CHAPTER SIX

THE IMMUNE SYSTEM

How Social Media Responds to Unwelcome Threats

 

IT’S HARD to imagine greater grief than that of a parent who finds a three-year-old daughter’s bed empty in the middle of the night and then never sees her again. But it can get worse. Social media trolls made sure that Gerry and Kate McCann’s actual nightmare wasn’t limited to the anguish of being unable to find their daughter Madeleine and whoever abducted her from their Portuguese hotel room in 2007. Those digital vigilantes perpetuated the conspiracy theories that bubbled up in the initial aftermath of what is now recognized as a deeply flawed initial forensic report. The British tabloid press, which first floated some of those theories—that the McCanns killed their daughter or that she’d died of an accident and they’d hidden the body for fear of retribution—have long since reined themselves in, forced by a libel case to pay damages and apologize. But on social media, the drumbeat of accusations just grew and grew, even as a new investigation exposed the deep flaws in the first one and fell heavily in support of the abduction theory. For years afterward, millions of viewers and vitriolic commentators were drawn to YouTube posts that showed photos of the middle-class British couple smiling—suggesting it as evidence of their guilt—complained of the articulate Dr. Gerry McCann’s access to politicians, and hashed together armchair detective theories on the real “truth.” Then as Twitter, which was founded the year before Madeleine’s disappearance, evolved into a global town square of relentless heckling, the cacophony of harassment just grew louder. So much so that the family closed the official @FindMadeleine account in 2015 because of what they termed the “toxic” postings of their accusers.

Yet the McCanns are not the only victims in this Salem-like rush to judgment that social media seemed to encourage. In some respects, their critics have also suffered—perhaps their failure to filter their own instincts is to blame, but they are victims nonetheless. Take Kerry Needham, the working-class mother of Ben Needham, who disappeared at the age of twenty-one months on the Greek island of Kos in 2001. She was heavily critical of the disproportional attention and UK government resources dedicated to the McCann case and made her point known on social media. Because the McCanns blocked her @FindBenNeedham Twitter account from posting on theirs, she felt they were unfairly implicating her in the circle of “toxic” attackers and went public to say so. Two grieving families were now slinging mud at each other in what amounted to a classic British class war. Then there’s the case of Brenda Leyland, the owner of the Twitter account @sweepyface, on which had appeared tweets calling for the McCanns to “burn in hell” with the promise to “supply the petrol.” In October 2014, with Gerry McCann calling on police to target “vile” trolls like @sweepyface, Sky News outed Leyland as the Twitter account’s author and confronted her near her Leicestershire home, later broadcasting the exchange on air. A week later, the sixty-three-year-old mother committed suicide. As Emma Barnett, a columnist at The Telegraph, wrote of the whole tragic affair, it should be a “wake up call” for everyone, a lesson that “we must confront this uncomfortable dichotomy between our real lives and our online ones.”

How did it come to this? Why is there such a relentless outpouring of fear, anger, and vengefulness in Reddit threads and the accounts of Twitter trolls? Why are there so many virtual pitchfork mobs attacking strangers for their perceived wrongs, often resulting in “punishments” like destroyed careers that far outstrip the original “crimes”?” Why do extremist organizations like ISIS succeed in using social media to recruit young people to their barbaric causes and stoke fear into the minds of Westerners?

I might respond by stating that to focus on the ugly side of social media is missing the forest for the trees. I could say that the problem is simply that the most alarming, negative posts tend to grab your attention, drowning out the silent majority of reasonable people and distorting the overall picture of positive change. I could tell you to instead focus on all the powerful, progressive stuff: social media’s role in helping foment the Arab Spring, its capacity to rapidly disseminate vital information during natural disasters, how Parisians used it to share secure information about safe houses amid the ISIS-led terrorist attacks of November 2015. But those answers aren’t satisfying: The fact is that social media can be an extremely effective tool for doing social harm, especially because of the virtual mimesis concept we outlined above. People who hide behind anonymous avatars and alternative online personas feel less retribution for being hateful and abusive than they would if people knew who they were. There’s no negative feedback mechanism to stop them.

