Members of the Missouri Student Association registering students to vote, Columbia, Mo., on Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2012, National Voter Registration Day (KOMU News)

Jonathan Haidt, the New York University social psychologist and author of the bestselling book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, has been on a tear for a while about the negative effects of online social media. Three years ago in The Atlantic, he and co-author Tobias Rose-Stockwell wrote an essay arguing that the public discourse was getting more coarse and less civil because of how social media “turns so much communication into a public performance.” Being outrageous, which might make a person tiresome in a private setting, gets rewarded in the online arena. Instead of dialogue, we get grandstanding. And so social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, attuned to foster continuous engagement, foment more division as they go about attracting and holding their users’ attention. Haidt and Rose-Stockwell had a point, though it was hardly an original one. But they also seemed incline to exaggerate the effect that social media was having on our society, writing, “This, we believe, is why many Americans — and citizens of many other countries, too — experience democracy as a place where everything is going haywire.”

Curiously, their 2019 essay made no mention of any of the other reasons people might be anxious about the health of their democracies, such as the rise in economic inequality, unresolved racial inequity, the failure to stave off climate change, the rejection of democratic norms by authoritarian populists, the exposure of rampant misogyny and harassment of women by men in power, the decades-long undermining of workers’ rights to organize at their workplaces, or efforts to restrict voting rights. Bipartisan institutional failures like the 2003 invasion of Iraq or the 2008 banking collapse, and the Republican-led brinksmanship that almost led the US government to default on its debt in 2011 also went unmentioned by Haidt and Rose-Stockwell. Even bigger reasons for the crises afflicting the western democracies, like the unraveling of their empires, were nowhere to be seen. No, to Haidt and Rose-Stockwell, the fall from grace is mostly if not entirely the fault of toxic social media.

Now Haidt is back in The Atlantic with an even more ambitious reprise of his 2019 essay, titled “Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Like his early piece, this one goes after the evils of social media, but Haidt is after even bigger game than the haywiring of democracy. According to him, we now live in a modern Babel, where no one speaks the same language or recognizes the same truth, everyone wars with everyone else, and our children suffer from rising anxiety and depression because they can’t keep up with the need to seem happy and beautiful all the time. We are fallen, and starting in 2009, changes that a few tech czars like Mark Zuckerberg made to their platforms are what destroyed us.

Yes, it’s all the fault of the invention of the “like,” “share” and “retweet” buttons, and the related engagement algorithms designed around them, which have turned social media users into performers instead of connectors. To be sure, these (and other) changes to platforms like Facebook and Twitter have intensified the formation of in-groups, which invariably also leads to more vilifying of out-groups. Zuckerberg in particular has been woefully wrong about the benefit of connecting everyone to everyone else, though that hasn’t stopped him from wringing his hands all the way to the bank.

But Haidt is making a uniquely big claim and it just doesn’t hold up. For starters, Facebook and Twitter are not dominating everyone’s attention. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, of the 5.5 hours Americans spend on all forms of leisure per day in 2020, the average American spent 3 hours a day watching TV, compared to 36 minutes on their computers playing games and about 32 minutes socializing and communicating with others. There’s some variation in this data, with people ages 15–24 online much more, but even among that group TV watching is their number one pastime. Older people report more leisure time overall, but again, spend most of it glued to the tube.

It’s true that in the last ten years, the percentage of Americans saying that they use at least one social media site has risen across every age bracket, to 84% of 18–29 year-olds and almost half of people over 65. And that trend has absolutely accelerated since 2009, when nearly everyone began getting smartphones. But while Facebook has managed to get almost seven in ten Americans to sign up, no other social platform has anywhere close to a majority of the public in its grip, not Instagram (40%), Pinterest (31%), LinkedIn (28%), Snapchat (25%), WhatsApp (23%), Twitter (23%) or Reddit (18%). Tech is a new factor in how we live, but hardly the only dispositive one.

Maybe there are other reasons young people are reporting higher levels of anxiety and depression than just concern about how they’re received on Instagram. Could today’s teens be suffering for other reasons, like loneliness from living in households where parents have to work harder than ever to make ends meet, or from despair at the evident failure of those in power to make a real dent in addressing climate change?

Another related weakness in Haidt’s argument is how much he relies on examples of Twitter’s toxicity to stand in for the whole of social media. “Is our democracy any healthier now that we’ve had Twitter brawls over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Tax the Rich dress at the annual Met Gala, and Melania Trump’s dress at a 9/11 memorial event, which had stitching that kind of looked like a skyscraper?” he asks with alarm. Are these “brawls” any different than the argument our parents had over Richard Nixon’s dog Checkers, or Jimmy Carter’s sweaters? Our democracy may not be any healthier because of those spats, but who cares or remembers them? Who is the “we” that Haidt is so worried about? Could it be a certain class of people who previously thought they controlled The Conversation?

To be sure, Haidt knows that the story is more complicated. He admits that the polarization between the two major parties in America started to intensify in the 1970s and worsened with the rise of Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1994, who ended any pretense of bipartisan comity with his scorched earth rhetoric about “Democrat corruption.” But while Haidt worries, correctly, about how much Americans have lost trust in their elected representatives and other powerful institutions, he never considers any other explanation for that collapse than the rise of Babel. “What changed in the 2010s? … A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly 1 billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.”

What Haidt never considers is that maybe, just maybe, America’s powerful institutions were rotten well before social media eliminated the gate-keepers that kept us in one mass audience consuming the same content, fed myths about our nation’s founding and destiny, and told lies about how it functioned at home and abroad. Like his earlier Atlantic screed, absent from this essay are any mention of the festering problems that our ruling elites haven’t solved, like the legacy of systemic racism and dispossession, or a word about the colossal lies told by the leaders of both parties as they led and kept us in a quagmire called Vietnam.

Slowing down the speed of social media, which is one of Haidt’s main prescriptions, would be a good thing. Things that go viral in the human body are called cancers; it’s long past time that the big platforms moved to reduce the virality of content, even if that means they’ll see less engagement overall. I agree with Haidt’s suggestion that more oversight by public regulatory bodies may be needed, but I’m also hopeful that people with experience managing big platforms — like the folks at the Integrity Institute — can also come up with industry-scale solutions.

What’s especially disturbing about Haidt’s arguments is how much he seems to yearn for an idyllic past when we all agreed about America’s history and purpose and everyone got along. Supposedly, until social media arrived, we were a successful democracy, characterized by three major forces binding us together as one country: “social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories.” No doubt the old-boy networks that created the modern American Empire — with its massive military-industrial complex, suburbs zoned to the benefit of whites, patriarchy at the head of every major institution from the unions to the university, the churches to the corporate boardrooms — had a set of shared stories. But starting in the mid-1950s, all the people who were excluded from that cozy country club have been demanding entry and equity. The results have been messy, no doubt. But the result, even with the advent of social media, hasn’t been Babel. It’s been something new and as-yet unfinished and unseen in the world: a multi-racial democracy. If we keep our eyes on that prize, maybe we can still win it.