All these years online and I still don’t know whether it’s better or worse to engage malicious, false, deranged or reactionary material or not.
I don’t think we even really know the answer to a pressing question, which is whether all the falsehoods and derangements have increased in number or are now more widely distributed than in pre-Internet public culture. It’s safe to say that they seem more influential on public affairs in a deeply distressing way, and that the Internet and social media amplify and quicken the dissemination of false knowledge and politically malevolent speech and intensify culture wars to a significant degree.
But it’s perfectly plausible to argue that lunatic ideas like “the coronavirus vaccine magnetizes your body and lets 5G networks track you” or planned campaigns of distortion like “critical race theory is a plot to take over America” have been a basic part of American public life since the beginnings of massified print culture. McCarthyism is only one of many 20th Century examples. If people my age and older imagine it wasn’t this way back in the 1960s and 1970s, they’re potentially remembering only that they consumed news media and commentary that conformed to a very particular middlebrow sensibility, with editors and writers scrubbing anything that went beyond those polite borders—and that their social and professional worlds also mostly were composed of people staying inside those borders. I can remember how utterly peculiar I found it when I talked with my paternal grandfather and he would go off on bitter, strange rants about how FDR allowed Pearl Harbor to happen and how the Depression had been the result of a conspiracy by Jewish bankers. As a historian, I now recognize that he was simply tuned into a social and discursive world I never interacted with save for visits to his house, and what seemed to me like the eccentric folly of one old man was a shared set of reactionary delusions.
So we still aren’t really sure whether the Internet generally and social media specifically just made us all aware of one another and then plopped us down within an algorithmic infrastructure that amounted to the endless poking of anthills by a perpetual array of sticks and magnifying glass fires, or whether it brought people to malice and falsehood who might otherwise have remained tethered some blander consensus understanding.
In all of that, what I simply cannot decide, have never been able to decide from Usenet forward to June 20, 2021, is what I should do about that malign content when I come across it. I rocket back and forth. One day, I’m certain that the best thing for all of us to do is ignore it—that the malevolent forces stirring within social media are always hoping to get a rise out of everyone else, that they are fed by the same attention economy that drives most of our public culture. The next day, I’m sure that sunlight disinfects and that falsehoods that are ignored propagate and gain strength.
I’ve made what seem in retrospect to be terrible mistakes—agreeing to participate in a “debate” with David Horowitz, which is roughly as sensible as agreeing to play cards against the Devil with a soul in the balance. But I’ve been just as wrong in advising fellow bloggers and online writers to just have the discipline to ignore tendentious, malevolent, unbalanced materials and the people who make and disseminate them. I’ve fact-checked people and felt like a pedantic ass afterwards. I’ve left falsehoods to spread by people who don’t mean to spread falsehoods who are mortified later that no one told them that they were disseminating rubbish.
I don’t think I’m alone in any of this, but it is the continuing torment that I think any responsible creator of public culture faces. Do we engage people who have no intention whatsoever of being persuaded by us, who are only using our engagements to draw attention? Do we ignore people who are trying to burn our whole world down, as if we’re too exalted to try and stop them? I fear that a lot of the time what we choose to do, given how unanswerable these questions have proved to be, is find the people with whom we have emotional and discursive standing and exaggerate and pick fights with them instead. “The narcissism of small differences” is where many of us end up, because only there do we feel we have any power, influence or hope—but that is also why so many of us experience online discussion as alternatively terrifying and depressing, as a cage match between former friends watched by an audience of marauders baying for blood.