The Social Organism covers a wide breadth of humanity, which in theory should create a market that inherently demands inclusiveness. The problem is that the network’s overarching heterogeneity is broken down into isolated pools of homogeneity. The all-powerful social media platforms offer tools to tailor newsfeeds to content we (or they) perceive to be the content we want. We’ve carved up this big universe of diversity into narrower subgroups of like-minded “friends” and “followers,” forming echo chambers that subject our creativity to the corrosive influence of groupthink. This birds-of-a-feather instinct, which sociologists call “homophily,” is not new. But social media is amplifying the process. And it has gotten more intense as platform managers have unleashed algorithms that control the reading habits of their audiences so that they can package up target markets of supposedly similarly minded people to advertisers and political pitchmen. (Check out a recent Wall Street Journal online graphic entitled “Blue Feed, Red Fed” for a startling demonstration of how Facebook was amplifying the homophily experience of Conservatives and Liberals during the 2016 election campaign.) Many of these divided groups are now constantly attacking each other. Humans have been waging such battles for centuries, of course. But now they are played out in ceaseless dialogue across our segregated newsfeeds.

In the last chapter I showed that the Social Organism responds positively to content that elicits feelings of love and warmth. But what one group “loves” can differ diametrically from another group. One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. In the 1930s Hitler was loved by millions of Germans, their hearts filled with Teutonic pride by the emotion-stirring images of swastikas and goose-stepping Nazis. He was hardly lovable to the rest of humanity.

It’s important, too, that the “love” people feel for their fellow ideologues can now be expressed with the click of a button. On social media platforms the “like” buttons and emoticon response options offered to readers are nearly always limited to positive expressions. For a long time it was impossible to do anything but “like” a Facebook post. Now, there’s a wider array of response options, but still no way to “dislike” a post. You can express anger, laughter, awe, and sadness with cartoon faces, but these tend more toward solidarity with the post’s point of view than critique. We can, of course, express opposition in comments, but the basic architecture of social media tends to promote like-mindedness.

Segregation in social media is by no means democratic. Due to disparities in digital education and access, the censorship structure of social media platforms (which we’ll discuss later in the book), and the pre-existing biases and inequalities imported from the physical world, some online groups have more clout than others even when their ideas are anathema to a wider humanity. It can be a question of how loud your voice is and how many influencers you have in your circle.

The #Gamergate scandal of 2014–2015 helps illuminate this phenomenon. In that case, men in the online gaming community—many hiding behind anonymous identities—attacked female game developers such as Zoe Quinn in what seemed like a concerted effort to inculcate gaming culture as a bastion of masculinity. Theirs was a nineteenth-century mind-set applied to a twenty-first-century, high-tech setting. Yet as regressive as their views were, the trolls’ waves of attacks overwhelmed Quinn and her supporters, some of whom had to go into hiding because of rape and death threats. A year later, despite the disgust that #Gamergate elicited in wider society, it was hard not to conclude that the misogynists had won. In the male-dominant online gaming subculture, the most antisocial voices were sufficiently numerous, vocal, and tech savvy to hijack the debate and turn it to their advantage. It was a discouraging challenge to the rosy Silicon Valley narrative that online technology breeds inclusiveness.

Sometimes warring social media factions will reach a kind of equilibrium in which neither side wins, leaving a cacophony of vitriol with no room for constructive dialogue. Consider the U.S. political sphere, where conservatives and liberals are locked in a quasi-permanent but restless impasse. Twitter feeds, news sites’ comment sections, and Facebook discussion groups reveal a world of perpetually uncompromising positions by Republicans and Democrats. This stalemate, which is directly manifest in Congress’s policy gridlock, is rooted in the disruption of broadcast news by cable TV in the 1980s. An early contributor to this failure to interact and negotiate was CNN’s Crossfire show, which decided that the public’s interest in “objectivity” was somehow served by having two egomaniacal personalities from either side of the political divide yell at each other across a table. Now, we see the same character attacks and petulant fights occurring right inside the two political parties; during the 2016 Republican primaries, standards got so low that when Donald Trump boasted about the size of his penis in a televised debate, the general reaction was a collective “of course he did” shrug.

If this inclination toward permanent conflict is frustrating, it is nonetheless a useful foundation for understanding how the Social Organism deals with stress. That understanding will help us design messages and mechanisms that encourage people to dial down the anger and hate and instead promote compassion and love. Not surprisingly, what we find is that this tendency toward equilibrium is consistent with how nature works. All living things—as per our rule number four—are constantly working to ensure that their internal environment maintains homeostasis, or balance. They need stability, not entropy. And often that means finding the point where each of two competing forces is unable to overwhelm the other.

