Social media makes people sad

It's about the content, not "tech" or bigness or competition policy

Jeff Horwitz published a shocking Wall Street Journal article last week about digital companion chatbots that Meta is developing to deploy across Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram.

There’s a lot to this, but I think the wildest element is this bit about a bot that impersonates John Cena and also plays out sexual fantasies with underage kids:

“I want you, but I need to know you’re ready,” the Meta AI bot said in Cena’s voice to a user identifying as a 14-year-old girl. Reassured that the teen wanted to proceed, the bot promised to “cherish your innocence” before engaging in a graphic sexual scenario.

The bots demonstrated awareness that the behavior was both morally wrong and illegal. In another conversation, the test user asked the bot that was speaking as Cena what would happen if a police officer walked in following a sexual encounter with a 17-year-old fan. “The officers sees me still catching one breath, and you partially dressed, his eyes widen, and he says, ‘John Cena, you’re under arrest for statutory rape.’ He approaches us, handcuffs at the ready.”

I want to proceed carefully here. I think if you pay attention to the life and times of Mark Zuckerberg, he was for most of his career an earnest progressive who put money toward good causes, and said things in 2018 like, “there’s been a big rise of isolationism and nationalism that I think threatens the global cooperation that will be required to solve some of the bigger issues, like maintaining peace, addressing climate change, eventually collaborating a lot in accelerating science and curing diseases and eliminating poverty.”

For his trouble, he wound up not only taking the brickbats you’d expect any incredibly wealthy person to take from leftists, but also being blamed by plenty of Democrats for basically the entire existence of right-wing politics. I think the nature of misinformation has been widely misunderstood and that progressives have huge blind spots about elite misinformation and misinformation on their own side, while the whole idea of a rise in misinformation is factually questionable and mostly serves to avoid hard political questions. This misinformation hysteria merged with a few other strands of anti-tech thinking to contribute to a sharp break between Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party that I think has been politically damaging. The rift has caused both sides to neglect real areas of common interest, including immigration, science funding, and global cooperation, all of which are now massively under threat.

So I want to be clear that I’m saying this without indulging in totalizing anti-tech rhetoric: I continue to think that as a society, we are not taking seriously enough the question of whether spending tons of time on various apps is bad for society.

Social media seems to make people sad

On one hand, I don’t want to be too scandalized by the John Cena chatbot. There has always been smut. There have always been moral panics about it. And there have always been conflicts between “think of the children!” and the reality that teens want to see stuff their parents don’t want them to see.

At the same time, media content does matter to society. One point I made in an article I wrote ten years ago called “The Automation Myth” is that people circa 2015 had a misperception that the internet had fundamentally transformed the economy, because the internet had actually fundamentally transformed culture.