Nurturing Democracy - Part 3
How Governments Use Social Media
It’s essential to explain how this phenomenon on social media occurs and why it’s dangerous. Social media movements are inherently biased and not based on the complete picture of what’s happening. Social media memes such as #NoFakeMedicine sit back and agree with whatever is said by the French Order of Physicians, condemning those physicians who practice the so-called banned medical specialties. They use keywords like “charlatans, #fake medicine, no evidence-based studies” to support it, and more. An article in Le Figaro group all alternative and complementary medicines into one. For example, comparing homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic, and mesotherapy is preposterous. Even worse, the rhetoric rolls down a hill like a snowball, gaining size and speed. Once the movement is so powerful, few question it, and those who do are dwarfed by the noise; worse, they are shadow-banned, canceled, and shouted down. The medical community acts as a tribe, erasing any individuality they once had.
To understand how a social media post can turn into something horrible when it’s not, here’s an adapted excerpt from Tobias Rose-Stockwell’s book, The Outrage Machine, as well as the podcast he did on the Jordan Harbinger Show:
“Imagine a man named Bob coming home from work, and he had a rough day at work. His kids kept him up all night. He’s used to working hard, and his wife asks him to pick up some milk and eggs at the store. He gets in line and places his groceries on the belt, and someone cuts in front of him in line. Bob is at the end of his rope. He almost got fired today, and he’s having a really bad day. So, he snaps at the person, saying excuse me, yells at her for a second, and the person in line yells back and escalates for a minute. Someone pulls out a camera, and they start recording that particular event of this altercation between Bob and this woman who’s in line.
It takes a second or two, and the woman says, ‘Look, I’m really sorry. I got out of line because I had to go back to replace the broken eggs. I needed to get some eggs, and these eggs were broken. I’m really sorry. I just had to get back to my place in line. I’m late for things.”
He apologized, she apologized, and things moved on, right? But that particular video, right? The video of the altercation between Bob and this woman, maybe some nasty things were said in that moment, is placed on social media. It’s placed online without the initial context about Bob’s bad day, and it’s placed without the natural resolution of the event.
Suddenly, the video of an outburst against a man and a woman goes viral. So, a natural kind of gender power disparity appears that people can use as a reference — ‘Oh, look, this is a problem with men in America.’ Someone can look at that and say, ‘That’s the problem, men in America and toxic masculinity. They’re just constantly yelling at women and being terrible to them.’ Or if one of them is a Republican or Democrat, you can add additional context.
The whole video misses the richness and nuance of real life. The background has been stripped away from the original event, and people can add context to it themselves. This tweet on X begins to go viral, and people start commenting on it, like, ‘Oh, this is a problem. I can’t believe that this guy Bob, he’s clearly a terrible guy.’ Then, someone else sees that and adds their own context to it. ‘This is an example of Trump’s America. This is an example of the gender disparity.’
But we’ve created this vehicle for taking these tiny moments with any hint or smell of power asymmetry. We turn them into these broader notions about the world that we are living in, and everyone participates. Everyone who sees it can have an opinion about it and chime in, and it becomes this consequential cultural touchpoint that is divorced from everyday reality. And that’s a massive problem for us making sense of the world we’re living in because we’re taking these otherwise benign anecdotes and turning them into prominent points of moral disgust and shame. All the while, missing the big picture.
That leads to the concept of moral emotions and how we act on our morals in groups with other people, which is tribalism. Moral emotions are fundamentally different from other emotions in our bodies. So, you have an emotion; I’m sad, and to change my state, I’m angry at something happening in the world around me. However, immoral emotions tend to involve other people. They tend to involve righteousness and indignation, shame, and disgust; all these are moral emotions and involve other people and how people should act in society. And we’re all operating with different moral emotions.
We all have different balances and tastes in life. Liberals and conservatives tend to have a very different but discernible profile of moral emotions. They are filters that change how we see events in the world, and these moral emotions are potent. They’re much more powerful than you’d expect. The way that you might see an interaction between two people as being deeply disgusting and problematic, someone else might see it. So, we’re all coming at these from different perspectives.
But online, when we see particular moral transgressions, these emotions come into play dramatically. We end up in these cacophonous pylons with other people who share the same moral opinions. So, this moral segmentation is happening online when we’re actually served significant amounts of content. And this is what social media optimization does. It will start to filter for morally outrageous content that you find morally outrageous. So, these algorithms begin to serve you content that will speak to your moral emotions, engage your emotions, and start peeling us into different moral tribes online. And this is one of the reasons we see so many identity groups online. There’s a lot of in-group and out-group behavior in which we feel very tribal online. That’s why you see many hashtag identities on those; you end up with these moral threats. When we feel a moral threat, we feel this impulse to find our tribe and want to find safety. So, when there’s a threat to the way the world operates, a threat to us, or a threat to a group we hold in high esteem, we feel called to defend them.
Two things happen there: we denigrate the out-group and venerate the in-group. So, we look to the out-group and say, “Those people are terrible because they are threatening my in-group with my moral foundations, and they are terrible, and my in-group is awesome. This is why I feel so good about Democrats and why I hate Republicans. Republicans are despicable; Democrats are great, or vice versa.” And that’s what happens when we’re exposed to moral threats, and that’s what social media is very good at doing and traditional media in moral threats to our way of life, to the way we think about the world because it is engaging and because it will sell ad revenue.
In the case of the French Board of Medicine, they took an excerpt from alternative and complementary medicine, grouped everyone together, made a document, and placed it online, to separate medicine and form “in-groups” and “out-groups.”
For example, the French Board of Medicine has used the meme #NoFakeMedicine to further their doctrine of banning medical specialties they feel are unworthy. They used their governmental powers to round up doctors practicing medicine outside of the so-called mainstream. Of course, many doctors and medical students jump on the bandwagon and start using the meme #NoFakeMedicine. But these people must read the studies or the thousands of patient testimonials. I can tell you from personal experience that these doctors have not read the studies. It’s true there aren’t a lot of great studies on certain medical specialties; it’s expensive to perform studies, especially outside of universities. For example, it costs about one million dollars to perform a level one orthopedic or pain medicine study.
Likely, the Order of Physicians has also taken a playbook from using social media and the pandemic. For example, it’s well known from the Schellenberger and Taibbi testimonies that media and pharmaceutical companies and governments hired hundreds to troll the social media landscape for healthcare professionals who were advising anything against the ongoing narrative that everyone must take the vaccines, use masks, lockdowns, and pre-treatment of COVID itself. Although no one knows for sure, it’s not unreasonable that the French organization is motivating other medical professionals using the same tactics.
Again, this becomes a vital Interplay of Medical Freedom and Free Speech. The French government demands that doctors only practice “approved medicine” according to their standards and not allow patients to choose how they want to be treated and what happens to their bodies. This is tyrannical government control at its best.
The next article will highlight the repercussions of these types of actions. Take the example of a back pain patient…