YouTuber C. G. P. Grey offered an explanation for this dysfunctional aspect of social media in a video entitled “This Video Will Make You Angry.” Grey, whose real name is widely believed to be Colin Gregory Palmer Grey, drew heavily on biological analogies to describe how anger, that adrenaline-releasing motivator of action, can have a viral impact on like-minded thinkers. He started by describing ideas posted on social media as “thought germs”—he might not have recognized it, but he was talking about memes—that latch on to the receptors of people (cells) who sympathize with the idea. The most powerful thought germs, he argues, are “anger germs,” since—as the Wharton study showed—ideas that provoke ire are especially capable of spurring sympathizers to share them on social media. As these anger germs encounter new sets of like-minded people, they lead to a viral-like explosion of replicated anger. Soon enough, though, this burst of fury across social media is spotted by people from groups holding opposing viewpoints, which prompts a countervailing, equally angry response. As each group succumbs to a constant, reinforcing feedback loop, they plunge into a fierce competition. “Each group breeds thought germs about the other, and the most enraging, but not necessarily the most accurate, spread the fastest.” Often, this competitive process ends up at “symbiosis,” he adds, a point in which “a super successful symbiotic pair of anger germs [reaches] ecological stability.” It’s a version of homeostasis.

Not all anger-inducing ideas reach equipoise with their antithesis on social media, however. Some ideas are so unacceptable to the bilateral status quo that the Social Organism swiftly responds to dispel or neutralize them. It’s as if they are foreign intruders from outside the organism, a threat to what it currently defines as its homeostatic steady state—which in this sense we might define as some kind of cultural benchmark of acceptable norm of behavior. Ideas outside the acceptable range are treated as a threat, like a disease-carrying bacteria or parasite, and prompt the Organism’s cells to unleash a defensive response. At these moments we see how rule number five applies to social media: The Organism responds to outside stimuli to adapt and or protect itself.

We saw this in 2015, when the Social Organism responded to news that Minneapolis dentist Walter Palmer had shot and killed Cecil, a beloved lion that lived in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park. Hordes of people took to social media to express their disapproval of what he’d done, which in turn spilled over into his offline life with sweeping effect. Palmer’s vacation home was sprayed with the words “lion killer.” The Yelp page for his dental practice was inundated with negative reviews that, despite Yelp deleting hundreds that it deemed motivated by politics rather than dentistry, left him with an ongoing one-star rating. Most tellingly, dozens of airlines from the U.S. and other countries responded by banning the transport of trophies from game hunting experiences.

In our bodies, the immune system is triggered when antigens carried by parasites, bacteria, or other unwelcome substances make contact with the protective antibodies we’ve built up through evolution and from our own past experience. It is as if the Social Organism recognized Walter Palmer’s behavior as a harmful foreign substance, a threat that needed to be expelled, akin to the racist Confederate flag. Much like the all-encompassing immune system in human bodies, the Social Organism has a collective subconsciously evolved networked system for defending the status quo of cultural norms. When the antigens contained in a toxic, antithetical idea make contact with receptors in the human brains that comprise the Social Organism, they encounter the cultural “antibodies” that have developed within our culture against offensive concepts. These unwelcome parasites, along with the human cells associated with them, are swiftly rejected and purged.

This kind of group policing on social media, however, does not always hew to the prevailing standards of our wider society. Walter Palmer’s problem was not necessarily that his behavior was outside such norms—though killing lions is now pretty widely frowned upon—rather that it was antithetical to the particular homeostatic balance that existed within social media. #Gamergate misogynists don’t represent the existing state of Western thinking on gender equality, but at that moment in the evolution of social media and its power dynamic, they had sufficient numbers to control the debate. If there was a similarly well-organized community of highly motivated, strong-minded safari hunters to come to Palmer’s defense on social media, his case may have played out much differently. While the Social Organism’s immune system is acting as an arbiter of its own cultural norms, it does not fully capture those of society as a whole. Social media still has a lot of growing up to do. We are seeing this played out to great fervor on the issue of gun control in America. It seems with every passing day, a new mass killing happens, and at some point, the American society is going to overturn the boundless notions of the Second Amendment and the NRA, and do something about this toxic influence in our culture.

Interestingly the debate still rages on about the Orlando massacre that left fifty gay men dead. The killer mixed so many metaphors: a disenfranchised mental health patient, a self-loathing homophobe, or an ISIS member and Islamic terrorist. Each group of social media pundits and activists locked on to their version of the story for their agenda.

