I thought Gutenberg was supposed to be the death of us.
Frank - I enjoy and usually agree with your commentary, but on this one you are being naive.
There is an underlying problem that exists, in that certain people chose to foment unrest, chaos and hate.
The internet is not the problem, it is people that have beliefs that are harmful to mankind that is.
It was predicted that the printing press would be ruinous, the platform you are using for this piece.
The Salem witch trials and Hitler were pre-internet.
More than half a century ago, naïve people believed that the addition of computers to our civilization will help humanity as a whole to free itself from ignorance. Now the internet enslaves people to social media, where they learn how to reply to replies to replies to replies.
I do not feel shocked anymore, but it is still disgusting to see how arguments can evolve from sensible reasonings to diatribes. Are you suspicious of Bolsonaro's intentions and aware of what he has said in the past and now? You are blamed as a communist and of helping Brazil to descend to "Venezualization". It does not help that the main leftist party is tainted with corruption. However, it seems that there was no corruption whatsoever in Brazil before the left took power. The Internet seems to reveal and exacerbate old prejudices rather than disposing a platform for dialogue.
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Those that use internet services must demand and hold accountable those companies that profit from their implicit support of racist and intentionally deceitful propaganda. It's not just the usual suspects like Facebook, Twitter, Gab, etc. but also the ISPs and hosting providers that operate behind the curtain.
I am tired of the bogus argument that technology is neutral; it's not. It has been proven time and time again that its algorithms skew towards more extremist content in order to garner more views (i.e. more money). The internet's fundamental business model for content driven sites never was sustainable or on solid foundation and we are now seeing the results of where it leads.
Anyone not using their real names should get a special license (author, journalists do) and enjoy free speech. But not cowards with fake screen avatars!
Blame the Internet? If not for the Internet, I wouldn't be reading the NY Times!
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If you are a member of one of these internet hate groups, just be aware that you are on an FBI watch list.
Whenever I turn to Bruni, I’m always looking for some trace of his illustrious predecessor Frank Rich, but am always disappointed. He’s not even as good in his new role as he was as the Times restaurant critic. At the time no photo of him was circulated so I imagined him as a sophisticated if somewhat overweight gourmand sipping a vintage wine and not quite able to resist another serving of foi de gras. The next thing I knew the skinny version of Bruni suddenly emerged which was a great disappointment. Now he doesn’t really fill Rich’s shoes, but they can’t even send him back to the food section.
The wheel, gunpowder, the printed word....and even the poor hammer in the garage...... All have been weaponized.
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I have worked in internet media since the mid-90s early days, producing major websites, apps and social campaigns you have likely seen. I spent many years tirelessly evangelizing its wonders and promise, but over the past five years have come to agonizing grips with the reality of the monster we have unleashed on humanity.
To those saying the rot is limited to the horrid social platforms that have dominated the last decade, know that it has long been this way - from the earliest BBS boards to IRC to AOL chatrooms to web forums to blog comments - the Internet by its very nature has always brought out the very worst in people. What has changed it only the facility of use and critical mass of adoption. Its communication paradigms have always been and remain fundamentally inhuman, which is why it has essentially become humanity’s psychic bile spittoon.
Even what’s left of the web (which social media has largely decimated) is a cesspool of SEO-gamed misinformation churned out to scrounge programmatic ad pennies on our hapless eyeballs as we read “UGC” medical diagnoses from idiots and (worse) bots on the likes of quora.com.
Add in the impact of the so-called “gig economy” and Amazon’s monopolistic shivving of American retail, and the Internet cloud’s Silver Lining becomes increasingly difficult to appreciate...
Don't be a doomsayer Frank - the internet is like most humans: a mix of good and bad. The IRA, Baader Meinhof Gruppe, early Al-Kaida and the Oklahoma-bomber acted without email or social media. And anti-semites in the seventies printed pamphlets about their WorldWar II phantasies on simple duplicators.
Obviously crazies use roads, pens, telephones, airplanes and computers once available. The internet, still young but growing up, is a very powerful actor for the good of all people. Let's develop a zero-tolerance policy - one that honors free speech- against the violent, sexist or racist crazies.
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Internet plus assault weapons equals mass killings.
Ok so if Gab is the niche of White Nationalist then Twitter belongs to Anti-Semites (Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam), Domestic Terrorist (ANTIFA), Black Nationalist (Black Lives Matter), Communist (Communist Party USA), ISIS (Islamic State), Al Qaeda, just to name a few. So yes Mr. Bruni you are ABSOLUTELY right about how the Internet has become a vehicle used by people to spread hate, the question is DO YOU have the guts to confront the whole truth?
No need to censor the internet as it stands, simply make the current internet obsolete by shifting all of the intelligent content to a new internet that you have to “unlock” through multiple verifications of your intelligence and human decency. Dumdums will have access to educational material and teasers for high quality content that will incentivize online behaviors that will allow them to unlock more access; if the dumdums can’t manage it, they will be left in the sad old internet where no one wants to spend much time (sort of like what’s happening on Facebook). Dumdums left on the old internet will feel the social isolation and shame of being too stupid and barbaric to access intelligent content and they will simply “swear off the internet” as though they are better than the internet (which will be good for everyone). We could even make access to porn subject to an IQ test. We can social engineer a better internet if enough big tech companies and social media platforms work together.
Garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes. Sigh.
The internet saves lives, is a wealth of knowledge, and connects friends and family like never before. It provides the world of food, literature, arts, crafts, travel and photography to us at our fingertips. That ne’er do wells use it to peddle hate is sad and unfortunately inevitable. Hate triumphed in biblical times when the Jews were exiled from their birthplace, during the Spanish Inquisition, in czarist Russia, in Hitler’s Europe, all long before the internet was a part of our lives. We should focus on resolving why people hate rather than the current medium used to spew their poison. If we did, we really might find love and perpetuate humanity rather than doom it.
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Facebook, including wholly owned Instagram, seems oddly tolerant of antisemites. I’ve noticed that bigotry directed towards any other group is quickly taken down. But antisemites are left alone. Obvious fake profiles - recently created, using nonsensical names, and posting only hate - are left alone. The company probably want the ad revenue served up to these fakes (though it’s unclear why any sane advertiser would pay for it) but, to this Jew at least, the double standard is appalling.
Don't let's abolish the internet, Mr. Bruni. Not a good idea.
A thousand years ago, King Louis IX of France--the only French king to be canonized!--was asked why he encouraged people to write and publish books.
"Because," the sainted monarch replied, "every book is a thorn in the side of the devil."
Think how many evil books have come out over the years.
"Mein Kampf" certainly heads the list. "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion"--not quite so well-known. Detestable for its malicious mendacity.
Yet who wants to see the abolition of printing presses?
Who wants to see LITERACY abolished?
Who wants to see HUMAN SPEECH--abolished?
All these things, Mr. Bruni, have been used--innumerable times!--for evil. Yet I, for my part desire to read. Talk. Listen. Submit comments to The New York Times.
The advantages of the internet? You know them better than I do. Which suggests another quick thought:
The evils of unrestricted internet traffic--the psychopaths, the homicidal loonies we all hear about--
--precisely! We all HEAR about them.
The good stuff--and sakes, Mr. Bruni!--there IS a lot of good stuff out there. Tons of it!
We don't hear about that.
Any more than we hear about the virtuous, upstanding citizens that live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
What's-his-name Bowers?
We've ALL heard of him.
Do something about the evil, the malice that percolates through the internet? Absolutely!
But don't let's abolish it.
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One aspect of this is these folks don't really have to lift a finger. Well they do have to lift at least one. To become killers. They can sit at home and soak it all up like a sponge. They don't have to go to the store to buy newspapers or magazines. So they don't have to interact with other human beings who might say some outrageous thing to them like "Hi! How is it going?" or the dreaded "Have a nice day". They don't have to go out and find organizations that offer similar views. So no meetings, no travel, no rallies, no anything. In fact very little outlay of energy. Just sit there. In the dark. Order food to be delivered. And just dive into the unlimited world of hate on line. And, at some point, they push away from the table or get up off the bed. Grab their coat and head over to the nearest gun store to purchase their tools. Just in case. And head back to their dreary room. Turn on their computer. And let the lap top make the case for them. How hard is that. Likely happening in far more rooms across America than it would seem. You could ask Bowers or Sayoc. But they would not know each other or anyone else like them. Just like all the rest of these guys. Just them and the computer. And eventually the guns. Their closest friends. Eventually they close the lap top and head out with their friends for a little "socializing" with the enemy.
Religious fanaticism will be the death of us! The internet is just a modern way to spread its divisive and dangerous messages.
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Social media = the death of social society
Technology is neutral, that goes without saying; it is a machine.
The USE of that machine cultivates extremist ideology, because unlike newspaper classifieds, supermarket notice boards, and the local bar, when a person, resentful and harboring a belief that "Jewish globalists are killing the American dream" or "caravans of illegals stealing jobs" or "Muslim's seek downfall of Western world", seeks out affirmation, they need only type those words in Google and find articles, forums, and like minded individuals to engage in hateful and rage inciting fairy tales which become more real, and pressing in their ecosystem. There is no desire to seek balance, truth, or neutral posture. Nor is there the usual silence, doubt and downright rebuttal an offline conversation would likely bring.
Technology is not the machine that populates the internet, human beings are. They build it in their image and for each person, a different internet experience unfolds on a daily basis. Unlike a machine, the human forgets that this experience is shaped by their interests and beliefs, and instead views the bubble of their creation as credible reality.
The danger is real. We are watching it unfold.
Our government is left with the task of correcting this problem and it needs to be addressed sooner than later, but this is where the task becomes impossible. Our government works for the companies and individuals that keep our politicians unable to make decisions that rely on common sense. We are on a one way ticket to a chaotic breakdown of our civilization on a worldwide scale. The world is awash in money. A few have a lot of it and billions have none. This is a recipe for disaster, but the love of money is too great for those that relish the power it bestows on them. The caravan heading to our border is the tip of the iceberg and the internet brought them all together.
I quit Facebook. The party is winding down, so the time to leave was right. Indeed, if I'd stayed any longer I feel I'd be overstaying my welcome. When attending social gathering, there is an art to knowing how long to stay, and when to politely leave. Two or three years ago being on Facebook was like attending a community block party. People I hadn't seen in decades would appear. Some people would always be there. Some talked too much, some posted far too many photos, and others were judicious in what they had to say. It was fun. There would be large boasts, side conversations, discoveries, jokes, and a feeling of being welcome. However, things changed and like good fruit that sits out a little too long, things got sour. The party was crashed. Like people who have had a bit too much to drink, things got dark. Then it turned out that the hosts - Facebook - had no control over what was going on. Indeed, it turns out they didn't really care who was there as long as they remained in the room. So, I've deleted the account. Of course, it's not that easy. Facebook - for some lame reason - waits 30 days to actually remove accounts. The temptation, and even mistake of reentering is like having a cookie on the counter. I did go back once wondering if I'd made a mistake, but I quickly leaned I was right to leave. Indeed, the room was emptier. It was dull and predictable. That's it. The party is really over. All that is left are those guests that just don't know when to say good night.
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I think this problem actually goes beyond the internet, to Fox, Sinclair Broadcasting, etc. While newspapers have often been owned by wealthy men with agendas, I think their reporters generally had a pretty free hand, even if their editors didn't. People can now get bias and deliberate misinformation from old-fashioned media as well as the complete lunacy available online. We need to regain control of the public airwaves before we even tackle Facebook and Reddit...you cannot have the host of major network spin dark theories about some a DNC members suicide, or the tragedy of Benghazi, or whether ISIS has embedded itself in a group of desperate and persecuted Guatemalans. Propaganda has no place in a free society, nor does libel or hate speech, both of which are theoretically already illegal, but somehow out of control.
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The Internet is not to blame, we are. It is how we choose to use the tools we are given that leads to either our triumph or demise. It is our choice to either exercise self-discipline or not. I'm reading your article because of the internet, because I can do it online, which would not necessarily be possible for me in the state of Mississippi due to the costs involved with the logistics. If we want to stop the outsize influence of the internet, then we have to choose to become interested in each other and to build the networks that prevent people from becoming radicalized. It can be done -- it is our choice.
These days, the utterance of one crazy and destructive statement evolves into "truth" as it is picked up by the media and purposefully spread across the Internet by those whose intention is to cause harm. The Internet has altered the landscape and at the vey least, requires us to re-think freedom of speech. In the past, I reluctantly conceded that groups like the KKK had as much right to march as anti-war activists, or women. It was assumed that depriving them of that right would open the door to the further abridgment of free speech. This need not be the case. The law is capable of specificity, Removing hate speech from the Internet, and even making it illegal, need not inexorably lead to the curtailment of free speech in general.
