Woke Ideology is a Dangerous Religion
Since the founding of Facebook in 2004, social media have existed long enough now to encapsulate a teenager’s entire lifespan. Yet the research have lagged behind on the psychological effects of these platforms on human behavior.
We often hear about social media’s effects of enhancing negativity, tribalism, and dopamine addiction. Some of these have resulted in tragic outcomes, such as increasing rates of teenage girls committing self-harm.
Up until this point, I had only 2nd hand exposure to social media behavior through anecdotes and the research by Tristan Harris. But I’ve grown to understand this environment from 1st-hand conversations with a social media “power user” on the topics of J. K. Rowling and Elon Musk.
Let’s discuss Rowling first: she wrote an innocuous comment online and that got twisted through multiple “least charitable” takes to the point where she became, supposedly, a “transphobic bigot.”
A video is worth 10000 words, so let me just show you this video that is almost the exact same conversation I had:
Rowling aside, you will find that no topic will incite a more visceral reaction from the ideological elites than mention Elon Musk.
As a technologist and entrepreneur, Elon Musk is possibly a brilliant innovator of this century. His vision of advancing human progress in the next 100 years have inspired many to join SpaceX, Tesla, Neurolink, and other companies. From listening to his long-form interviews, I learned so much about the impact of AI on human society and the importance of planning mankind for the future. Elon has no filters and corporate speak about his grandiose vision, and he doesn’t shy away from the negative impacts his own company can bring: Tesla can destroy transportation jobs comprising 15% of the economy.
Yet the adjectives that describe Elon were “immature”, “prideful”, and “crude” from someone I care about. This person, let’s call them Jane, has a strongly negative opinion of Elon. So I tried to explain Elon’s impact on society and how he fits into the economy as a founder and innovator.
Despite the wider context, Jane instead focused on Elon’s tweets and his classification as a billionaire. Here was a typical interaction with Jane:
- Jane, who is a tax professional, talked about Elon not paying his fair share of taxes
- I explain that Elon paid more taxes than anyone in history in 2021
- Jane says this is because his options were expiring so he was forced to pay
- I explain that this is because founders in a tech company should never sell their shares
- Jane says he pays less taxes than the working class
- I explain that he does what every founder should do — optimize their. Instead of forming holding companies in Ireland, he was proud of paying his share of taxes
- Jane keeps repeating that billionaires don’t pay their fair share
Ignoring the irony of a tax pro criticizing Elon for the amazing work his CPA firm did, I was extremely perplexed that Jane was dead set about this perspective.
The conversation continued to other topics: tax reform, my favorite subject of macroeconomics, and Elon’s tweets versus politicians who he didn’t support. In each case, I try to push Jane to look at the bigger picture, but she adamantly focused her judgment of Elon based on a subsection of his politics-related tweets.
In one example, she mentioned Elon’s tweet, “I forgot you’re alive,” to Bernie Sanders. As someone who enjoys standup comedy, I found it a typical roast and a very tame joke.
On the other hand, Elon’s tweets are nowhere close to the “Fck Elon Musk” tweet from a local nameless politician, which ultimately led to Tesla moving their HQ — and thousands of jobs — out of California. Yet Jane labeled Elon’s tweets not as jokes, but as “attacks”.
Social media is a double edged sword, and most users lack a deep understanding of its nature of radicalizing you and narrowing your viewpoint. These platforms can only be used responsibly with mental guardrails, which most users lack — sometimes, they even think they are aware, yet unconsciously become conditioned. There’s no better analogy to social media than the “monster” described aptly in Friedrich Nietsche’s famous quote:
“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” — Nietsche
Social Media Influence: My Eureka Moment
These conversations typically become tribalistic diatribes when confined to 140 characters on social media. My chat with Jane is civil in comparison, but nevertheless, many people should know better than engaging in the first place. Yet I’m always curious about others’ perspectives. As the adage goes, “first seek to understand”.
What if I told you that Jane’s intense and visceral reaction to Elon makes perfect sense in the context of social media?
Each of us is conditioned by our environment.
About 15% of the population has a Twitter account, and it tends to attract people with more extreme views. Some consumers use social media day-to-day for hours, and participate in the biggest Skinner Box experiment in history.