The social media purging process can go too far, too. In So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, journalist Jon Ronson details many cases in which hordes of social media users have taken a person’s actions or utterances out of context and responded by attacking them with devastating effect. There’s the case of Justine Sacco, who boarded a plane in Heathrow and made the fatal mistake of sending what she says was meant to be a sarcastic joke on Twitter: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” She’d been sending a number of tweets employing racial stereotypes that, taken together, make it seem like she was really poking fun at racists and, perhaps, at her own privileged position. But social media doesn’t handle irony very well. So, unbeknownst to Sacco, while she was unplugged from the world during the eleven-hour flight, her tweet unleashed a deluge of opprobrium. Tens of thousands of indignant replies were thrown back at her, calling her racist and insensitive. While she was in the air, #HasJustineLandedYet became one of the top trending hashtags. Upon disembarking at Cape Town she discovered an overwhelmed Twitter account and a receiving line of journalists, both professional and hobbyist, waiting to document her arrival. Within hours, she was fired from her job, her career in tatters. Sacco’s joke was certainly ill-conceived and reflected an ignorance of the Social Organism. But did she deserve all this?

The same question could be asked by Tim Hunt, the Nobel Prize–winning biochemist and molecular physiologist (my kind of scientist). He was famously fired from an honorary professorship at University College London after he joked before a gathering in Seoul that the problem with having women in a lab is that “they fall in love with you and when you criticize them they cry.” A comprehensive analysis of the events from former UK member of Parliament Louise Mensch later revealed that a journalist whose coverage of Hunt’s remarks sparked outrage and mockery on social media had overlooked clear signs that Hunt was being ironic and self-deprecating. He spoke before an audience of female scientists and women journalists—a setting in which it’s almost inconceivable that someone of his caliber could say something so blatantly sexist unless he was being ironic. An audiotape of the event released one month later, which revealed a laughing audience’s response to his joke, contradicted the reporter’s claim that his comment had met with silence and seemed to confirm Hunt’s assertion that he’d simply made a rather ham-fisted joke about his own less-than-perfect looks and love life. Eventually, Hunt was reappointed to some of his posts, in part because UCL’s overreaction prompted a separate backlash against the university. But the damage was done.

One way to think about these mob-driven overreactions is to contemplate the failings of our biological immune system, which can also take things too far. If you have allergies, you may dread springtime, when your immune system reads false antigen signals from otherwise harmless pollen and, viewing it as a threat, produces mucus and unlocks your tear ducts to dispel it. After all, antigens are just another “pattern” that the body has learned to recognize, and it can misinterpret those patterns. Whether immune systems do or don’t overreact in this way is a function of genetics. The same principle might apply to memetics with the Social Organism. We need to evolve a more sophisticated memetic code, one that allows people to use context both to interpret others’ comments and to recognize the outsized harm that their own kneejerk responses can have when they’re unleashed on social media. This technology, and the online society that has built around it, are young and underdeveloped. Nuance is often absent. Perhaps the answer is a more multisensory world within our social media experiences, one that virtual reality technology might eventually bring us. For now, we must grapple with an imperfect evolutionary state. We must figure how to encourage its healthy, progressive evolution.

Other examples of tension within social media have less to do with swiftly purging a threat and the pursuit of homeostasis and more to do with how competing memes within the Organism battle for ascendancy over time. Yet in these cases, too, responses and counter-responses look very much like the behavior of an immune system. The street protests and mass actions that the #BlackLivesMatter movement coordinates via social media seem like a concerted attempt to purge racist ideas and institutions. Because they face stiff resistance from anti-BLM forces, the movement doesn’t consistently succeed in immediate expulsion. Few cops, for example, have been charged with murder in these police brutality cases, let alone convicted. On the other hand, as we’ve documented, the accumulation of actions from the #BlackLivesMatter and other social media–led activist movements are nonetheless driving evolutionary change within the Organism. Over time, they have developed ever-wider support from a large subsection of the population. In time, I believe they will change the entire Organism for the better.

#BlackLivesMatters was a constructive idea that inserted itself into the Organism from outside. But destructive memes can also enter the same way, using the Organism’s cell structure and metabolic pathways to sow hate and torment. We’ve mentioned ISIS, but there are many others that we should be concerned about, too.