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In the old days, great newspapers like the Times, the Washington Post, even the Wall Street Journal, were family owned (the NYT still is, of course) and felt a responsibility to present the news to their communities in a responsible way. For Twitter and Facebook, only profit matters, so they don’t care if extremist elements operate on their sites — that increases traffic. The first thing we have to do is treat these internet giants like we treated the old family newspapers. Had the NYT been a forum for a extremist conspiracy theories in the past, the owners would have been endlessly criticized and shunned socially. That’s a good place to start with the owners of Facebook and Twitter.
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Lately I’ve been trying to understand some people’s opinion that Obama was more divisive than Trump. I saw him as a wonderful unifier. I think I understand this better now. I now understand it was the internet and specifically social media which really came of age during the Obama era that was the divider. People airing their grievances and finally saying what they long thought, sometimes in dog-whistles. The veil was dropped and people wrongly attribute it to Obama.
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Brilliant insights, thank you for articulating.
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More and more thankful every day I never "joined" any of the social sites, as they seemed ripe for lying, manipulation and bullying from the start. (How old are you? Hmmm) Addiction to instant feedback from posts, positive or negative, is the biggest drug of abuse in this country, far more than opioids. These companies are milking us dry for money, wrecking social discourse, and tempting demagogues like Trump to deceive the aggrieved and needy. When will they accept some responsibility for providing the means to end our democracy?
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It is the user's fault if they blindly accept the opinions of others without researching enough to form their own. Lazy-minded people have always been easily led, and it isn't the fault of the medium if they lack intellectual curiosity. They are the same as those who blindly listen to Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, and just accept as fact what they are spoon-fed. The Internet allows a person to be informed like at no other time in history, if they will only use it.
Well said. Sadly, hard to go back to being a Luddite in the current economy. But since Mr. Trump aspires to be a strongman nationalist and gets a manic high from shouting “fake news” perhaps he should control the internet just as corporations run firewalls. But that would just push the rot to new mediums like WhatsApp. No easy quick fixes to the moral decay of our society. Sad, very sad.
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What amazes me is that according to Mark Zuckerberg, he is surprised that he unleashed such a "monster" . His views on humanity when he started Facebook were very naive. He thought everyone would just go "tapping" happily into "rapid communication land" with freedom and delight. Well human nature is very complex, as history has shown, and can be violent, hateful, disruptive, and selfish. What I do not understand now is why there are no regulations coming from Zuckerberg and our government, abolishing the lies and hate from the social media platforms. Have we not had enough violence, divisiveness, and misinformation that is helping destroy our civil society yet?
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Thank you Mr. Bruni for your thoroughly insightful opinion on a truly frightening topic. And you did it without mentioning you know who !
I was on an airplane a couple of days ago and the man sitting in the window seat was reading the NY Times in its paper version !
He could not have responded like I am now, just after reading your opinion on my iPad. And it is troubling for me for I actually dread pointing my finger towards my NY Times icon in tne morning and I have since being informed of the results of the 2016 Presidential election.
Frank, did you forget to mention that the left also has many bad people too? They are socialist that want to give people healthcare. How terrible. That is why we need a New York Democrat as president. They will be sure to be for corporations and the moneyed.
Your article is an over reaction to headlines. The death of 11 people is of course completely horrible and should not be minimized but to put this in context, 448 people have been shot in Chicago so far this year. None of the shootings had anything to do with the internet. The world is not ending.
The anonymous lack of accountability is what makes it deadly.
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What if instead of absorbing the rogue grievances in horror we start responding, en masse? What if we all sign-up for Gab and respond, not in anger and out-rage and criticism; but with rational, logical, fact-based, and compassionate rebuttals? We could start a movement to overwhelm the Gab site with reasoned responses. Kill them with kindness, and shutdown their servers with traffic. It's been said that a terrorist is someone who has not been heard. Suppose we use the internet to let the haters know that we hear them, and the VAST majority of us disagree. We need to stop allowing them to victimize us. We need to take back the megaphone. If we kick them off of Facebook they will start Gab. If we shut down Gab they will startup something else. The answer is not the technology. The answer is us and our willingness to confront the danger-- out loud, en masse, but without rage.
The New York Times does a great job of moderating their comments -- these comments. More so than any other outlet. This means it can be done.
The fascist movements movements that emerged in Germany, Italy and other European countries in the 1920s and 1930s, not to mention the Ku Klux Klan in the United States, acquired a mass following long before the Internet came into existence. The "liberal" case for censorship and suppression of free speech -- and this is precisely what is being advocated -- reminds me of the arguments that were being made by many prominent liberals for the loosening of restraints on torture and the curtailment of democratic rights after 9/11 (i.e., "The Constitution is not a suicide pact.") We know where all this led.
Prior to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq between 2001 and 2003, most of the information and arguments debunking the pro-war narratives of the Government and much of Establishment media (including this newspaper) were published by left-wing Internet sites. Access to many of these sites is now being restricted, under pressure from the government and prominent Democrats, by Google and Facebook.
The arguments that are being advanced to suppress the Internet, however dressed up as well-intentioned efforts to "combat hate," are profoundly unconstitutional. Moreover, there is good reason to believe that the main target of efforts to suppress the Internet will be the anti-war and socialist left.
1
Social media is at the heart of many of the issues we face today. Some messages are replete with vitriol and hate. Make no mistake, prior to SM a lot of angry, hate filled people lacked the means of spewing forth their anger/prejudice. Now, such messages appear on cable news 24/7. We don't listen and learn from one another. We YELL.
1
To begin with, when we have the Orwellian double-speak of "social media" for what is almost entirely an asocial and often narcissistic interface, how can we NOT expect problems??
It's not the internet generally, but most 'social media' that is a metastasizing lie.
2
Here's one way to curb the 'distortionists' and bomb throwers on the internet: Make it against the law to use pseudonyms. It's anonymity that's fueling the excesses - allowing hatemongers to spew without consequences. End it. Force people to own up to their views. End the anonymity, one country at a time. I know it's a reach, but it might just be the best way to get a grip on this mess.
2
Advertisers need to be pressured to stop supporting platforms like Facebook and Twitter. That will starve them out of existence.
1
An aside, of sorts: It’s astonishing to me that neither this column nor any of the many comments I’ve read so far even mentions the Russians’ exploitation of the Internet to subvert the 2016 U.S. presidential election — the event that brought us the abomination in the Whte House and the countless horrors stemming therefrom.
1
Given that Trump uses Twitter to indulge his darkest whims and maniacal fantasies shouldn't our focus be on the misdeeds of the perpetrators instead of the platform that serves their dark and deadly motives?
The fact that the CDA failed to limit unlawful use of the Internet documents the need for revisions in the law that require platforms to stop hosting unlawful acts. Presently the CDA protects it. Lawmakers could call revisions to the CDA, the Libel/Hate Speech Run Amok Amendment.
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The genie that came out of this technological marvel - magic! all our dreams will come true! - is, indeed, a complicated matter.
It's so easy to travel to dark corners, and some of us never find our way out again, trapped with people we don't know but who instantly become intimate friends except they are really strangers.
I did Facebook exactly one half day. I thought I had sent a trusted friend something I did not want shouted from the rooftops. My friend immediately wrote back. Did you know you posted that on 'the wall' instead of just to me, he said? I almost had a heart attack. I deleted it (though, of course, it's floating out there - like space junk, floating forever in 'the webs'. I deleted Facebook instantly. I don't do Instagram. I don't do Twitter. But I do read political stuff instead of picking up a book. I do read and write comments way more than is healthy. After the midterms, no matter what happens, I'm turning off the tv and internet and listening to my old records on my new record player. It's all so addictive. And they make it so it is. Just like the food industry - so many choices! - addicted us to the inner aisles of a grocery. Do people sit around during meetings at Facebook, plotting how to micro/mini/targeting to sell you what you don't need and not even thinking about consequences beyond making money?
We are such an intelligent species, and yet so very, very stupid. Ants do better. Bees do better.
Why can't we?
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Sorry Mr Bruni, you are wrong. The internet won't be the death of us; it is just a medium for the vile manipulators who have destroyed society - a society that was inclusive, kind and caring. The real killers are the anti-social machines of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like. I detest them and have never made them a part of my life. The internet can be a source for good, if we so choose to use it that way.
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I didn't even get past your headline, Frank, before thinking to myself, "He's right. It will." I've been saying exactly these words for the past, oh, three years. But maybe it's just us who will be the death of us--our apparently incurable addiction to hate, violence, greed and selfishness.
1
To make a good start, and by way of example, the NYT should institute new rules that commenters on its site must use their full and correct names and places of residence when commenting. The names and places given to the Times when the subscription was paid for.
If you haven't noticed, there are many commenters with unlikely four-letter names and ESL-for-slavic-speakers sentence construction leaving false and tangential remarks on almost every article.
2
Here I am in California, reading Mr. Bruni, who could have been almost anywhere when he wrote this, for a New York newspaper (which isn't made out of paper, at least in the form it was delivered to me). It's very early in the morning, and rather than find pen and paper to write a response and then an envelope and stamp to mail it off for delivery in several days, I'm here typing away on a little gizmo, my words soon available for view by many millions, all of whom could read and respond in turn if they were inclined.
Wonders.
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Indirectly, it will be the death of us. The direct cause will be violent civil strife, a result of getting to 9-10 billion people with insufficient resources, and an altered climate that forces upheavals and shortages in all of the major systems of modern commerce and civilization. The ironic reality is that the internet, a supposed enabler of unprecedented connectivity, is actually the most isolating technology in human history. The nut jobs radicalizing themselves online are generally misanthropic sociopaths to begin with, and the internet allows them to further distance themselves from daily, face-to-face interactions with other (and diverse) people. When one is forced to live and work with others, bonds are built and healthy relationships formed. Eliminate the face-to-face interactions, connect - in the isolation of your computer world - with the minority that is like you, and the inevitable result is civil strife and even violence.
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Eloquent. You write so well, Mr. Bruni:
“Enclaves of the internet warped the worldviews of all of these men, convincing them of the primacy and purity of their rage.”
I tend to read liberal sites/blogs that match, affirm, and amplify my views. I eschew/avoid sites/blogs that don’t match my thinking.
Maybe I am just as warped as those men.
Democracy is much more endangered by the fact-liberated propaganda of right-wing media. It, not the Internet, is how we got here.
Bruni is ticking alone withnicely, then he flies off the tracks and demonstrates he's victim of the disinformation echo chamber he's against: "... there’s no discerning the real from the Russian."
That's trollwork, not analysis. Insult a whole nation, reinforce a false generalization created by his side to cover it's own backfire manipulation of a primary.
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It's guns. It's Trump. It's the internet. All nonsense. Whatever happened to individuals being responsible for their own actions? In article after article something else is always to blame for events that, so far as we know, were one-man shows of pathological obsession and violence. Oh well, you know, maybe he had a rough childhood, his girlfriend broke up with him, he didn't get the promotion he thought he deserved, they cancelled his favorite show, his hometown team lost the big game, it rained today. Whatever the complex series of triggering events we want to blame everything and everyone but the actual perpetrator.
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Let's try sensible gun laws. And keeping them out of hands of most men.
They identified 11,696 anti-Semitic posts after the Tree of Life massacre. Without the internet and the ability to post, what would you cite to make your point? The amount of hate speech on the internet is a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself. If you develop censorship as a tool, then soon we will be a society with a hammer solving every problem as if it were a nail.
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What makes the Internet dangerous is it’s anonymous nature. See my posting name Above? No last name. We are free to post w/o identifying ourselves, and as a result can express the worst of our natures. Require every one to post with their full name, photo, and IP address, and watch the change in posts. There’s nothing in the First Amendment that guarantees a hiding place.
I use the Internet for lifelong learning and I am grateful to have it.
How about this? Hate facilitated by "social media" has become a socially-transmitted disease?
How come no one ever says what will really be the death of us? It is dominant masculinity that transforms everything, from fists to a club to a gun to money to populism to the internet into a power grab. I know and love lots of excellent and kindly men, but every time I open the paper, I see that someone with a gun or a well of resentment has taken his anger out on a lot of other people who were minding their own business but managed to offend him anyway. The power of this masculinity to destroy everything around it is constantly underestimated and then does it again, much to the surprise of those who thought laws would work, government would work, checks and balances would work. The internet is a tool. We have learned to make tools, but we have not figured out how human males are to use tools without destroying each other or the ecosystem.
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Net is the symptom - not the disease. What used to be considered fringe & freaks is way more prevalent than we want to accept. Easier to blame their megaphone.
I don't consider anonymous internet speech worthy of taking seriously. On the internet, odds are that it is produced by bots.
@Steve Bolger
I just left a post contradicting that. I would be interested in your reply when it is published.
Key point-many of those inciting online anger are foreign operatives, manipulating to wreak havoc.
Sorry Frank, there's a long line of things that will be the death of us. The Internet will just have to wait for its turn!
IMHO the internet, as a research tool, is amazing.
But, just as television could have been an amazing educational tool so too the net. It is those who use these venues as
as a means to more nefarious ends that are bringing down the whole world.