When users consume information on social media, oftentimes it is through “shares” or “retweets” where the poster spins the topic/person mentioned with their opinionated analysis. This would be fine, if the opinions were eclectic and encourages dialogue. However, most users follow people in their social media circles, and the machine learning algorithms on these platforms purposefully encourage them to subscribe to people that are like them.
As a power user of social media (known as “influencers”), your life revolves around the social media circles you’re a part of. You strongly identify with your group of like-minded people with the same views. Your opinions are informed by political influencers, and reinforced recursively by the repetitive sharing of selective information. Politicians are expert at this type of influencer game:
The ultimate effect is that it’s hard to differentiate the opinion of the individual apart from the opinion of the collective. With Jane, I wondered multiple times if she was speaking her own mind because it sounded exactly like the opinion of politically-tinged social media circles.
Elon Musk, the Greatest Troll
On social media, Elon adopts the persona of what’s colloquially known as a “troll.” Trolls like to make fun of people and incite reactions, and are commonplace in online communities. He admits in long-form interviews that he uses Twitter to joke and blow off steam. Whereas normally people grab 2-hour happy drinks, Elon only has 10 minutes a day and he chooses to shit-post on Twitter.
Because personal tweets are not filtered by a PR team, it’s bound to inflame a portion of the readers. This wouldn’t be a problem if he was the average online troll, but Elon’s public image is an elephant in the room. When he tweets, the minority of people with the loudest voices can be a significant amount of people, enough to cause trending headlines.
When engrossed in social media, the only angle Jane sees is the flamboyant online persona that Elon exudes. His pokes political circles, while normal to apolitical users like me, are shared repetitively in Jane’s circles to reinforce their belief that he is uncouth.
So I understand 100% how Jane arrived at her perspective about Elon based solely on his comedian persona, and how her opinion is reinforced over 3+ years to build a caricature of Elon.
A Psychological Tangent
Let’s dive deeper.
Each of us care for our own opinions the most, and form our “identity” based on the environment and people around us. For social media users, they regularly use their social media accounts which comprise a significant part of their lives. The more popular influencers value their social media presence — their followers, impression count, engagement metrics — to the point that it is their ego. In this context, having a strong identity means having a strong opinion and being part of an online community that thinks, behaves, and communicates like you.
Let’s ballpark estimate the amount of active usage of most users compared to Elon:
- The regular user spends hours per day
- Popular influencers practically treat social media like their 9–5 job
- Elon spends 10 minutes per day, randomly sh1t-posting on his toilet
Yet Elon has 80+ million followers.
For the smart influencers, such as seasoned politicians, they understand that the best way to garner attention is to punch up to someone who’s likely to respond to their advantage. This is what leads the most extreme comments, goading Musk to respond, which further goads each side’s followers to skirmish.
For the naive influencers, this is a subconscious blow to their ego. Their hours of activity ends up in engagement metrics not in the same league as Elon’s, all the meanwhile Musk is treating social media platforms — which form a big part of an influencer’s life — frivolously with jokes and memes.
What many social media denizens fail to realize is that Musk’s presence is derived from his gargantuan body of work, from his early days at PayPal to his current projects like SpaceX, Tesla, Neurolink, and Boring Company. Yes, he does spend 10 minutes on Twitter, but his following is due to the other 990 minutes where he dedicates his life to advancing humanity.
The Nature of Social Media
Many people do not understand the deep nature of news media. “News” is the new information, while “media” is the transmission of that news through a perspective.
This perspective is rarely impartial, and the most effective influencers frame news in a negative and radical lens, often fabricated and often repeated.
In Edward Bernays’s seminal book, Propaganda, he outlines the susceptibility of the masses to media’s influence. In democracies, negative media is the prevalent because it is the only form of propaganda allowed in such a system.
Social media is fundamentally a technology that amplifies the effect of propaganda. Negative news travel 6 times faster than uplifting news. A limit of 140 characters encourages the most sensationalist of headlines. It doesn’t matter the 99% other things Musk has done outside the bubble of social media that advances human civilization, because he will be judged for the 1% of actions he does that’s click-baiting and can be used to further the agenda of those who master propaganda.
After reflecting on my conversation with a social media power user, I realized that this person behaves exactly how we would expect someone to behave, when their main source of information is social media. It’s not the person to blame, but the system of incentives that condition their behavior and way of thinking.
