Not Even....

That'll do it! pic.twitter.com/0kA3US1ekp

— Cody Johnston (@drmistercody) December 5, 2022

The problem with this argument is that social media did not create a brave new world, or even fundamentally alter circumstances. This is the argument of someone who’s never tried to teach a person to simply reason, to simply try to think. Good speech/thinking doesn’t simply replace bad the way a fresh breeze relieves stagnant air. The two sides are always imbalanced because reason is hard to learn, much less master; and selfish whim and foolishness and ignorance takes no effort at all.

Moreover, the internet is not the world, not even a sliver of it. How many people are on Twitter? (Hint: not as many people as live in the U.S. And Twitter is an international enterprise.) And how many of them have “followers”? Most of us are just reading what a handful of people say.  And we are a tiny sliver of the world’s population; an equally tiny percentage of the U.S. population. Are we really, along with people on Facebook or other social media, running the world? Did we shape the election a month ago? Nobody seems to think so. Have we ruined really free speech and public discourse?

I remember in the ‘60’s when the public discourse was about war and civil rights. There was no real question of good ideas driving out bad; ideas you didn’t like were bad, ideas you did like were good. So civil rights were good; or they were too radical too soon, and we should “wait!” Or it was just not done, shouldn’t be done, and was countered with shouting, or violence. Real violence, not harsh words on a computer platform. I don’t remember good ideas driving out bad, but rather being forced out of public acceptance. They weren’t eliminated, obviously; or they wouldn’t be back now. Most of them never even left, because conditions today are little changed from what they were then. Social media hasn’t changed the world; it’s just given us another excuse to snip at the branches of the tree of evil, rather than at its roots.

The free exchange of ideas has always meant bad ideas could be chosen instead of good. The history of the world is that they almost always are.