What will happen when millions of 3d printed guns are in the hands of the crazies?
Very thorny issue. In the beginning was a kind of separate reality before VR (Virtual Reality) allowed you to travel into a completely disconnected world: very similar to the travels a Marvel's superhero like Dr. Stephen Strange, the "Master of Mystic Arts" would undertake when entering through an "open door of consciousness a parallel dimension known as 'The Dark Dimension' ". I remember watching a program a long way back describing the Internet like a sort of "LSD trip" with a voice over answering questions a befuddled potential user would be asking: Q."where is the Internet"? A. "Is everywhere"; Q."who owns it"? A. "No one and everybody" (now we are the wiser), a sort of Matrix where you can travel with your mind and fantasy. On the other hand, if I am able to express myself using this space through which the NYT is generously allowing us readers to expose our own ideas and thoughts this is thanks to the Internet. Little did we know it would veer the same thoughts and ideas towards darker parts of us. But as reflecting life itself there's the good and there's the bad in everyone.
It turns out giving everyone a platform and a megaphone is not such a great idea.
I suppose it is too simplistic to suggest that the answer to this question is simply to turn the Internet off? What I mean by that is you, as the user, simply stop using it in obsessive fashion. Turn your devices off. And when using it direct your critical eye, always, at it.
But along with doing this how about an additional idea. Eliminate all anonymity from the 'Net. I know it might seem hard to conceive as to how to do it, and in our "free" society, it might be unpalatable, but the Chinese do a variation on it already.
Perhaps the West will need to do it as well. Some sort of "license to drive" may be needed for everyone who uses the 'Net; because a free citizenry is doing what a free citizenry always do, they are running amok and killing the golden goose for everyone. File it under the category of one bad apple spoiling the barrel.
In the end it tends to be the perception of anonymity that gives rise to all the vile human behavior that is rampant on the 'Net. Eliminate anonymity and then let's see what happens next. Perhaps it will inspire social responsibility.
John~
American Net'Zen
When we seek access to the wealth of information on the web, we may pay a small fee to subscribe to an ISP or choose instead to log on through "free" WiFi at a public business or a library.
But when we ultimately pay with bodies in Pittsburgh, Aurora, Layfayette, Orlando, San Bernadino, Montreal, Oak Creek, Roseburg, the WTC, the Pentagon and around the world, I would suggest free speech just like freedom itself is not free.
Using the Internet for self-expression should be a privilege not a right. Ostensibly such submissions are screened for their content but obviously not nearly enough.
Donald Trumps tweets are a perfect example. Just because he was elected President does not give him the right to post lies and hate mail. Or to suggest immigrants are coming for nefarious purposes, or that their babies are illegal.
Or Fox News to broadcast misinformation or Rush Limbaugh to incite anger, the list goes on.
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The internet is not the blame its simply the conduit, the megahorn for angry people. America in the year 2018 is seething in anger. The anger is there without the internet, the anger is there without politics, the anger is there. People are very unhappy with their lives, many are lonely, many can't find someone to love them. There are probably more people living alone than at any other time in this nations history. The internet did not create any of the problems in America. The problem is the problem that comes out of the realization that the America dream for most people is unattainable. The big lie of America "as the greatest country in the world" is being laid bare. America can be the greatest country in the world if it wanted to be but our leaders want us angry and desperate, they want to exploit the workers and keep them slaves to health care packages. People are slowly coming to the realization that things could be much better, and should be much better. The American people are fed up and angry but dont see any way out. Both political parties are run by people with their own agendas, and the happiness of the American people is not on the list.
With the two political parties at war with each other-the prospect that things will get better for the American people, that we will get free health care, free college and other things that will make life better are nothing but pie in the sky. And the anger builds.
There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. We must accept it as a given now that paranoid, ill-informed lunatics on the fringe have instant internet aggregations previously unthinkable, and encouragement in their delusions. And it certainly is made worse by our Mad Twitterer in Chief being another source of this encouragement. The answer is not so much censoring the internet as getting together with your kids at the earliest ages, and giving them honest answers, and unconditional love. And put them into as many activities as possible which specifically do not require cell phones or the internet. This will tilt the playing field toward rational people with a conscience, which we badly need.
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Don't comments sections such as this one exacerbate the problem, giving voice to just about any position that can be presented in a civil tone? To complicate matters, then there is an opportunity to hit Reply and add to the opportunity for an audience and foment an errant discussion. Few if any Comment entries are read and edited by a person with a set of guidelines but pumped through some program designed to be "neutral" as I understand the process.
Of course, I am participating in that noise myself and need to take a hard look at that.
Mr. Bruni,
The internet will be the death of us if we allow this Frankenstein communicator to take over our lives. It is a tool; a powerful one used on a global basis, and one that has also been a life-saver in the times we are living.
In another era, my parent living in Paris when I worked at a bank believed our phone exchanges were being recorded, and I did not have the temerity to reply that the firm was not interested in her velvet drapes.
A skilled mathematician, an artist, architect and a mistress at chess, until her death at an advanced age, she might have been brilliant at knowing how to use the internet with discretion.
It was never about her 'velvet drapes' in the end, but the principle and virtue of discretion, and had she known that Alice here was peppering The New York Times, with comments to all and sundry, via this out-of-control wonder of modern technology, she would have shouted 'Off with her head!'.
Fortunate are we in America to have Freedom of Speech, but whether we know how to use it, with decency and decorum, is another matter all together. Some of us are having trouble keeping up with the News and some of us do not wish to know. Some of us choose to remain in a recognizable bubble feeling safer, and become detached.
A friend and I had a phone exchange earlier this evening, and one word only was enough for us to pause to feel a moment of sorrow, remembering the Past, and facing the Now. It was 'Synagogue'.
I read this article from a small city in Austria, over the internet, while sipping my coffee before going to work. What a luxury. We all share the same frustrations of fake/alternative/hate-filled trash on the internet, but the technology is not the problem - the news in my town is horrible. The local media is primarily owned by the catholic church, the choice between boulevard press and conservative christian media does not provide much opportunity for freedom of expression, nor control over propaganda. I assume is it similar throughout most of the world. The idea that the internet has introduced to a smorgasboard of propaganda and manipulative news is of course non-sense - it was always there. I do not have the answers, nobody does at the moment, but I suspect that we need to look hard at libel laws, free-speech laws, etc. and in attempt to reign in a bit of what has, through the internet's turbo Modus, gotten a bit out of control. But we should sacrifcie the incredible freedome and positive potential that the internet provides - it needs to be tweeked not thrown-away or condemmed to blanket misstrust. Throw away or shun the internet, and you can go back to your local news and hear only what your local mayor and business association want you to hear.
There is an organized, politicized front end driving the cycle of false information which is then spread indiscriminately by the gullible and their friends who will not check real facts. The GOP "think tanks" in D.C. and their funders bear a great deal of responsibility for this. It is not just Trump, Bannon, Stone et al, it is the likes of the Federalist Society with its covert financial racism and willingness to be the minions of the 1%. There is a head to this poisonous snake filling the radio, TV and the Internet with toxic PR. Those GOP anti American efforts need to be scrutinized and new laws drawn up where necessary. The outcomes these think tanks pursue destroy education, infrastructure, healthcare, and environment below what the Constitution demands as a political democratic country.
Many Islamic terrorists across the world have become radicalized from various sites on the internet, years back. Dylan Roof predates our current President. Trying to simplify the far right wing domestic terror attacks on Trump's failure to condemn white nationalism is beyond simplistic. Perhaps some feel more emboldened, and more sites have sprung up on the net, but it's likely that ALL hate sites, right wing or left wing (they kind of cross over/meet when it comes to Islamic terrorism against Jews), are increasing each year. That is the draw of the internet.
Years back a realtor took me to see a house in foreclosure, in my neighborhood, where a Muslim family, the women looked quite westernized, lived. On the screen in the living room were men in traditional dress watching an overseas imam preaching/screaming, shaking his fists, whatever he was saying. It looked quite scary-doubt he was lecturing on self improvement. Satellite TV is more limited than the net, but it too has worked its ugly magic.
In many regards, the internet can definitely bring out the worst in us. Would a Democratic president turn it back into educational utopia? Get real.
Social media has always catered to two of humanity’s basest instincts: voyeurism and vanity. But now it’s threatening our democracy, our decency and and our humanity. We somehow survived for thousands of years without it. Turn it off.
I am reminded of how our particular species has squandered the earth's bounty and shows no sign of adapting. Big brain, minute scope of concerns.
Frank, your understandable concern is misplaced by blaming the Internet. The Internet only connected people, it didn't create their content. Your remedy of "policing the internet" is no remedy at all. You may police some people on the Internet, but you can't "police the Internet." The Internet is not content, but rather the connectivity to content. What we lack today is not going to be solved by some censoring of the Internet's content. It can only be addressed by good people rising to positions of leadership to lead a society that doesn't foster the bigotry, hate, lies and divisiveness that has polluted our exchanges. I am optimistic that those leaders will arrive, just in time. The mid-terms may be the start of the pushback and the election in 2020 is likely to be when the pushback is successful. As Barnum Bailey famously stated you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the time. The whole Trump entity is based on lies and lies are always found out. Of recent, the caravan's danger to the US is a lie, presidents changing the constitution by executive order is a lie, and the 10% tax cut for the middle class is a lie. This will all come to be known and since Trump can't change who he is, there will be more lies between now and 2020. Even his most ardent followers will come to see the emperor has no clothes. The country will learn and grow from the mess. Place the blame where it belongs. Not on the Internet, as it has no mantra.
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If you think we have problems now just wait a nano second.
Mark Zuckerman says artificial intelligence can weed out truth from falsehood. But humans make the decisions that define the AI algorithms. And those humans work for Zuckerman.
So we can have a free-for-all or we can have Zuckerman's or some other dweeb mind defining what is real.
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It is not the internet that is enabling all of this, it is social media. And specifically, it is social media accessed through smart phones that is the real problem. The social media companies and the phone companies are trying to maximize people's time on social media through their phones because that's how the companies increase their profits. And spewing this toxic mix of lies and hate is what is keeping people on.
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While the internet is more easily accessed and manipulated by the unethical, what isn’t? Bank fraud, stock fraud, fraudulent colleges, doctors taking advantage of Medicare, insurance fraud, etc. etc. etc. Where there is something beneficial to society, there are predators looking for a way to game the system. There is not something good in everyone.
It is the down side of technology that a bad idea, a bad intention, now has a major megaphone and world wide reach. Before the internet, a lonely, angry, potentially dangerous person, only had whomever was local and thinking the same to look to for validation. Now they have websites where all the misfits and malcontents can gather and feed off of each other.
Every day I pray for Trump to stop tweeting and not say anything that the world will see or hear. If he could be shut down the world would surely be a better place.
I'm so glad that you are writing about politics. You are continually the voice of reason at the Times, providing sensible commentary on these tumultuous times when many of your fellow columnists seem to just be stuck in permanent howl of terror.
You are not alone in being struck at the harm caused by the social web, at the way it seems to magnify the worst voices and take people who, in earlier years, might become nothing more than a bother to their families with "crazy talk" about politics and turn them into actual terrorists. (You neglected all the young Muslims from non-radical families who were recruited into ISIS via the internet.)
I'm not sure what to do either. We don't want to limit speech because that's the infamous "slippery slope," but at the same time, these privately owned sites seem to be doing a terrible job of policing themselves.
The internet is a prime example of Freedom without Responsibility.
You can't have an anonymous society, where people can not be held responsible for their words and actions, and expect civility.
Cyber-bullying, trolling and a host of other malignant activities would be quickly curtailed if they had to be done under real names, attached to real addresses that could lead to real consequences. By consequences I am referring to law enforcement and public shaming and shunning.
Yes, theoretically it would limit social activism and the 'Arab Spring' would be cited. The problem is that the Surveillance Industry is the first stop shop for budding dictators. The NSA and many others already have, and use, those tools to silent dissent.
When bullies and trolls appear in the real world (BBQ Patty and all the White Folks caught on video) their identity is revealed and corrective action taken.
The Anonymity of the Net is at the root of most of the bullying, trolling and fake news.
"It casts rogue grievances as legitimate obsessions and gives prejudices the shimmer of ideals."
So do certain well-known news sites!
All you say about the internet is true, but take another look at the violent perpetrators you mention here -- all men. I am not saying all men are violent, by any means, but you don't see the same phenomenon of women getting into dark corners of the internet and then going out and killing (or at least it's very rare). So we cannot just blame technology -- there are certainly social factors here.
"The Internet Will Be the Death of Us"
Frank, it doesn't have to be.
Darwin was right about the survival of the strongest. That's the way nature is - every being, every thing is in a competition with everything else to survive. But it goes beyond just an insect's struggle. Social Darwinism says this struggle applies to beliefs as well. This is the struggle we're seeing now between the left and right in politics - and it will be the beliefs and ideals with the broadest appeal which will survive.