Consider simply the coldheartedness with which some people denigrate appearances, whether in reference to complete strangers or to public figures like tennis star Serena Williams, who has been frequently subjected to racist and sexist comments on social media about her muscular body shape. Such cases are examples of the least compassionate aspects of human behavior.

I think of these unadulterated blasts of hate as social cancers. Like cancer, they use the Organism’s own system to nourish abnormal growth, creating tumors that can outpace the growth of normal cells. Typically, our immune system is adept enough to stop carcinogens from triggering tumors. Other times, that same system might fail to stop the advent of a tumor, but it will curtail its growth and prevent it from metastasizing. Often, however, the cancer wins—often enough to put the various diseases that come under this category in the crosshairs of medical researchers the world over. By stealing nutrients away from healthy non-cancerous cells, a malignant tumor will starve the organism to the point of death unless chemotherapy or radiation is successfully administered. (Here, too, failed pattern recognition is to blame: The most deadly cancers are those that disguise themselves so that the immune system fails to recognize the mutated cell growth as a foreign invader.) We can think similarly about memes that do harm to the inclusive, wider body of the Social Organism. While I believe that the Social Organism will eventually mount the defenses required to overcome these diseases, they are undoubtedly working against the constructive value of social media.

How to stop these cancers? For solutions, we should look—you guessed it—at the study of human biology, specifically at how it informs cancer treatment. A key word here is “mutagen,” which doctors use to describe an agent, either radiation or chemical, that induces genetic mutation. Many mutagens, like the chemicals in tobacco smoke, are unwelcome because by changing our DNA, they can provoke cancerous growth. But mutagens are also useful as weapons against cancer. Both radiation and chemotherapy (a chemical-based treatment) are used to force changes in the underlying cell structure of different types of cancer and stop or reverse their growth.

A related approach is immunotherapy, an exploding new medical field that my allergies-suffering partner at theAudience, Sean Parker, has aggressively supported with $600 million in funding. It aims to train the body how to better fight true enemies like cancer, and not substances like the peanuts and shellfish that Sean’s body mistakenly sees as a threat. Whereas mutagen strategies involve altering the genetic mutation process, immunotherapy is about teaching the immune system to interpret information. In both cases, however, we see a type of “recoding” taking place, and that notion may be the key to strengthening the Social Organism’s defenses against hate.

As we’ve been saying from the outset, there’s no turning back the clock on the new communications architecture that social media represents. So, if we are to harness more of this new system’s positive features and diminish its uglier, negative aspects, we must explore new strategies for fostering a more inclusive, empathetic society. We need to start thinking about how to mutate or rewrite parts of the Organism’s memetic code to foment fundamental changes in our social mores and culture, to make them more resistant to the disease of hateful communication.

How might we deliberately alter the memetic code? We could start by simply expanding the meme pool with healthier memes. Just as the strength and resiliency of an organism is bolstered by the number of positive, strong genes from which its DNA is drawn and undermined by the weak ones that leave it susceptible to disease, so, too, the health of the Social Organism is determined by the right mix of memes. One way to build a healthier, more positively inclined social media environment, then, is simply to encourage a greater abundance of emotionally positive, uplifting content. We need to celebrate and promote the human spirit; encourage compassion, empathy, and respect; build bridges of tolerance and inclusion; provide sustainability for art and culture; and seek reconciliation and rapprochement between enemies.

That may sound like stating the obvious. Our poets and priests have been calling for more compassion for centuries. It might also sound a little naïve and idealistic seen through the lens of pre–social media communications history. But only now, in this new era of communication technology, do we have the data to test and measure the effectiveness of different strategies for spreading goodwill. Social media can be mapped, studied, and quantified—a living laboratory, hundreds of millions of interconnected nodes that powerful computers can analyze. To be sure, the astronomical fees that social media platforms like Twitter charge to access their core data will for now constrain our ability to learn from it. To me, that’s an incentive to develop decentralized social media systems that no person or company owns, an idea we’ll address in chapter 8. Still, with the right access to all this complex data, we really can start to study social interaction as a more precise science. One example of this being put into practice comes from the Kavli Foundation’s HUMAN Project, an interdisciplinary analysis of an enormous, decades-long dataset lifted from the actions of ten thousand New Yorkers. In Kavli’s words, it aims to “enable the development of new theories, therapeutics, and policy recommendations currently unattainable through traditional studies of human beings.”

