6 hours ago
9
Sometimes it’s a real problem not being able to swear unreservedly in a national newspaper. I mean, I understand social convention and propriety ’n’ all that should be preserved and that, generally, as our parents and teachers told us, swearing is nothing but a sign of a poor vocabulary. But not always. Sometimes – and increasingly so, I think, as I look at the burning world around us – swearing might represent the mots justes. It might be the only fair response. Under certain circumstances, anything else begins to look like obfuscation – a veil being drawn over unpleasantness. We would be in a much better position if, to retool Mrs Patrick Campbell’s notes to George Bernard Shaw for this more brutal age, someone early on had told Trump, for example, to eff off, just once.
But rules is rules and so I must shape with care my response to Inside the Rage Machine, a documentary about how social media is run. The shortest, most honest, most accurate review I could provide would read: “We’re doomed. We’re all doomed,” before advising you to start prepping a bunker now – use your last moments before pulling the plug on the internet to order supplies or buy an isolated homestead in Montana, then gather a go bag and … just go, people. Go.
It’s not that we don’t already know a lot of what the film, presented by Marianna Spring, the BBC’s social media investigations correspondent, tells us. However much we bury our heads in the sand when faced with the growing evidence of the harm that online life is doing to us (and the younger generations, who have even fewer defences against it because they know no different way of being), we have some awareness that Meta does not run Facebook or Instagram to uplift the human soul. Elon Musk did not buy Twitter to spark a renaissance. The handful of billionaires who own these platforms and keep getting richer (and building bunkers in New Zealand, by the way) while the rest of the world gets poorer are probably not working on secret wealth-redistribution programmes.
But to see their machinations laid bare in under an hour, frequently by people who worked inside Zuckerberg’s factory or on the Twitter-to-X transition, until they couldn’t bear the guilt and fear any longer and left to become whistleblowers, is … quite something.
Matt Motyl, a senior staff researcher at Facebook and Meta from 2019 to 2023, looks the most stricken. “I know some of the problems more than I wish I did,” he says. He is not alone among the commentators in wishing he was still living in ignorant bliss. He and others set out how the algorithms behind the companies that now dominate our leisure time, our attention and our lives feed on outrage. Extreme content, misinformation and anything that stokes disbelief or anger results in engagement, which means more ads can be sold and more revenue raised, more increases in share prices – and to hell with anything else.
Most of the former Meta insiders talk of a slight shift in Zuckerberg’s attitude after he was hauled before Congress in 2018 to answer questions connected to Facebook’s apparent unwillingness to constrain hate speech after violence stoked online was unleashed on Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. They also talk of how it didn’t last, although Meta’s statement shown at the end of the programme says that they have strict policies and have invested in safety and security to protect users on their platforms. On we go, through the Southport riots and other online-hate-fuelled events, up to the assassination of the rightwing US activist Charlie Kirk last year.
Spring sifts through documents given to her by various whistleblowers that show the profit motive displacing any finer feelings on this or any other matter (especially once the rival platform TikTok arrives on the scene and starts cannibalising the audience). Safety teams and fact-checking departments have been cut to the bone. When Musk took over Twitter, he sacked 80% of its workforce – those teams were hardly a priority for a man who went on to reinstate Trump, Tommy Robinson et al – and proceeded to treat the platform as if it were a mouthpiece for his own political views.
Thus we live in a world where nuance is worthless and detail is damned, where the most inflammatory statements and speakers are rewarded and the idea that a lie has gone just halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on – which still suggests the truth has a chance to catch up – looks like an aphorism from a lost golden age.
The hour finishes with only a gesture towards solutions. “It’s a governance problem,” says one commentator. “We have to make transparency legally required,” says another. Which is, I think, documentary-speak for: “We’re doomed. We’re all doomed.”