The internet is the most manifest example of this. It is a cauldron of beliefs, good, bad, and otherwise, all competing for survival. It is the single most important instrument of social evolution, writ large. Some beliefs will win, some will die. The question is, how will those beliefs shape society?
On the internet, might makes right. But that depends on the definition of those terms. What is "might"? Mere volume? What is "right"? Being the most prevalent? Even the meanings of these terms evolve, depending on and creating new perspectives and influence. The internet is a tempest of turbidity, ever changing, never static, with each belief competing against every other one.
The internet won't be our death. We may cease to exist because our beliefs become so cataclysmic that survival is no longer an option. But the internet wouldn't cause that. It would be our own inability to win in the battle of ideals which would be.
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I don't quite blame the internet for the incredible amount of sociopaths that find "their space" and shared twisted beliefs /grievances in fringe websites.
I do think companies that provide, maintain, and secure domains need to be better regulated.
Yes, free speech, right to assembly, free expression are all extremely important, and must be protected. But somehow a line ought to be drawn when it come to utterly destructive sites that offer sanctuary to speech, assembly and expression of despicable ideas.
One thing is to spew this venom anonymously expressed on-line. Quite another to do so face to face. Most people would lack the courage - which begs the question of course. They do know right from wrong, and act anyway.
Who ever would have imagined that “General Adversarial Networking” might lead to something vaguely Satanic? This isn’t some feat of magic, it’s a language game.
Blaming the Internet for the conflicts that people choose to perpetuate is about as absurd as blaming roads for automobile collisions.
I heartily agree. It seems to me that the internet is now a kind of virtual wild west, a simulacrum whose "realities" have now settled over society like a fog. Consider such things as pornography, trolling, hate-speech, and the fatuous and limited "discourse" of Twitter that have all now been normalized throughout virtually every level of society simply because of the always-on, always-present internet. Couple that with the fact the most powerful status markers among millennials are particular brands of laptops and cellphones and the open-armed embrace of nearly everything ported through them, and you have entered a reality that ceases to have a recognizable or attainable exterior (hence the profound crisis of partisanship eating away at democracy around the world; the internet is destroying the demos).
Marx called religion the opiate of the masses, and Derrida argued that there is nothing outside the text. The vast limitations of the internet have taken on the whiff of that opium and that prison.
"I think human consciousness, is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight - brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal."
Rust Cohle
And so the inevitable hysterical over-reaction to a real but solvable problem begins.
It’s actually quite simple:
Social media, (Not the internet, per se), serves no other purpose then to provide a global platform for people, ideas and issues that otherwise would be marginalized and should be ignored.
Not everyone deserves their 15 minutes of fame.
The providers of content on the internet, i.e., The NY Times and Facebook should certify and verify sites and pages to ensure a minimization of false information using an independent conglomerate, perhaps?
This can be done only with human eyeballs and brains.
An algorithm cannot determine truth, all it can do is search for terms that have been provided by the coder writing the algorithm.
If the information cannot be verified independently then it should be REMOVED, not given some sort of ridiculous rating that no one understands or pays attention to and the offender banned from the site.
Easy peasy!
The problem isn't the internet. The problem is the lack of critical thinking skills among too many citizens. Many people are unable to differentiate legitimate vs. fake news which explains why millions believe ridiculous conspiracy theories, are unable to differentiate facts from lies, and do not accept broad scientific consensus (e.g. climate change).
Our educational system needs to increase, greatly, teaching critical thinking skills in K-12 and college. Extremism requires gullible and angry men (and usually they are men). Quality education will reduce the number of gullible people.
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NYTimes 2017---
“Twitter Fails E.U. Standard on Removing Hate Speech Online
Google and Facebook, by contrast, now comply with the region’s demands to take down at least 50 percent of hate speech, upon notification, according to the study.”
European governments, especially Germany are debating how to regulate hate speech online---to pass laws, or to push the internet companies to do it. And they have stricter laws on privacy.
Frank, please discuss and compare to US.
We have never had MORE means to communicate ...while communicating LESS than we do now.
But don't forget that Obama never would have been elected if not for the internet and his creative use of web data mining. He had next to zero credentials to be president yet won using social media etc.
I agree that it would be nice to put the web back in the bag but tis too late...
There are immediate concerns, such as the sociopathies of the web and Trump, and then there are long term concerns, such as Anthropogenic Global Heating.
We have so much work ahead of us. So very much.
So, the only thoughts we should hear are those processed by the mass media washing machine?
The Internet is the epitome of free speech. (Well, it was up until a couple years ago and companies started screen scraping social forums to ensure their employees did not say something politically incorrect.) A platform EVERYONE can use to air their thoughts or grievances. I simply do not care if some of those thoughts are ugly. That only means that some people think ugly thoughts. (News flash!)
I am often astounded when 'bastions of the first amendment' seem to endorse censorship by publishing opinion pieces like this.
Yup! Let's only let people publish their thoughts if those thoughts are approved by the majority - or at least a large minority. Sounds like a nice Orwellian plan.
Terrific essay.
Madison Avenue and the mind benders finally break the people's mind. It started with Edward Bernays. You could look it up.
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One thing not talked about much is the fact that, given the Internet is addictive, withdrawal is difficult and painful. Such withdrawals and recoveries are major events in peoples lives. As is the failure of withdrawal. Internet cold turkey is a thought that makes our blood run cold.
Yet the New God is entirely vulnerable to all sorts of manipulation including just turning it off. Massive freakout and the gnashing of teeth would ensue within minutes. Panic would set in immediately. Millennials don't even have TVs or radios. Utter and instantaneous panic.
I think Frank is right. We're goners. Cue the great Ray Price "Under Your Spell Again." We are hooked and in trouble.
Those of us over 60 have been leery of the internet since the 1990's. However, it does enable me to contribute to your salary.
Yes, the Internet will be our undoing. Like most everything else, becoming enormously successful initially in a country that has no self-control or common sense and doesn’t believe in censorship has thoroughly wrecked what should have been primarily a good thing for mankind. Its ease of access and openness to the opinions of every misguided hate monger on the planet lend themselves perfectly to the fomentaion of hate. Worse, its inherent lack of security - while government, military, and industry insist, in the face of inevitable disaster, on tying vulnerable operations and administration of critical systems to it - make those systems ongoing targets for exploitation and even destruction. The cyber bad guys will always have the advantage. And the Internet is now so ingrained in society that there is no shutting it off or moderating it. Woe is us.
The Internet is a tool, just like a knife is a tool. It depends on how it is used. You can be a luddite about it or you can use it wisely.
I bet some people said the same things about TV, the radio, the printing press, etc.
What about MSNBC and FOX, etc.? Do they not serve the same purpose (albeit not to the extent of mass executions)? It's not the internet. It's our politicians, who are perfectly happy fueling their extreme bases and keeping their jobs.
The internet is like the Venus Fly Reap plant. It lures people in and brainwashes them. Once they are seduced people are willing to believe anything. It's the black hole of conspiracy theories. The dark side. It validates people's crazy beliefs by cauterizing their brains. And it provides a false sense of security to those seeking a panacea to their ills. There should be a warning like on a prescription container, "Can be dangerous to your health. Do not exceed recommended dosage." What many don't realize is that it can be a narcotic. It reminds me of subliminal advertising. That's what the Russian hackers did in a way. Proceed with caution because you don't know who is trying to manipulate your mind.
Well researched, elegantly crafted and forcefully argued Mr Bruni. Thank you.
Now let’s mobilize the wisdom of the crowd to craft the solutions
Pwa
As you say free speech and expression are king. They cannot he sacrificed. What needs to change is education. Kids need to learn from a young age how to navigate the internet and how to use it effectively. Technology is a tool and right now we’ve all been handed an electric saw without a single minute of shop class
Is self-control too much to ask? Used very sparingly the net can be helpful. Social media is poison but 5 minutes a day for a quick check in is pretty harmless.
Limit use to maybe 1/2 hour a day, avoid any social media that confirms your beliefs or points you toward like-minded people, no politics under any circumstances.
Keep in mind most of us are wrong or misguided most of the time. Stay humble. The second you start to feel right or righteous about anything, shut the device and take a walk.
the good news is studies (and my observation) is young people do not believe what they read on the internet.
What's surprising is old people do.
What's needed is education for both, not just math and a language but real education on how to understand and tolerate others.
Of course there's crazy violent people. Wouldn't you like to know who they are before they strike? Maybe thank the internet for publishing them? If a group is concerned, why don't they read the rants and publish their names? It was easy to read the bomber and shooter's thoughts and names, does anyone care enough to call them out?
Read Pinker and Durant and Wilson and Harari and others. Read history. It used to be much worse.
Let’s not forget that the entire Trump administration has been spreading false conspiracy after false conspiracy. The death of us in an unfit president unfamiliar with the truth.
The best way to solve our addiction to living online is to create an alternative that is more attractive. We need to have free community programs and activities for children, youth and adults, where we can participate in a variety of sports and activities instead of living on the internet every spare minute. If we are out more, we are offline less, and we mingle with other people of other races, religions, cultures and sexual orientation.
I don't know most of my neighbours. I have thought of organizing a get-together or even just talking to them, but I am afraid of looking too eager because everyone eyes you suspiciously if you are too interested in each other these days. Not so if you're interested in knowing about someone online who lives oceans away (then you're normal). If you start a conversation with a stranger offline, they immediately wonder if you have a motive of sorts, and why you can't just mind your own business and stare at your phone and just be in your own circle of life... does it mean you don't have friends you can text with while you're waiting for the bus? That's not the kind of person they should be talking to in the first place. So they live in their bubble and you go back to your own.
It will require a giant push and many people onboard to change this new normal, but one day we will get there if we keep trying. We have evolved. We can evolve more.
In technicum onlineum veritas. Certainly won't be the death of us, but it's made our nature abundantly clear -- and it ain't pretty.
"The Internet" is like a highway - it is fast, efficient, gets you where you want to go. A lot of people use it, just like a lot of people avoid Rt 1 and use I95.
The Internet is not the problem, anymore than I95 is the problem. It's the drivers, not the road. It's the destinations, not the route.
The fault, dear Bruni, lies, not in the stars, but in ourselves.
What we are arguing about here, is that people can be hateful, evil, violent crazy, vicious, manipulative, addicted, obsessed - and the internet makes it easy for them to connect to others who are the same.
I95 makes running guns from Georgia to NY easier - again, it isn't the highway. It's the gunrunners.
Human problems - trying to get the worst of us to not be the worst of us - don't get solved by railing about the technology they use. We can force better standards to identify hate speech; we can crate standards of editorship to remove the most egregious lies.
But in the long run? We are stuck with people being able to flock together - just as we are stuck with militia groups in small towns in Idaho. It is people we have to learn to deal with.
Of course it was good old snail mail that delivered the bombs.
And good old military grade weaponry that was the tool do deliver death upon so many innocent people.
Both very analogue.
Social media is analogous to the self-driving car. They are self-editing tabloids. Analogue journalism with its journalists, reporters, editors, and fact checkers is dying. Analogue journalism competes by being accurate and reliable. Internet social media compete for clicks. If FB had actual editors, it would cost money to maintain. It would have to stand by its content. It would have to charge money for its service. And its service would be to provide reliable content to its consumers. Instead the business model is not content, but popularity, and its money comes exclusively from a combination of advertising and data-rape. It doesn't serve the user, it serves the companies who advertise and analyze the users without their knowing. It's 1984, but Big Brother is the board of directors, not government. The cart is leading the horse. It is the definition of nefarious. We have let the robots take over the job of editing and let this viral business model replace fact with instant gratification.
The Internet is also part addicting drug, arousing sensations of pleasure in the release of anger and hate as perceived foes are verbally castigated online. After such conditioning these users will turn up at a Trump rally like addicts seeking a more intense experience screaming, "lock her up" and the like.
A addiction model of politics would also explain why actual issues and facts seem to be irrelevant to Trump supporters. What they seek and what they get is the pleasure of watching screens where fantasies of their perceived enemies being castigated are enacted. Health care? A sound and fair economy? These take a backseat to the intense drama of the TV or Internet addict. In sum, it's the combination of FOX and the Internet that provides fantasy screens for the hopelessly addicted.
The "internet" isn't the problem... the content is... and regulating content is difficult in a democracy based on free speech... and ANY regulation at all is impossible in a country where one political party gained its' prominence by declaring that "government is the problem" and the other political party's response a refusal to support government as an institution.
The best solution is to eliminate the profit motive in the "news" media by banning advertising and/or sponsorships on any show that is labelled "news". Our country needs a free press that is dedicated to ensuring the continuation of democracy as opposed to rewarding its shareholders. Here's a mildly outrageous proposal: eliminate news shows on TV. The major networks do not earn profit by offering factual reporting: they only earn it by entertaining viewers. CNN, MSNBC and Fox are not competing for accurate reporting of the news: they are competing for market share and doing everything possible to obtain and retain sponsors. C-SPAN's market share is dismal and it's revenue is probably low compared to the "news networks"..., but it's dry broadcasts of Congressional hearings are far more healthy to democracy than the bloviating pundits who draw viewers and advertising revenue to the so-called "news" networks.