Much of our work at theAudience involved studying human socialization, albeit somewhat less rigorously than Kavli. In the interests of helping our clients to profit from making constructive messages go viral, we explored data to find the right methodology for spreading goodwill. Now, with Big Data, machine learning, and sophisticated analytics, we could similarly measure the efficacy of how different strategies play out across the social media universe. In the process, we could help to build a friendlier, healthier Social Organism.

Rather than studying how negative content breeds hurtful feedback loops, it might be more useful to start by looking at where social media is succeeding in promoting tolerance and inclusion. Many publishers are already demonstrating its enormous capacity to breed positive, uplifting sentiment. I noted in the previous chapter how we’d had viral success at theAudience with advertising shaped around life-affirming content. The same is occurring in new forms of journalism and non-commercial creative content. These are the people who will help us rid the Social Organism of its cancerous cynicism.

Brandon Stanton’s hugely successful Humans of New York blog and Facebook page (17 million followers) are shining examples of how to harness social media to encourage compassion and pathos. Stanton’s simple formula, coupling a daily photo of an ordinary person with a quote that captures their hopes and fears, routinely draws a flood of heartfelt, uplifting comments from readers. The photos aren’t always exceptional; neither necessarily are the comments. But day after day, these posts form a uniquely humanizing story that can have an infectious effect on those who encounter it. Stanton’s posts become powerful memes shared by millions around the world. “HONY” is a phenomenon, so much so that a photo of one kid from a poor Brooklyn neighborhood inspired a fund-raising drive that raised more than $1.4 million for his school and earned the photographer, student, and his school principal an invitation to the White House.

Some critics have charged that HONY’s posts are superficial and breed sentimentality rather than real connections or knowledge. But based on how I see the evolution of the Social Organism and the importance of emotions and empathy within it, the very creation of positive vibes between people is a valuable contribution to society. I like to think of HONY as an empathy replicator. We need to build more of them. Activists, policymakers, educators, journalists, even corporate brands—anyone who wants to make a positive difference—could follow this model. It’s the kind of healthy living the Organism needs to ward off its cancers, precisely because it encourages us to celebrate each other’s presence on this earth. It is an example of what Ethan Zuckerman, a media theorist at MIT’s Media Lab, calls “digital cosmopolitanism,” an inclusive model that breaks us free of our homophily-saturated newsfeeds and treats the viewpoints of others with respect and compassion.

Other examples of content providers taking a positive approach include Upworthy, whose posts over social media typically combine a video with a positive, humanistic message. Within months after it was founded in March 2013, the service’s posts had surged to third place among the most shared and liked items on Facebook, hitting a combined tally of 14 million in November 2013. Upworthy’s success has spawned a slew of imitators, including Distractify.com, ViraNova.com, Liftbump.com, FaithIt.com. Cynics will charge that these sites are all just “clickbait” ploys, and that may be the case. But clickbait that celebrates positivity is a good thing in my book.

Social media can also turn the inspiring acts that people carry out in the offline world into something with a viral, global impact. When the Make-A-Wish Foundation granted five-year-old cancer survivor Miles Scott his wish to play the role of “BatKid” and save Gotham (aka, the City of San Francisco), it staged an elaborate performance across the city that enlisted the help of professional actors, the city’s mayor, and even a herogram Vine loop from President Obama. But it took the power of social media, which alerted a massive crowd to the prospect of attending as cheering onlookers and which was used to broadcast the events to millions of viewers worldwide, to turn this into an international celebration.

There’s also the case of Liz Woodward, the waitress at a New Jersey diner who left a note for two firefighter customers, telling them that she’d personally paid their breakfast tab in gratitude for their service to the community. When Tim Young, one of the firefighters, posted a pic of the note on Facebook in which he called on his friends to frequent the diner and “tip big,” his post about her thoughtful gesture went viral. When it passed over the feed of Lorraine Hatcher, she sent a message back to Tim pointing out that Woodward had been trying to raise money to buy a wheelchair-accessible van for her invalid father. The firefighters seized the opportunity and launched their own campaign in support of the Woodward family’s online GoFundMe campaign and turned the whole thing into an even bigger good-news story. Donations started flooding in from around the world. In short order the fund had reached $86,000, enough to buy the van and then some. The story went national, including an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and played out for months on Woodward’s own infectiously uplifting Facebook page, where she posted about the positive turn her life had taken. In her re-affirmed worldview, she saw how good deeds beget good deeds. “Look for those opportunities because they are everywhere,” Woodward wrote in one post. “You can make a difference—it doesn’t always have to be an elaborate production or effort—it’s always the little things that have the greatest impact.”

