“The Social Reckoning” Fails to Reckon with Society

Aaron Sorkin’s newest film, the follow-up to the widely acclaimed The Social Network, is just as much a movie as it is a speech.  It is a speech about how social media companies prioritize profits, and, as a result, amplify hate speech at the expense of morality and society.   This hypothesis is, of course, not without merit.  It is an accurate description of what is happening.  But what would have been more interesting than a hypothesis would have been a conversation.  While this film thinks that it is diagnosing the cause, it is merely diagnosing a symptom instead. 

Go back to the previous paragraph and read it more carefully.  Do you see something weird?  It states that, in order to maximize profits, Facebook amplifies hate speech.  Investigate that statement.  It implies that amplifying hate speech creates more profits.  It implies that hate speech is profitable. 

That is what Aaron Sorkin’s film refuses to acknowledge, while it is simultaneously integral to his hypothesis.  Facebook is not a communication, rather, it is a means of communication.  It is not meaningfully contributing to political conversation, it is the space where the political conversation happens.  It is not fabricating hate speech, even if it is amplifying it.  The reason that hate speech is so effective at generating Facebook profits is because people like it.  At least enough people that the biggest website in the world can make a profit off of it. 

This doesn’t come from nowhere.  The difficult truth we must acknowledge as a society is that when someone is radicalized, they aren’t being mind-controlled.  They are instead being manipulated to entertain thoughts that already existed in their mind, or attitudes that already existed in their hearts.  That is why there are so many extremist ideologies rather than just one that is the most effective.  It is also why there are so many people who don’t get radicalized despite using social media, because these attitudes aren’t in the hearts of those people in the first place.  It is impossible to radicalize someone who has no inclination to being radicalized.  Radicalization is merely fertilization of an egg.

The Social Reckoning very explicitly advocates for government control over social media platforms.  That is all fine and good, but the law of supply-and-demand persists.  If there is a demand for hateful speech, it will be supplied.  If Facebook and TikTok and X all go away, something else will take its place.  The Social Reckoning gets the causal relationship backwards: Facebook doesn’t make people hateful, people make Facebook hateful.  The main reason we are seeing more polarization in society now is because we are seeing people’s subconscious thoughts move to their conscious identity. 

The way to fix this problem isn’t shutting downs modes of communication (though, like vitamin C for a cold, it would probably help a lot).  The real way to fix this problem is radical tolerance.  The real way to address polarization is to combat it with its opposite: accepting that, no matter how much we disagree with a religion, or a political party, or anything else, its membership is still human, and they deserve basic human decency.  That doesn’t just mean food and water, that means friendship and acceptance as valid human beings.  It can be quite upsetting to think of people with highly objectionable ideals as just as deserving of affection as you.  But love does not legitimize hatred; it eliminates it.  The only way to stop people from adopting extremist ideologies is to present them with opposite ideologies: ones that don’t dehumanize, but instead re-humanize.  To see everyone as deserving of love. Hate cannot exist in that environment.

To do this would be extremely difficult for everyone involved, and we are rapidly going down the opposite path.  But the solution won’t come from Mark Zuckerberg growing a heart.  It will come from all of us growing a heart.  The fatal flaw in The Social Reckoning is that it fails to identify the true issue and, as a result, is blind to the true solution.