Ridiculous. The same things were said about the telegraph, the penny press, novels, radio, television etc. It is *not* the technology. Technology is only human knowledge and nothing more. It has no agency. People do have agency, and can use the technics of communication to advance their interests. But it is those people, and what their interests are, and why that matter, not machinery. Focus, Frank.
Great premise.
Weak evidence.
Overall, disappointing.
In dealing with the conundrum of free speech vs untrammeled have speech, I'm reminded of Abraham Lincoln's comment that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. We should be able to take reasonable steps to restrict speech that is virtually incitement to riot.
The greatest risk to these social platforms....if users decide its too toxic and simply LOG OFF. There’s nothing on these platforms that MUST be consumed....it’s a choice.
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I learned a long time ago, not to believe everything that you read in the newspapers and the same applies to the internet. The answer is that each of us must learn to be more critical and discriminating in our thought processes so that we can distinguish the "true" from the "false" . Since that is learned behavior and part of the educational process, perhaps our schools -- and parents-- need to do a better jobs in teaching us how to THINK and evaluate information within the context of a system of values that represents who we are as a people. That is the only answer. The internet is here to stay. It is to late to turn back that clock.
3
I'm a dinosaur. I use my cell phone as a phone, not a computer. I resisted getting a cell phone for years, until I got fed up with people sending me text-to-landline messages, without asking if I had text, and the messages were flawed with an electronic female voice conversion. Now that I finally have a cell, it is obvious that everyone I know uses their cell as a computer (and expects me to do same). They live much of their lives online in some form or another. My heart aches for the days before the internet.
2
All primates, including humans and chimpazees , are social creatures that utilize non verbal means of communication such as facial expression and body language. Neither of these adjuncts to verbal communication are available on the internet. Add to this the confusion over the difference between beliefs and evidence and what arises is the toxicity of a addictive virtual reality system : the internet.
In my career as a manager I found myself transversing the two worlds of personal interaction and then, the world of internet. Two managerial principles evolved out of these two worlds I worked in: First, I recognized early on that workers would write things on the internet that they would never say to a person face to face. Second, I would repeat over and over again to colleagues and workers the following line: If you wouldn't say this to a fellow worker in person, don't write it in an email. I should add one more principle---don't use the internet to communicate highly confidential information---
It does seem rather gloomy right now, given what is seen from the unaccountable freedom of Internet. Freedom which we so highly honor turns out not necessarily so good as many have staked, if not given their lives for. If it’s not a fallen world, there’s clearly enough fallen-ness in it to do great harm ... as seen again and again in daily living presently in this land of free and home of the brave. And after the experience of the 20th century and all of the dead and crippled and extended suffering from war and savagery in those years, it ought to be clear broad intellectualism and sophisicated reason weren’t the “answer.” The Internet is just a new mechanism for some for causing more misery in having their way. You’d think unrestricted freedom would make for happiness. Well, it doesn’t; and there are those who will fight to the death, unwittingly for death in the noble cause of freedom.
If social media companies could be held liable for any crime foreshadowed by a user's postings -- in other words, if social media companies were made to bear more responsibility for the malicious content on their platforms -- they'd figure out a way to solve the problem tout de suite!
I have an opposite experience of twitter. My twitter feed is occupied by journalists, including Frank Bruni, because I like good writing. I can watch their conversation abt an issue from the right and left and learn so much. They can direct me to articles in various magazines and newspapers I would never know about on my own. It's not nasty only fulfilling. I don't have an IPhone so I don't know when I've received another tweet, but I check it 3-4 times a day. Twitter is my delight.
2
It was fairly obvious from the beginning that most information found on the internet was wrong - either purposefully or accidentally.
These articles always say at some point that it’s a great tool for learning. I remember before - people were better educated and better informed. And life was as efficient. Really it’s all a crock. The idea that the internet would bring about world peace was just marketing for device makers and bandwidth providers.
Why don’t we just take it down?
4
The internet also encourages action / reaction over deliberation. Speed and real time are vital to its efficiency and addictiveness. If what one did took weeks to register online it would be totally different.
I grew up in PA and was thinking 30 years ago that guy would have had to find a group of Neo-Nazis to talk to (there were plenty), get along with them somehow and then had enough back and forth with them to get the nerve to do what he did. It is likely he was too antisocial and misanthropic to see through this process with like-minded people, even if he found them.
The need for actual back and forth with people, that which is now lost, would have likely dampened his worst motivations.
Anonymity makes geniuses of fools and heroes from cowards. The internet extends the reach of those who would not say something to your face able to say it to the whole world. At first blush it would seem a huge 1st Amendment quandary but I would suggest maybe not so. While I'm no Constitutional scholar it seems to me that boundaries of free speech have been pretty well worked out for this situation. While I have every right to stand on a street corner and have my say I am forbidden from yelling "fire" in a movie house. And that's exactly what platforms such as Gab are allowing. In my humble opinion the Attorney General should seek action against any platform that promotes hate speech, and shut them down. There is no place for it in a civil society.
2
Inequality will be the Death of U.S.
2
Too tired to think tonight, but omg I love that Bruce Nauman neon object.
1
To paraphrase Aeschylus, “Nothing great in human life without a curse.”
1
How ridiculous for a columnist for the New York Times, a media outlet, which, like all media outlets, promotes an evangelical belief in "technology" at every opportunity, in any way it can, to write a column on the perils of the internet. At this late date. I stopped reading at the Nora Ephron reference.
And yes, I wrote this on a computer. There's a difference between using whatever the current standard is, and the current widespread evangelical view of "technology" as an entity that is currently speeding humanity toward utopia.
1
The internet may wrap around the home more tightly in the future, and perhaps like a Burmese python. It is possible that the coveted A.I. robots will replace the role of the family dog in the not too distant future, and will inevitably be programmed with racism slanted views, and carry out violent acts by the populace with an ax to grind. It is not hard to find ax grinders on the internet today, and tomorrows power punching robots could become a cancer on society as we know it. The firewall is on the internet today, but tomorrow’s firewall will be around the home, to prevent robots and drones from attacking, looting, and robbing. Imagine what a programmer could do with the junk robocall of today, harassing private robots on their dutiful jobs of pickup and delivery with highway robbery as commonplace derailment. Who will hack the EV charging itinerary on the internet to lie in wait for people targeted for robbery at EV charging stations? Imagine being robbed by an robot with no finger prints or discernable features that a police lineup could narrow down. Surveillance footage will no longer convict but confirm something went wrong. A robot could take a life very easily, making 1928 Chicago typewriter rubout’s all too common and virtually undetectable in the not so distant future, as individual assassination surpasses mass shootings as public outrage continues to chase its tail.
Sociopathic media based on surveillance economics rewards content that twitches the limbic system. Everything else follows from that incentive structure.
Long ago, newspapers learned not to publish anonymous letters to editors. Anonymity is the soil of cowardice and unaccountability.
4
...and the President has given the world permission to lie.
3
No Frank - it will be us who is the death of us.
1
Wait I thought television already killed us. We barely escaped the printing press alive, of course.
1
It is a 21st century version of the ‘Maschinenstürmer’ argument journalist Karl Marx confronted in his writings: In M’s days it was the machine powered looms that became the target of revolt because they were perceived to cause unemployment and to spread misery. M. wrote (this is no quote) that it is not the steam engine that impoverishes people but the social conditions (and mode of production) under which it is set in motion. An analogous argument can be made now: It is not the Internet per se that is to blame, instead the rising problems are nested in the social, economic, and cultural conditions that determine its use, i.o.w., it is highly unlikely a member of a local string quartet or choir will go out and shoot up people, but a mentally unstable gun fanatic with a closet full of weapons who gets cheered on by an echo chamber of like-minded buddies and riled up by a 21st Century Führer figure might do it.
1
What is the media? Answer: Anyone who publishes to the "Internet"....where "Half a truth is often a great lie." Benjamin Franklin. From the wisdom of our founding fathers: Truths become self evident....an individual responsibility through the gift of human reason.
Environmental degradation and overpopulation will do us in first.
3
Trump and FOX news do more to spread hatred than the internet. Fox is the enemy of the American people...at least those with critical thinking skills.
6
Frank Bruni's anguish about the internet, representative of many American's frustration, stem from a dogmatic attachment to the concept of free speech & free expression. Free speech given to undeserved hateful people is worse than letting high school kids publish the school newspaper with zero supervision. Bad idea.
@Observer Our founder disagreed with you. Hence 1st amendment.
@keith Noticed you did not use the term "founding fathers". Nice touch in the age of political correctness. The "founders" were just male tribal leaders of that chaotic period, each with their baggage like slaves and debts, trading horses to cobble together the Constitution & Amendments. Threw in the Electoral College. They do not warrant the veneration.
Change the title a bit to “Social Media will be the death of us”.
Much of it sure ain’t social.
Most of our great moral adepts said that gossip is poison.
The nature of gossip is irresponsible. Belittling, mean spirited. Piling on. Hypocritical.
Gossip is meant to elevate the self. Usually to demean someone else. Unfairly, probably. Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette know this, as do their fans.
Buddha knew it, it is explicitly in his teachings.
And that is what our minds are full of now.
It is all that the internet is. Not just the View or the tabloid shows, the news is a gossip. Every slot on every hour of cable news is a new angle to put down Mr. Smith, and praise Ms. Jones and to endlessly, and with wit, explain why, cunningly:
The definition of gossip.
Look at Donald Trump and how we scold him. We're out there leaning on the fence with our neighbors, arms akimbo. Today its the 5,234th lie! And his 100,000th fault! I can name them all! Im not kidding, I really can!
All this time we could be making art and working on preventing the famine in Africa instead of being hypnotized.
It is not that the lies or the flaws are irrelevant, but it is the way in which we consume them which makes them both surreal and real, makes things happen like wildfire, that never should.
Trump is the worst gossip of them all. The macho accused rapist who is fascinated by manipulating shallow celebrity.
Gossip about celebrities of every kind.
Every kind of gossip.
It is all that anyone is talking about.
And gossip is poison. It just is.
Ask your heart.
2
Perhaps a lot of the evil-incubating nature of the web would be greatly reduced if we illiminated net anonymity. If what one posted anywhere could be traced back to them personally, people would be a great deal more circumspect about what they posted.
No newspaper, including the NY Times, will publish a letter without publishing as well the author's full name and town, and keeping on file the author's address and other particulars. Yet they allow anonymous usernames for on-line comments.
Shouldn't freedom of expression come with the obligation of taking personal responsibility for that which is expressed?
Is net anonymity any different from the anonymity afforded by a white hood?
2
Happy Birthday, Frank.
And while you're closing down the internet, don't forget the printing press (Protocol of the Elders Of Zion), the soap box (Nazi Nürnberg rallies) and radio (Goebbels diatribes).
1
so far, in human history,
things that could be done were done,
no matter their consequences, good or bad:
see nuclear bomb throwing, cloning, genetic engineering,
to name only 3 [leaving out slavery, torture, genocide etc.].
now [a]social media won't go away.
- one big flaw is how they relieve us of any accountability
by allowing us to hide behind avatars, aliases, fake ID's.
- whether echo chambers make our lives heaven or hell
depends on how we are as people, BEFORE we enter them.
- whether [s]cambridge analytica's dark posts
["if you vote for hillary she will take your gun off!"]
make you vote for djt or make you LOL, depends on
whether or not you were taught to think critically.
that skill can be taught online and off.
yet, a number of influential people want to prevent just that.
if we had all the $$$ tax evaders, money launderers & co.
swindle our govts out of annually, we could do so much good.
inequality in education*), in economic status, health CARE ...
would there be less rage & hatred in need of venting online
if lives offline were comfortable for all, not just for 0.1 percent?
fix the dark sides.
and invite your real-time friends over every once in a while.
______________
*) as someone who works with texts & languages for a living,
i tend to be irritated - and saddened - by the amount of users
who find correct spelling or complete sentences challenging.
[a different story. which does not include NYT commenters :-)]
“Technology has always been a coin with two sides: potential and peril.”
I worked for a company in the late 1990s that helped companies connect their internal processes to the internet. It was exciting and expanded the reach for so many businesses.
But around 2013, we discovered the NSA was collecting information on US citizens generated by their own use of communication technologies. Bad news, bad strategy. The trade off of privacy for security was the underlying rationale.
Then there’s the dark web, where the illegal or immoral can be bought and sold. Human trafficking. Prostitution. Drug sales. Unregistered weapons. Allegedly the dark web contains more than 90% of actual internet transactions. I’m not sure of that number.