This kind of good-vibe contagion was not possible in the pre–social media world.

Even so, against a relentless stream of articles about humanity’s capacity for cruelty, and faced with depressing clickbait headlines (“15 Incredibly Hideous Prom Dress Fails”)—it’s hard not to take a jaded view. The feel-good stories discussed above can seem tokenistic against this overwhelming flood of gloom.

Michael and I believe that social media is a major contributor to positive change. Like all technology, it has its negative side effects. But it helps us in so many ways we already take for granted and which bring convenience and security to our everyday lives: We’re able to crowdsource knowledge and ask questions that get answered in seconds, whether in a neighborhood Facebook group or a forum for people with common interests. Information-sharing apps in which each node on the network contributes seamlessly to the overall good of the system are changing the face of cities, exemplified by Google’s traffic info service Waze, tweet analysis is being used to send early warning signals for everything from earthquakes and disease outbreaks to market behavior.

But it’s more than just utility. It’s the possibility that individuals can broadcast powerful statements about our shared humanity that makes this technology so important. In the days following the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, a blindfolded man appeared in Place de la Republique with a sign that read, “I’m a Muslim, but I’m told that I’m a terrorist” and “I trust you, do you trust me? If yes, hug me.” As people constantly came up to hug him, word spread on social media of the opportunity to be there and videos and photos of the exchanges were shared around the world, often with a hashtag that expressed the solidarity that people felt for the city at that time: #JeSuisParis. A work of performance art became a powerful contributor to reconciliation.

As we’ll discuss in the next chapter, there’s strong evidence that, with the rise of the Internet and social media, society has become more tolerant and less violent—despite what might seem like appearances to the contrary. If we use this technology well, it should help us to transcend our social fragmentation and push this new digital society toward a more inclusive future. More than a billion people from all walks of life, cultures, religions, and political perspectives use platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. And because of its holonic structure, no one interest group can ever truly wield power over all others. We might hide in groups of common interest but with just one mouse click we can reach across those divides and find a common humanity with someone from a different background.

Still, we do have the capacity to screw this up. Look no further than how Donald Trump used this technology to bring racists and xenophobes from out of the woodwork during the 2016 election campaign. We can hope that the positive forces of cultural change described above will have a self-correcting effect to reverse these worrying throwbacks to exclusion and bigotry. But there’s no guarantee that this will occur on its own. By definition, evolution is not something we can micromanage. What we can do instead is establish the right preconditions to encourage positive, progressive evolution—or, even more important, avoid those that would steer the Organism’s evolutionary direction into something nastier. We don’t want to be like the cotton farmers who tried to poison the boll weevils only to find that they’d created a more virulent, resistant strain. And to carry that analogy further, I would say that censorship, both by governments and from the social media platforms themselves, is the equivalent of the USDA scientists’ DDT dumps on the cotton fields of the South.

When we see the kind of sexual harassment that Caroline Criado-Perez endured on Twitter in response to her feminist activism in the United Kingdom, the instinct is to create rules that curb such hateful expression. But as understandable as that impulse might be, the secondary effects of such draconian responses always do more harm than good over time. It’s why I worry about the European Union’s move in 2016 to force social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to censor hate speech—the line could get fuzzy very quickly, and such bans are open to abuse and poor discretion.

One big problem is that censorship sets a precedent, giving de facto license to information gatekeepers—be they governments, traditional media companies, or the corporate owners of our social media platforms—to use these sanctioned speech curbs to pursue and protect their own interests. In the pages ahead, we’ll discuss the prospect of inserting certain software algorithms into social media platforms that create incentives for people to engage in positive speech. This is a softer, carrot-like approach and whether it’s successful or whether it also creates unwelcome distortions remains to be seen. But I do know from years in this business that the stick approach definitely doesn’t work. People will still be shitheads.

The other big problem, as we’ll discuss in the next chapter, is that by explicitly limiting our exposure to even the most hateful of speech, we constrain the Social Organism’s ability to evolve in a way that positively influences our culture. The last thing we want to do is turn the hatemongers of social media into super-mutant, indestructible boll weevils.