Is social media-enabled collective behavior creating a crisis?

Characterizing the effects of scaled-up communication technology on societies around the world as a global phenomenon with new risks to humanity, seventeen researchers, from anthropology, biology, philosophy, psychology, and some interdisciplinary programs, penned the research note, Stewardship of Global Collective Behavior, explaining the nature of the problem and recommending solutions.

The main thesis of the paper is the proposition that advances in communication technologies have accelerated social change, modified traditional social networks, and created new risks. These changes resulted in a new form of collective behavior on a global scale, making social systems even more complex and more difficult to study, understand, and explain.

The paper succeeds in highlighting the fact that social media-driven collective behavior has consequential effects on all areas of life. In other words, the scaled-up collective behavior not only impacts local cultures, ecosystems, and social order, but it does so on a global scale with serious impact on natural and human resources.

Although the research note has clear bias towards providing public policy recommendations, the authors did not neglect to draw attention to the need for academic disciplines (and researchers) to adapt to the fast-changing world. For instance, the authors find that the traditional peer-review process might be too slow to tackle the new challenges and that both changes to that system and the adoption of new pathways, such as “multiinstitution and interdisciplinary collaboration” might be needed. Specifically, the authors recommend that universities embrace and adopt changes through funding allocations, hiring plans, and tenure and promotion standards.

This paper is a breakthrough contribution to the slow-to-adapt academia that faces headwinds impacting not only the way universities produce and disseminate knowledge, but also the way institutions fund their activities, which has consequential effect on the former. However, the authors of this paper seem to understate or overlook few things.

For instance, the authors claim that researchers lack the scientific framework needed to answer the “most basic questions that technology companies and their regulators face” like the impact of a given algorithm on spreading misinformation. This topic is important because it is at the center of the authors recommendation for creating the “crisis discipline” and new value system—akin to “the Hippocratic oath”—applicable to both researchers and leaders of media companies.

As it stands, the answer to whether algorithms are connected to the spread of misinformation is already known. In fact, algorithms may have been designed to do what they do with that goal in mind. Commercial social media platforms are systems of generating and growing wealth, not designed to produce fact-based knowledge and reliable information—the task of researchers and research institutions. Regulators and legislators, too, could commission studies of the algorithms and enact policies and ordinances that mitigate the harm caused by business practices relying on algorithms.

The authors of the paper seem to side-step the fact that all activities and events are outcomes of systems—businesses, government agencies, universities, and other natural and mechanical entities operate according to systems. Importantly, as the growing body of evidence and the recent pandemic have shown, systems are intra- and interconnected, whereby the outcome of one influences the other be it on small or large scale, immediately or latently. It is a form of burden-shifting, or, more precisely in this case, a form of outsourcing of duties, to expect a social media company to steward our collective behavior in an ethical manner, especially if the adoption of such ethical norms were to diminish or decrease the wealth of shareholders. Societies should not entrust the wellbeing of communities, especially the most vulnerable ones, to companies designed to produce wealth.

Indeed, technology companies may refuse or resist sharing their “secrets,” such as algorithms, with independent researchers. Government agencies, however, possess a plurality of tools that would force them to do so or risk breakup under existing anti-trust laws or other legal or public policy regimes. Moreover, it is rarely the case that regulators are faced with binary choices such as, should social media exist. Most often, there are choices that balance public good and free enterprises. If there are aspects of social media that are needed by all (a necessary public interest), regulators can separate the elements that are necessary for public good from the legitimate commercial aspects; the former can be entrusted to non-profit management and the latter could be run by commercial entities and open to competition.

It is laudable indeed that the authors are calling on research institutions and universities to make the necessary changes to meet the challenges produced by globalism and advances in communication technologies. However, their emphasis on the creation of a “crisis discipline” obscures their more practical recommendation for more collaboration among researchers across disciplines. Importantly, more emphasis should be placed on encouraging researchers from the social sciences and the humanities to embrace the Systems Thinking Framework (STF) to interrupt the fragmentation of knowledge, to benefit from the settled knowledge produced by biological and mechanical sciences, and to stimulate meaningful collaboration. Integrated knowledge in research guided by the Systems Thinking Framework is a step beyond the outdated interdisciplinary endeavors.  Human societies are by far the most complex systems. Notwithstanding the complexity of social groups and social behavior, embracing and deploying the Systems Thinking Framework will allow researchers and scholars to address emerging crises efficiently, rapidly, and holistically.

A last point of critique: for a paper that is written collaboratively and that addresses a global problem, the list of authors alone unmasks the lack of appreciation of true diversity, which is the foundation of the new understanding and application of human rights norms. Many researchers still consider Western universities and Western researchers, alone, as capable of producing the kind of insight that can solve modern problems. A growing body of scientific literature and datasets are showing that we can learn from indigenous communities and their relationship to the environment and their way of extracting needed resources from nature. The omission of perspectives from outside Western societies is shortsighted and perpetuates the inequality, human rights abuses, and discriminatory biases that have been reproduced by the same systems and institutions that originated them.