But, to me, 2015-2016 really highlighted the darker side of social media. Not that there were differences of opinion, but that opinions, however radical or misinformed, were thrown around as fact. More importantly, discussions devolved into diatribes. Minds were not being explored and changed, they were becoming more entrenched. Those who disagreed with another’s “position” were castigated as morons, losers, “libtards” or “Republithugs.”
In a book I’m writing about my experience with cancer during the health care debates of 2017, I refer to the phenomenon of internet devolution as “social media psychosis,” an inability to hear or be heard as one human to another.
This psychosis was evident in the rants of this week’s perpetrators of evil.
1
The internet is like a bad tooth that needs to be removed. Especially in the area of the nation's infrastructure which is now so dependent on it. It makes us more vulnerable to really bad things that make ignorant postings by morons look lake a day at the beach.
Most wealthy people now send their children to schools without internet or electronic access. There's a reason for that. They know the dependency and damage will only get worse.
1
Mr. Bruni is caught ( tu quoque, Frank?) in the midterm election as all the op-ed staff by merely putting together the more disparaged and bizzarre news he's red recently.
Except that there is no "internet" who wrote them. People did.
As much as the nytimes reports of that zany episode on whatsapp in Brasil, so other people do the same with piece of information they get. Newspaper don't hold the unanymous truth anymore.
Now it's about critically informing themselves.
If someone can't judge about what is true and what is false that means he has to train better his mind and trust some big newspaper, or even better some news agency which are the most politically neutral source of information due to their rapidity in posting the article and their succint forms in describing the event.
If that don't fit into the nytimes' opinion staff rationale, so be it.
Once you know newspapers have their own agenda, it's a matter of finding the space where to have a discussion, and up until now there was no evidence someone else (or this "internet" guy) makes them do evil thing.
That was their own individual act and they should take personal responsability for that.
I would very much like to read how mr. Bruni justifies the op-ed of mr Friedman today on nytimes using the nazi tactics of repeating, nonetheless a whole paragraph long!, the imperative inciting order to vote Dems, in front of a centrist, a republican-leaning or even an independent reader?
1
@Alex p
Please Nazis tactics have been used many times even before there were Nazi's.
Nazi's only refined their creed and made poison out of candy. A little Critical Thinking and just a touch of putting yourself in another's place can help to show how stupid that creed is.
Like the rise bush: there are beautiful flowers but also thorns that pricks. So what’s one to do? I just visit Facebook periodically to see what my real friends are up to.... and I totally avoid any political posts.
Thé âge of Trump also contributed to the open acceptance of hate.
No matter how stupid and insane your thinking, you can go online and find 10 million people just as insane and stupid. We've empowered stupidity and insanity, made it impossible for most to call it out as stupid and insane.
The internet is also where the NYT is most readily accessible...
1
No matter how old we grow, human beings need structure. We need boundaries. Without them, we grow anxious, and some of us act out on our anxiety.
Boundaries by and large do not exist in cyberspace.
Let's have some accountability. Regulation is an idea I'd support.
Every human being who wants to post things on the internet must register -- name, address, email and phone number. No more anonymity.
The problem goes well beyond the mass murderers: the internet played a major role in the rise of Trumpism and -- yes too, in conspiracy-mongering on the left. Even if the right does far more of that. 15 years ago, my late and fiercely Republican aunt ardently forwarded baseless claims alleging that Hillary refused to meet with Gold Star mothers. Many on the left are still convinced the only reason Senator Sanders wasn't the nominee was a DNC conspiracy, a conclusion that calls for a lot more scrutiny about the 2016 primaries than they've provided. A popular FB chart claims the US spends many times as much on defense as health care, which is preposterously wrong. Extremists and murderers find fertile ground on the internet, for certain. But so does our dark new nation where everyone has his or her own facts -- especially the right.
1
There is no paradox. Information is not knowledge. Knowledge had value and power because it was nurtured by cultural institutions for shared purposes. Science, religion, academia, the arts all created standards and purposes. A meaningless marketplace of decontextualized information, which is what all our media, not just the internet, has become, serves no purpose but enriching the people who profit from it. The internet was designed to make money by spying on us and selling our data. It was not designed to be a font of knowledge. You could have opened up all the libraries of the world, destroyed the cataloguing systems and piled all the books up randomly in people's houses and done more to foster knowledge & communication than the internet. It simply feeds people what they want, while robbing them of the focus and structure to make constructive use of what they think.
Dispense with the notion of anonymity. that would seem to be a good start.
I read the NYT on the internet ... didn't used to read it as much when I had to lug heavy paper around - better informed I am thanks to technology.
I could give a hundred examples of how this technology has enriched me/extended my capabilities positively.
What controls get put on this technology and by whom and against whom? I bet if Trump could have his way he'd shut me - and you Frank - down to some degree.
The problem is 3 fold.
We are deficient in our education - our emphasis has been on producing people that "know" things - things we cook and feed them. Scholarship/critical thinking/real cause and effect are not paramount - knowing the "right" answer is.
We - at highest levels - have devalued truth and higher values - and made everything important highly political or secretive. I could cite a 100 examples - but consider these - how can we not have a cost efficient universal healthcare system in place by now? why do we not have REAL HONEST scientific measures of economic/environmental health officially presented before us?
We allowed the GOP to win by cultivating division, elitism, fear, distortion - and worst of all - by not measuring them against any real rigorous egalitarian success criteria. Winning is the only criteria they consider for themselves. Their base only that that advances their personal theocratic or racial or plutocratic objectives. A recipe for the darker side of things.
Even if the internet didn't exist, fox "news" has done an exemplary job of highlighting the bigotry of trump. They and all the MSM have given him a pulpit that is inexhaustibly hateful. He incites the people at his rallies by spewing catch words that make him their hero. He blames immigrants, the media and just about every other group for their inability to assimilate into what they believe is an irrational society. I miss the days when people talked, even argued with each other in person.
Trump is a master of the media. When the lights are up, he comes alive. But the masses that follow him are filled with hate; they abhor the Other. What most of them don't realize, is that they are a minority of Americans and that their hero did not really win. Next week let's remind trump etc that America is a nation of immigrants, white, black, brown, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, gay, straight, trans, male, female, Democrat, republican and independent. Together we can win over the tyranny of trump.
With so many of us suffering from Post-Election Traumatic Syndrome these past couple years, let us not yet give up hope that somehow the worst is behind us. No, the internet will not kill us.
standard Machiavelli - 'unify the people by identifying a common enemy'
disparate dispossessed happily unite behind flags of 'we don't like them' - it gives otherwise insignificant individuals the chance to appear energised in public, as part of a greater group, as if they have friends.
unfortunately as I learned in protests with good people, such crowds attract criminals who hide in the crowd to commit acts of violence, and the entire crowd can then be blamed for the acts of a tiny few.
"Democracy is at stake. So are lives."
Enshrined in the Bill of Rights are freedom of both speech and press. Technology has made such guarantees extremely dangerous. The most vile and evil speech and writing is shared at light speed to eager like minded audiences at no cost and under very little restriction.
Anyone should be able to stand on a stump and chatter to their hearts content, or print and hand out pamphlets to all interested passersby. Under such conditions dangerous nonsense would quickly die on the vine, information being both expensive in effort and money to propagate, thus unlikely to overwhelm consumers.
Now an avalanche of garbage is poured into the eyes, ears and minds of even the most passive and uncurious. This will not end well.
It is not the case that people are generally both logical and rational, especially when overloaded with unverified, and often intentionally misleading or false information.
It may be the case the we are at the limits of unrestricted, automated communication when the fringe that lurk in the dark backwaters of the internet are more and more frequently radicalized to kill, and we are helpless by law and love of freedom to stop them.
Political hijacking of countries is just the beginning. Wait till the monetary system and power and communications grids are hijacked. We’ll hate the internet a whole lot more.
What social media do is exactly to publish the writings of individuals. What people on facebook do is write opinion pieces that are then delivered to subscribers, otherwise known as friends, and the effect is the same as if a newspaper with those opinions had been delivered to the recipient. I don't understand how the ceo's and executives of these so called "platforms" can escape exactly the same responsibilities as publishers who do what they do more slowly with paper. Freedom of speech does not mean that a newspaper can publish any maliciously conceived reputation destroying lie about a person or a business without being held liable and facebook etc should be no different. But then they would need to hire some kind of editors to review every post before it is posted. That is how it should be and if facebook disseminates a post asserting that a well known politician raped someone in the back room of a pizzeria we should think of Mr. Zuckerberg as being fully responsible for the statement as much as if he had said it himself because in some sense he did. Calling Facebook a "platform" of course is the ultimate rationalization.
I am on the same page with your sentiments. I was a Mac evangelist and trainer of advertising creatives back in the mid-80s through the birthof the "worldwide web", enamored and as passionate as Parsifal. Now, at being70 I have returned my modem to Spectrum, have no television since 2005, and my sole connection to technology is my son's old IPhone 5. After Trump was elected I saw where our wonderful egalitarian cyberspace was asphyxiated by malignant advertising, and the rise of mediocrity and populism. Frankly I knew we were in serious trouble when Kim Kardashian started making the front page of the Times. We were unprepared for the eruption of hate that is strangling our democracy.
I have retreated back to my first love, painting, and just read headlines now, and even that is too much!
Someone - Alfred Nobel? - once pointed out that human beings will weaponize any technology we develop. The internet is turning out to be a glittering example of both our creativity and our innate savagery.
Walt Kelly's Pogo had it down clear. "We have met the enemy and it is us." Humanity has not changed to any satisfactory degree for thousands of years and the horror that is driving us to extinction in approximately twenty years has no real will to change. The internet is a mirror, nothing more.
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I firmly believe that ALL online media should block comments sections. We should return to letters to the editor to communicate dissent. This platform is just too anonymous to be trusted and merely foments hatred. The guarantee of free expression does not mandate that everybody has the right to publish anything they want. Newspapers have editorial discretion. This should extend to websites. Ban comments sections on all online media and we will have gone a long way to squelching this scourge
Anonymity is the problem...take that away and let all your colleagues, employers, friends and family know what you really think? Instant return to civility.
One has to be optimistic, there isn’t any other choice. And it is ridiculous to think that this technology, that is a communication technology, is going to destroy civilized society.
Communication is always the remedy, not the problem.
We are more likely still simply recovering from the bad effects of the old television. The old television was bad because you sat in front of it like a vegetable. It softened the underbelly of the mind.
But this new television is going to make us collectively stronger. It is just going to take a generation or two, or three, before all the good stuff really takes hold.
But one has to be optimistic, there isn’t any other choice.
And where did Trump come from ? He came from the old television. « The Apprentice «, I think his show was called. All the soft underbelly folks watched it, like vegetables.
It is not just the internet. We need to examine propaganda purveyors such as Fox News. It is not permitted to shout fire in a crowded theatre when there is not fire. It is possible to apply some test on subversive lies that present existential threat to the nation. The First Amendment is an important foundation of our constitution, but it should not be a suicide pact.
The question is do we have evil because of the internet or does evil exist and the internet has just given it a wider platform. Maybe, a little bit of both. The recipes are clear. Get off the internet (social media, email, apps) a bit more often, spend more time with your family, friends and neighbors and go to the elections.
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Freedom to print a pamphlet advocating any point of view is distinct from access to a printing press.
While our public square now includes the internet, the establishments “there” maintain the right to control access.
If I visit a favorite or new coffee house/restaurant/bar/bookstore/etc and find hateful or violent people I leave and if I tell the owner why I am leaving they can choose how and whether to make their establishment enticing to me again.
Twitter/instagram/Facebook/etc are businesses and will respond, but only if you tell them why you are leaving.
And just as you would do in person, be polite and courteous when telling the owner of your concerns, after all, you want them to want your business.
And you highlight only the most grievous and violent examples of internet horrors. Think of the millions impacted by cyber bullying (one reason why teenage suicide rates are high),the proliferation of child pornography, the wasted hours spent by young people on internet games, the plethora of dating sites that are really just ways to have uncommitted sex and the internet generated willingness of everyone to accept any false statement because it was made on the internet. Preaching hatred may be the most glaring negative aspect of the Net, but not the most pervasively destructive. Unfortunately, in a free nation (at least for the time being) there is no way to impose meaningful controls. All we can do is "teach our children well" and hope for the best.
One idea is for each of us to start with ourselves. Commit to at least a few hours a week (if not a day) of non-screen time. We are all addicted and we all need to withdraw. Get to know some people in your town face to face instead of through facebook.
If we don't all take some responsibility for how this addiction is depriving us of healthy, secure attachment (which is biologically critical for a sense of well-being), then your headline come to be true.
The Internet Will Be the Death of Us
It casts rogue grievances as legitimate obsessions and gives prejudices the shimmer of ideals.
Well, the title lured me in, and the content lured me out.
I agree with the content; wholeheartedly; I support it. But the title promised to reveal something much more general, much more pervasive, much more human about the internet than the rant that the body of the essay delivered.
