The Closing of the Social Media Mind

By Shlomo Maital

     Even as regulators wrestle with how to counter the massive damage social media are causing to young minds in particular, social media are morphing and changing. 

      Here is how The Economist explains it, in its latest cover story:

    “….new social media are no longer very social. Inspired by TikTok, apps like Facebook increasingly serve a diet of clips selected by artificial intelligence according to a user’s viewing behavior, not their social connections. Meanwhile, people are posting less. The share of Americans who say they enjoy documenting their life online has fallen from 40% to 28% since 2020.”

       This was inevitable.  As populism spreads like a virus, and politics are increasingly driven by narrow identity and tribalism, social media fall in line.  They are providing viewers with what they want — content that fits with who they are, what they believe, what they support.   It is the closing of the social media mind.  

        Well done, Zuckerberg.  This is how you can make money.  Meta made $16 b. in profits in fourth quarter 2023 alone, with a 41% profit margin!  This, with a social media platform that many are abandoning. 

          Nearly 35 years ago, philosopher Allan Bloom published his book The Closing of the American Mind (Simon & Schuster, 392 pages).  It was a surprise bestseller, selling half a million copies in hardback!  Bloom’s key point: “openness leads to closed minds”.

           What does that mean?  If you believe that anything goes, any view, any opinion, any value, and that criticism of someone’s opinion is prejudice, unacceptable – you are not respecting diversity, you are destroying the search for truth.  “Prejudices,” Bloom wrote, “strong prejudices, are visions about the way things are…error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth, and therefore deserves our respectful treatment. The mind that has no prejudices at the outset is empty.”  If anything goes, then nothing is true, moral, right.

           Let us be clear.  This is not a praiseful essay for racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia!  It is mainly a desperate plea to restore critical thinking.  If every view or opinion is legitimate, then minds are closed.  If everyone chooses to listen only to what they agree with, there is no dialog and no open critical search for truth.  And that is where social media are rapidly descending – according to The Economist.

             When social media become tribal totems, society and politics fragment.  If Florida bans books in school libraries because they may clash with parents’ conservative views, they are closing kids’ minds rather than doing what they should be doing, opening them.  When Trump pushes his own social media Truth (aka Lies), he is promoting the closing of minds, probably because his own mind has been closed from birth.  

             “Critical thinking is the analysis of available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments to form a judgment by the application of rational, skeptical, and unbiased analyses and evaluation. The application of critical thinking includes self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective habits of the mind.”   I can argue that all human progress has occurred because of individuals who are expert at critical thinking (XYZ is wrong, I seek the truth). 

      We are failing our kids, by facilitating the virus of political correctness, and by passively accepting the closed-mind nature of social media. 

      The damage will be hard to fix.