The Science of Social Media Mobs

Internet communication, the addictive effect of moral outrage, and powerful social media mobs.

Dealing with Social Media Mobs

The inspiration for this post came from a video I recently saw with Patrick Bet-David on his +5.6 million subscriber YouTube channel, Value Entertainment, about the Isralian thinker, Yuval Noah Harari. 

Harari is a heavyweight among intellectuals. I have high expectations for his upcoming book Nexus which is a follow-up to bestsellers like “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus”. Harari's talk at the World Economic Forum in Davos 2020 served as the main inspiration for my first post on Substack and helped to shape the direction of Futuristic Lawyer. 

One of Harari’s thought-provoking ideas is the concept of an emerging “useless class”, a new social class that may encompass the vast majority of humans in the future as AI displaces more and more human work and increases wealth of capital at the expense of labor. If done wrong, technological development could supercharge the power and influence of the mega-rich techno elite (as AI is doing now) and make wage earners poor and redundant.

This is a bleak, unpleasant vision of the future and understandably some people are not keen to embrace it. Anyone with a shred of common sense who has read Harari's books or listened to his talks knows that he is not endorsing such a future but warning us against it. 

That doesn’t keep Bet-David from explaining to his millions of YouTube subscribers that Harari is saying "You are all useless" and that Harari is participating in a kind of unspecified evil plot with the World Economic Forum and its founder, Klaus Schwab. The comment section of the video is full of users calling Harari evil and dangerous with hundreds of likes. 

My first instinct is of course to fire back at the attackers for spreading falsehoods.  But then on a second thought, discussing with random strangers in the comment section of YouTube videos is not a good use of my time - certainly not a net benefit for humanity to borrow some lingo from the effective altruism movement. Rule #1 of internet communication is to never engage with trolls or keyboard warriors. 

There really is no way of winning against internet users who often hide behind the comfort of anonymity and can say whatever they want without social consequences.  Few people are prime targets but for those who are unlucky enough to draw the attention of an angry internet crowd, logging off the computer does not always solve the problem. 

American top-attorney and law professor, Alan Dershowitz, was "cancelled" after false allegations of sexual misconduct and close ties with Jeffrey Epstein's sex-trafficking ring. Dershowitz described the experience of being canceled in the excellent book on the topic, Cancel Culture: The Latest Attack on Free Speech and Due Process:

“Cancel culture combines the worst elements of self-righteousness and judgementalism. Its activists and practitioners sit in judgement often on great people — musicians, artists, and scientists — who have accomplished much good in their lives, but their actions or ideologies have offended cancellers. Many of these who sit on judgement on who to cancel have accomplished little in their own lives. They can’t be canceled because there is nothing to cancel.”

The textbook example and probably the first well-known instance of a powerful social media mob asserting its power was in 2013 when Justine Sacco, the 30-year-old director of corporate communications at a large US company, blew up the internet with a single tweet.

Sacco was about to board a Boeing 747 from London to South Africa without WiFi. Shortly before the flight, Sacco posted a silly joke, as she so often did, to her 170 followers: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”. Then she got on the plane and slept.

After arriving at Cape Town airport 11 hours later, Sacco turned on her phone and it was blown up with messages from friends and relatives wishing her sympathy and asking if she was okay. Over the span of less than a half day, Sacco’s joke had gone viral with tens of thousands of angry responses accusing her of being racist, and the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet had been top-trending on Twitter for hours.

As a result of the incident, Sacco had to delete her social media accounts, publicly apologize and was fired from her job. 

This was an early instance of the phenomenon, public internet shaming. Some of the shaming, for example in connection with the #Metoo movement has been justified. Some of it has been less justified, and some public executions on social media have been based on false evidence and willful misunderstandings. 

The dynamics of why people choose to join social media mobs are not straightforward to nail down. Luckily, we have a good paper on the topic – one that is based on philosophy rather than data – which is not necessarily bad. The paper helps to explain the lure of moral internet outrage, and also why it’s so problematic. Not only for the victims - which is obvious – but also how harsh judgements have consequences for the perpetrators that are joining the mob.