A downer, but it's not a criticism; the title ought to have been chosen differently and more carefully.
Complaining about "the internet" because of the dirty deeds that go on there is like railing against "the telephone" because of robocalls and terrorists using mobile phones. Both the telephone and the internet are communications media that are available to anyone for virtually any use. No one seriously considers tampering with the phone system, or "policing" it, because of the villainous uses to which it can be put, and no one confuses the perpetrators of robocalls with the network itself.
The author's quarrel, and those of his many like-minded colleagues, is with privately run organizations like Facebook and Twitter which operate using the internet. Unlike that network, they are centrally controlled and we know who is responsible. It would be more effective to direct our ire toward those authorities rather than just bemoaning the existence of "the internet".
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Our tools and inventions aren’t the problem, Frank. We’re the problem. The internet, especially social media is just a faster, easier way to express the worst characteristics of our species. The historical record is clear - we have been cruel and violent towards one another for millennia, using only the tools of the time. All new technologies have been and will continue to be “weaponized”.
Nobel believed his invention, dynamite, would end all war. The same naive assumption was made about the Gatling gun and the atomic bomb.
Why would we have assumed things would be different with the Internet?
“We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
Only when victims of stalkers, truthers and the like band together in a class action lawsuit against the all-powerful, too-powerful internet companies and platforms will this be resolved.
People do all sorts of crazy things when they think they are anonymous online (which, due to ISP addresses, is rarely true).
But when they carry that fantasy state into a gun store - or a voting booth - we all suffer.
Don't believe everything you hear. Wise words which should be modified in the Internet age to say: don't believe everything you hear, read or see on the Web.
An antidote to the evil made accessible and magnified by the Internet is education. Education must begin in pre-school and continue throughout one's life. Curriculum must teach and reinforce the need to question, double check, triple check what we hear, read, see on the Internet.
Education must teach students to distinguish between reputable, reliable, fair, honest media and propaganda outlets.
Education will inoculate sane people from the evil that the Internet spreads. As to the insane people among us, only medical attention can help them. They should be observed, even monitored if they demonstrate a propensity for evil.
Social media platforms should end anonymity. That alone would deter much of the evil that echos through the Internet. Insane people are just as afraid as sane people of being exposed or held accountable for wild lies. People hide behind anonymity to say terrible things they would never say out loud (unless they are Donald Trump).
Just as DNA identifies us, just as a social security number identifies us, just as a drivers license identifies us, people who use the Internet should be required to have an Internet ID which can be traced right back to where they access the Internet and provide their identifying information. Knowing you are not anonymous would deter shouting fire in a crowded theater.
In 1450 the printing press was invented, by 1475 it was really up and running. In the next century it produced over 100 million books, about two for every adult in Europe. And so people learned to read. The result was not enlightenment, but violent argument as they all read the bible and found they disagreed about what it meant. Suddenly the forum of public debate, till then mostly left to the leisured and priestly educated, became flooded with all sorts of half-educated people and their half-baked ideas, eager to prove the old maxim that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. There followed more than 100 years of bloody religious warfare.
In 1990 the internet was invented, by 2000 it was really up and running. In 2007 came the first smartphone and soon everyone was connected all the time. Suddenly the forum of public debate, till then mostly left to the readers of broadsheet newspapers, was flooded with Archie Bunkers, half-educated conspiracy theorists, xenophobic grandmas, and unhinged middle aged men living in vans. Suddenly people were brought face to face with the violence of their disagreement, even as they also found silos where everyone saw things their way. The result was not enlightenment.
Its Rene Girard's mimetic theory: its tribalism, Othering and schismogenesis leading to alterity (reactionary movements).
It’s the dying of the West…
Best decision I made this year was to delete my FaceBook account. Admittedly, I have missed seeing my former students with their partners, their children, their pets. I also miss keeping up with relatives near and far. However, I am psychologically better off. I do not have to read the comments of bigots. I protect myself from the deranged conspiracy theories. But, more importantly, I took this step as a boycott of social media and the harm it is causing. I blame Trump on Fox News and FaceBook. Of course, there are other factors. Lack of civic courses also leads to ignorance. I would bet my house that Trump has never read the Founding Documents.
Not too long ago, you can read articles about how social media was a force for good and how it was used to make the Arab spring possible. It was all optimism. But many times we forget to take human nature into consideration and ignore the lessons of history, run against human nature, or simply believe that human nature has changed for the better without having any proof or evidence. Technology does not make us better or worse. It simply makes us more efficient. If you are a good person, you will do more and better for society. If you are not a good person, you will make even more damage. You can kill more people with an AR-15 than with a knife. And we are exposing children to this addictive corrosive technology that is damaging the social skills and motivation of so many of our children. I am a conservative but figuring it out a way to regulate the information on the Internet must be considered for the benefit of the health of this society.
The Internet will not be the death of us. We are already skilled at preparing more effective means: climate change, nuclear weapons, every-day wars - SA +USA Vs Yemeni women and children.
Without the Internet how could I learn so much about my country of birth that I never knew, how could I follow its failure to enter the 21st century or its steady decline as concerns health, infrastructure, belief that we all belong to the only race, the human?
From a ferry in Sweden on the way in to the harbor my then 13 year old grandmother left for Boston never to return.
Only-NeverIn Sweden.blogspot.com
Citizen US SE
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Yes, the internet enables bigots and extremists to find validation and backing, but it also allows the marginalised, misfits, victims and outsiders to find support, solace and information. You don't hear much in the news about the latter because they don't tend to go on homicidal rampages, but that doesn't mean they're not there, or vastly more numerous than the former.
Basing an armchair judgement on mere impressions of an unrepresentative sampling of current affairs is unlikely to lead one to either truth or wisdom. Even if you don't take the quantitative scientific route, there are valid and evidence-based qualitative ways of talking about social facts. The approach taken in this column ain't one of them.
Frank, you have the bully pulpit. Which you have gained through steady giving good work for good time expended. Maybe we can all write more clearly and understand better because of your prominence.
It is good to see your whitecaps gathering their hidden currents informed by clear but internalized thermals. Such is the metaphor of activism inspired by insight. You start out your measurement of the beachhead quietly, a whisper which is heard by all but only alerts those eyes wide open to the full spectrum of possibilities.
I have to tie me down not to collapse with the possibility that are we being warned not to believe everything we hear and only a bit more of what we see? And to what end? The course we face is impossible without the inchoate and fearful nether angels whose fiery coals of coke stoke the marvelous flames of discontent that are our engines of change.
A prayer of St. Francis of Assisi: "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy."
Such is the quatrain of mystery upon which we must stake our bottom dollar: the impossibility of faith in a universe fraught with contradiction. And yet we progress.
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The internet is the proverbial double-edged sword: It spreads information and misinfomation in equal measure. The only cure is education from kindergarten upwards, failing which we shall witness the ever increasing phenomenon of its use and misuse.
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I may be addicted to the feast of information provided by tech, but the banquet of revelation, and the lies, are exposed too.
We are in a nightmare.
I agree with Frank Bruni.
Speaking of demons, we now have Bolsinaro, the new president of Brazil. I am appalled that the markets, which I have been following on Bloomberg news- and technology pushed him in there- thanks also to the US Senate foreign Relations committee. Their election was hacked, and ours will be hacked too, because the super amped up markets don't want democracy and are blind to the real dangers we are facing, nor do the toxic investors care. The markets , nothing against them per se - are frenzied and psycho.
Technology is not going to solve our climate crisis either. We/ You have to have a heart and soul to get through this.
Technology is not neutral. Technology is soul-less, because it has no rudder and it doesn't have a container by living consensus upholding and regulating balance for the wellbeing of the whole society. Tech is a new and very powerful tool, so the comparison to physics and nuclear arms is apt.
Freedom of speech means one's speech is heard but can be rejected by the community that has evolved best principals over time: our constitution.
The internet grew too fast, available not only in our computers but everywhere we go in our phones. Is like a Babel of sort. It will take us one generation or more to catch up to its speed. We need to start teaching our kids how to deal with very human situations, just like drugs, but in a virtual reality that is embracing us too tight.
We are the death of us. It seems to be more and more that self-destruction is built into the human genetic code. There are the narcissists and sociopaths whose brains are wired to lack empathy, compassion, and whose understanding of especially natural and biological complexities is severely limited. They run the banks, the technology companies, and the fossil fuel companies. And now, they have ascended into governments at a point of no return. We won't stop climate change or destruction of the earth eco-systems, not because of the internet but because self-destruction seems to be implied. So get ready. Think about where you'll be in 10-20 years so you don't get swept away in the first wave of social break-down.
In the 1960s I thought it would be atomic weapons; later on I thought it would be bio-terrorism and then global warming and a Malthusian calamity. But, yes, now I also agree, that the internet has unleashed the worst side of humanity and threatens to bring us all down.
I think this column applies more to Social Media and the anonymous comment boards and chat rooms where anger brews and conspiracies are born than to the internet as a whole. Contrast online forums with open public discussions like city council meetings. Yes, tempers can flare a bit and passions run high from time to time there, but people remain largely civil and crackpots are dismissed. Why? Because people can't hide behind screen names and fake accounts, and no one wants to agree with, or even acknowledge, the occasional lunatic in the room at the risk of being tarred one as well. I find the chat rooms that require people to identify themselves, by their full names and locations, to generally have thoughtful comments and opinion. Either we have anonymous online forums and continue down this path, or we force people to reveal themselves through a uniform system where the sign up and register to comment and prove their identify before doing so.
PBS Frontline’s 2 Part Report on Facebook was excellent. It seemed to me that upper level individuals including Zuckerberg were either clueless or didn’t care as long as their profits rose. The Senate Committee before which Zuckerberg
Yes, indeed. The internet ushers in the end of civilization as it degrades public figures to, well, the level of mass.
I like the insightful quote from Tim Cook. The way I think of it is this: we used to have social: meeting friends, family, co-workers. And we had the media: newspapers, radio, and television. The two were completely separate.
Before the internet nobody, other than the ever present conspiracy theorist, ever questioned the media - it was just the news.
Now we have combined the two into social media and the world is changed in world in unexpected ways. Being able to communicate and organize over distance has helped extremists more than moderates.
We often speak of censorship as a negative thing, but without it the open conversation quickly evolves to vulgar name calling and incendiary comments. The only reason the NYT comments works is because it is moderated.
Mabye the internet ISN'T free speech...more like a road, a public service that one needs to be qualified to use?
Frank;
'Hate speech', via the internet or otherwise, is free speech whether you like it or not. Counter it with your own, and don't blame the internet.
With all due respect to Marshall McLuhan, the medium is Not the message here.
Spot on, Frank. Good grief. But I don't see us policing or legislating the wild wild web anytime soon. The same nonsense has been floating around since Johann Gutenberg started printing. The difference now is the speed and ubiquity. For the foreseeable future people need to smarten up. Or maybe they just don't want to. They see their reflection and like Oedipus fall in love. They feed off one another and it is just awful. A great example the other day was a meme about the forthcoming 2.5% social security raise and it read "not one Democrat voted for it." When my friend was challenged that it was an automatic law his response was "see. I'm right." That is the thinking. It is the best of times and it is the worst of times.
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The lament of the chattering class. I have a prosperous business as a freelance writer and editor because of the Internet. No Internet, and I'd have to become a wage slave again.
Any technology can be problematic in some way. The benefits of the Internet far outweigh the negative aspects. In the end it's people and not the Internet that foster falsehoods, prejudice, and hate.
Check out the latest episode of PBS's Frontline about the creation of Facebook and the early signs about it's potential for both good and bad. I'm a lifelong Democrat. I remember during the Arab Spring all the praise in the NYT editorial pages about social media and it's contribution to the change in the Middle East. Until the dictators (both home and abroad) figured out how to weaponize it. If the internet posses a threat, it's in the hands of the powerful, not in the hands of a minority of the disgruntled and unstable.
This is a difficult problem. How do we respect free speech and acknowledge when a boundary has been crossed? Who regulates all of this.?It is true that Facebook and other social media have done an exceedingly poor job. I am not a Facebook subscriber and never will be. I abhor the whole enterprise. The lack of foresight has been absolute. It sort of reminds me of the motorized "Bird" scooters currently operating in Los Angeles. Disasters waiting to happen and yet nothing will happen in terms of regulating these reckless and unthought out millennial businesses until real damage is done.
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Need to come with a disclaimer. Using our products and services is injurious to your health.
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"Disasters waiting to happen and yet nothing will happen in terms of regulating these reckless and unthought out millennial businesses until real damage is done."
@Caroline: Even then nothing will happen ... bear in mind our national firearms business nightmare.
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@Caroline
Answering your question, I think that the only way to respect free speech is through knowledge. I do not see any other way. Knowledge since our childhood in the school, at high school and University, and further on. Instruction is the only way to combat and, in my opinion, it is not a strange case that it became a "secondary problem" in some countries where this new way to make politics. In Italy this new far-right/populist government is discussing to give more money to unemployed people. Good thing, from the social point of view, one could say. But what was proposed for increasing instruction as a real way to give people a free chance to decide his future ? Nothing....zero.....
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Information isn't properly vetted. Everything caries equal weight. If anything, well established institutions are the the ones most often challenged despite being supported by robust research. Consider this real scenario: a public school study team convenes to discuss a student having difficulty with Algebra. The members include the teacher with the struggling kid, other classroom teachers, the school nurse, counselors, the principal, a Reading specialist, a Math specialist, and a speech and language therapist among others. The group "brainstorms" and generates a list of possible interventions. The teacher with the Math challenged child then chooses an intervention from among the list. Since the teacher can opt for any of the solutions on the list, all ostensibly carry equal weight. This is standard procedure and, while I recognize that it is often a good idea to "think outside of the box" it sends the wrong message about the value of expertise. Its sort of like going to an ENT doc to discuss the correct procedure for your broken ankle.
It's not the Internet per se that's the problem. That is just a conduit. It's the platforms people create for it--each platform is controlled by someone or someones, most of them libertarian in philosophy--and the resultant lack of desire to curate content therein.
The reason none of these platforms will do anything to attempt to get a handle on all the vitriol is that it'll cost them customers. To appropriate a statement once attributed to a basketball player about his apolitical stance on certain topics, homicidal bigots notice advertisements, too.
This is the logical extension of what happens when you take a Calvinist, Social Darwinist, rapacious libertarian capitalist mindset--one that has reached its purest form in the United States, but is certainly not limited to it--and apply it to what should be thought of as the public commons. Eventually, or not so eventually, something's gonna go boom.
And the only concern of those with the mindset is to make sure they don't have liability.
Which, of course, means that the only way to get some sort of grip on the situation is to make sure no one who used the commons--who uses the public airwaves, OR the internet infrastructure--lacks potential liability. And that can only be done at the level of government, both nationally and internationally.
Europe seems to be at least willing to have a discussion about where the limits and liability may be. We should have the courage here in the US to do the same.
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A lot of internet problems would be solved if users were no longer anonymous on line. If you speak in person you are identifiable. Why should it be different on line? In an autocratic country freedom of speech might be curtailed, but anonymity is not the right tool to obtain freedom of speech. Moreover, autocratic governments can, and probably do, obtain users' identities from the ISP.
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The real challenge is supporting a system of learning that allows us to live our lives in this hyper connected state. We have instead one designed to prepare people to be obedient workers. We must instead support learning that is intrinsically oriented, socially adaptaptive and exquisitely flexible. Our current muddle will only allow us to blindly follow the path you describe.
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@Mike Wilson: there is no rational justification whatsoever for any public policy supporting the ludicrous delusion that nature has a human personality.
I find the irony of articles like this amusing. They give us dire warnings about reading things on the internet but are posted on the internet. Bruni should have titled this piece: READ THIS AND DIE.
I’m no technophile, but in general I would say that the internet has greatly improved my life. Among other things, the convenience it offers has allowed me to live car-less in Los Angeles of all places. That’s a great improvement indeed.
Here's a thought - turn the Internet off for 23 out of 24 hours the way parents do for children. You have all your freedom but just not all the time in the world to exercise it. So we make a few less billionaires in Silicon valley, we lived before without them. Oh wait, they will be needed to expand the capability for all the compressed traffic. I'm confident they will have an answer.
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I respect this article, but I must say I entirely disagree with it. I think most people only perceive the internet as social media. That is simply not true, the internet is a collection of trillions of webpages; the actions of one don’t define the actions of all. The internet has its quirks, no one is denying that, but when you make claims like this you are hindering our progress as a civilization. Sure I might have a little bias due to the fact that I’m 16, but think of all the things someone my age uses the internet for. It allows me to connect with my piers and teachers outside of class, read the news, learn about topics, and so much more.
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It’s not just the hate speech. It’s faux-documentaries, faux-science; all legitimized to some (we’ll, many) by the medium. “Published” by the unscrupulous on the right and the left. It’s as if every crackpot and zealot had complete and unfettered access to Time magazine in the 1970s. If it looks legit, it must be legit; the delivery system imbues the content with undeserved credibility. The medium is the message; always has been. But I don’t think it’s the end of us. I think it’s a loud, raucous, exciting, dangerous and dynamic marketplace of ideas - awful, good, mostly mundane - that can still do good. We just haven’t figured out how to control it, or even whether to control it. I think we should but I get the problem of who and how. At this point I think our problem is more about bad leadership than bad web.
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The problem isn’t with the internet as it was originally conceived: information- lots of it good, some dubious or bad, sure- but just information. Then capitalism got its teeth into it as it always does and the internet became abimaking money. Selling stuff. Ads. Then data to target those ads. That was easy: just collect information about people who were using it. Then that wasn’t enough: push stuff to users rather than letting then search for it. Then for that they refined and refined artificial intelligence and the algorithms it uses. And here we are.
internet.
we need to talk about the fact that sites like Facebook cannot control what they have created. In a way, they are co-conspirators to the the radicalization and crimes of these people and, yet, they go unpunished. If it can be proven that their sites have facilitated deadly acts, perhaps they should be punished too. It’s a conversation that needs to happen.
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The internet needs to be restructured by a blue chip panel of librarians. Yes that's right librarians. People get advanced degrees in "Library Science". This is the science of how to arrange and organize and even vett the content, usually known as books in the library.
We still have refereed Journals where all the articles are read, edited, evaluated, and vetted by experienced and knowledgeable professionals in various fields.
Young people go to the library and learn how to use it. Elementary schools initiate the process with an hour each week spent in the school library with the school librarian learning how to distinguish history from fiction, ideology from scholarly tracts, and so on.
For all the good intentions and magical optimism about how computers and operating systems and the internet would usher in a golden age of democratized knowledge and enlightenment, without the structures of the library and the organization of knowledge, the wen will lead many into rabbit holes of misinformation and predatory advertising designed to addict them to a new obsession, no matter how crazy, as long as it generates clicks and profits.
With all do respect, the Bill Gates' of the world armed with only knowledge of programming code not placed within a much broader liberal education and literacy. can become the narrow one sided barbarism that would chill Gates and other Silicon Valley leaders to the bone. The technocrats have reached their limits.
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The internet is a tool. Whether you use a tool correctly is the issue. Whether you comport yourself on the internet the same way you would in public is the other.
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Technology has always been used for bad even though the good that it does is obvious to all. And that also includes warfare.
Fire, an element essential to survival has been used to hurt others. So has the wheel, the discovery of metals, gunpowder, mixing of chemicals, the telegraph, telephone, the self combustion engine, flight, the automobile and the computer. The internet is just another invention to be weaponized by the military and by citizens.
Sadly, what helps us also destroys us. What we mortals need to realize is that all of this can be resolved; we just need love among ourselves. Unless we treat others the way that we would like to be treated we are heading full speed to our own demise.
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The social media are *not* the internet, even though they dominate
it. They sit on top of it, and as such, they
provide just one of the ways to enter the public
sphere. Another way is through the forum. Compared to the forum,
though, social media are fundamentaly toxic, by their very structure.
The structure is called peer-to-peer networking, and it promotes,
well, self-promotion. With the forum, your audience is always
voluntary, and interested only in the topic of your posting.
When you post to Facebook or Twitter, the part of your followers that
isn't interested in the topic of your posting is captive. Therefore,
in the aggregate, users will drift in the direction of talking about
themselves, the only topic that will satisfy all their followers.
This cannot be healthy, in the long run.
2
Of the 25 deadliest mass shootings in US history, 15 have occurred since 2005. Nine occurred while Obama was in office, with 170 dead. It may fit a narrative that this kind of violence is connected to Trump and his rhetoric, but that would be cherry picking and confirmation bias. The worst shooting was the recent Vegas shooting, where some on the left hinted that the victims, being Country and Western types who likely voted Trump were the victims of what they wished for. If you look at the acceleration of these events since 2005, it really can't be pinned on one person or office. We have violent shooters looking for a body count. The correspondence in time matches the rise of Facebook/social media, not Trump's Presidency. The internet, like any other tool, will be misused. Unlike any other tool, you have to do very little to attain or earn it. It has the feeling of anonymity, it is designed to echo sensibilities rather than challenge or complete them, and exposes exactly what the Greeks learned about open, unfettered democracy.
2
The internet is protected by the ifirst amendment.That being said we can and should recognize that responsibility for libel or slander or hate speech or lies that contribute to a crime need to have serious financial consequences. Change the libel laws to open the domain and user to potential liability.
1
The internet is the pool of water that Narcissus looked into, only worse. Narcissus looked at himself all alone. Now we all look at ourselves together.
My father, recently deceased at 96 years and 10 months, said to me over 10 years ago, "The Internet is going to implode" I felt as helpless to respond to him then as I am now to Mr. Bruni.
I envy Narcissus.
2
Life online offers many tragedies, but we could quite easily argue the counter-intuitive notion that Internet enabled individuals and their activities enhance life, love and human relationships beyond what we might have experienced otherwise. Then again, what some people insist on defining with horrendous terms and incendiary language - even militant censorship - I quite often find merely reflective of familiar although currently out of fashion American ideals, cultural norms and yes, national values. The burning bush of liberalism seems to have sent smoke signals beyond the bounds of their utility, and now the inevitable pendulum swing back from the hyper liberal Obama era to a more sedate normative society of familiar social values, mores and mandates quite offends some who now argue for stasis, rather than for change - or what we might call change for the better or change back.
Do not overlook commercialization as one theme of the internet that has sewn divisions, distorted truth, and wreaked havoc. Everything is given a price tag, and if it sells, then it is published, with no thought of the guidelines of morality or truth. That disease attacked our newsrooms back in the 1980's and is prevalent on the internet today. Our values have been sold for profit.
7
Blaming the internet for our social woes is akin to blaming trees for making the paper where we used to print our screeds.
Granted the magnification and amplification of extreme views is so much easier with the internet and social media, but the cause is systemic. We've allowed our society to deteriorate through a lack of quality education, ignoring the rewards of community involvement and devaluing culture and science in service to quick greed gratification.
The internet is just the medium reflecting how careless we became with our precious heritage.
9
"And utterly terrifying. I don’t know exactly how we square free speech and free expression — which are paramount — with a better policing of the internet, but I’m certain that we need to approach that challenge with more urgency than we have mustered so far."
Attacks on the internet which, like newspapers and television is only a medium for transmission of ideas, appears to be another in the recent spate of main stream media attempts to maintain control over the political discourse.
Fear, and need for security often breed rhetoric implicitly calling for control over the cornerstones of our democratic republic; freedom of speech, ideas and opinion, absent which governments not people rule.
From automobiles, to swimming pools, to guns, to the results of virulent rhetoric, life is fraught with peril. However, the writer's thinly veiled call for government censorship is not the answer.
The answer is teaching the populace to combat bad ideas with good ones, which today at many levels horrifically including colleges and universities, is being abandoned in favor of suppressing speech and speakers in order to protect students, who for God's sake are ostensibly our future leaders! from upsetting ideas, apparently under the theory that "what you can't see or hear can't hurt you."
Rather than attacking ourselves by implicitly calling for limitation on our freedoms, we should bring the virulence to light and lance the boil with calm analysis and incisive rhetoric.
3
Perhaps the same could have been said about parchment, the printing press, radio, television, etc. All of these media were merely the mouthpieces of communication. Evil has lurked for all of us since the beginning of time. The internet is simply the latest iteration of expression. The hatred too often distributed via this newest medium is most likely overshadowed by the countless benefits it has afforded and will continue to afford more and more of us.
2
I think Mr. Bruni only gets half the story here. The NYTimes background descriptions of both the bomber and the Pittsburgh shooter (no names, thank you) tell the familiar tale of "they didn't connect with people, they were loners." People who cannot find the kind of acceptance and validation in real life community are finding it online. The real life community serves as the regulator of most behavior (in normal times - communities can go off the rails too, in abnormal times). The online community has no interest in regulating behavior, only stimulating it. That's how it tries to feel alive. All electronic media has the potential of isolating human beings in a frantic search for real connection, which the Internet promises but does not deliver. It's make-believe. For those who are already isolated because they are too extreme to get along in real life communities, it creates a make-believe sense of connection which leads to make-believe solutions to their grievances, like shootings and bombings. Neil Postman predicted all this in the 1980s, as did Huxley in Brave New World. Silicon Valley elites are already putting the brakes on this media because of its effect on community and thought. Will we?
4
My opinion is that people that are programing the algorithms we utilize are forming human conscious more than their parents.
All that to say, I can understand why some of our young adults don't know how they will vote; if they vote.
Suggested cures to internet madness:
1) end anonymity; require users to register and verify identity;
2) charge a modest amount to use it; use the income to hire monitors trained to weed out patently dangerous messages;
3) start teaching children in elementary school about the responsible use of social media.
3