Elites Need Some Emotional Distance from Social Media

A free press has always come at a price.

Free and open public spheres are always unpleasant, frequently abusive, and chock-full of all sorts of lies, conspiracy theories, and nonsense. What the Internet has done is lowered the barriers to entry to the ground, and perhaps lower—it is not just that it is easier to publish online, but we are expected to have some kind of online presence, just as a matter of norms and facilitating social coordination. It is possible to be almost entirely offline, other than an email address and phone number through which one can be messaged—but doing so carries the risk that you will miss out on opportunities in your daily life.

In short, nearly everyone is online now, to some degree. And to be online means that you have, at your disposal, the equivalent of both a printing press and international distribution syndicate at your fingertips. Like the old press, having those things does not guarantee you an audience; and indeed, precisely because these things are available to everyone, the competition for audiences is more fierce than it has ever been. Your odds of casually taking an audience for yourself are quite low.

Individual odds aside, in aggregate this does mean that new “presses” are popping up all the time. And given such presses begin their existence as the product of amateurs, they lack the kinds of norms and ethics that might constrain a buttoned up, professionalized operation. The modal new media “influencer” therefore has much more in common with tabloids than with the New York Times of any era.

Those disenchanted with our era of the democratized tabloid often take refuge in nostalgia. In America, this means looking back to the era of the Big Three broadcasters (NBC, CBS, ABC), with its higher standards and the greater unity it was able to produce in national culture. If only we could somehow recapture the essentials of that moment. Those inclined to do more than fantasize about the past suggest building up the current public broadcast model, or adopting models found elsewhere—the BBC approach, for example. Perhaps, through government policy, we can overcome the technological sinkhole of our media moment and return big, consolidated broadcast to its rightful position of primacy.

But even in the heyday of the Big Three broadcasters, in which the austere heights of broadcast culture were gatekept by white men in suits, the riot of print culture continued unabated: messy, unpleasant, full of inaccuracies and outright lies, and with a large tabloid component.

To be a liberal is to affirm that the cost of a free press is well worth the price of admission. But we must admit that there is, indeed, a price. Nostalgia for an era that, in point of fact, was just as terrible as our own and worse in several important respects cannot serve as a guide for the present or future.

Like everything in a dynamic, creative, and pluralist society, freedom of speech and of the press have always threatened to blow the whole thing up, to be so out of control as to derail their own foundations. Time and again, dictators have arisen from that chaos with promises of taming the wild, unruly public sphere—Mussolini referred to the press under fascism as “a well-tuned orchestra, absolutely ‘free’ to play what the director chooses for them.” Time and again, all that these dictators have achieved is a false peace that cuts their own regime off from critical feedback mechanisms and produces a brittle and unsustainable political order.

The open society is stronger than authoritarianism or totalitarianism, precisely because it seeks to harness the uncertain, messy, and difficult reality of social difference and social conflict. In so doing it embraces dynamism, change, and self-correction over false peace, short-term stability, and the illusion of perfection.

The question cannot be “how do we return to the monoculture of broadcast” or “how do we dispense with the unpleasantness of social media?” Instead, we must ask: how are we to live together in a world where any random citizen can become a tabloid?

Responsible elites in the tabloid era

It is difficult to understate how enormous the impact of broadcast was at its peak. At one point their nightly newscasts alone reached 70 million people—or 30 percent of the total population. Nostalgic recountings of this era claim that broadcast created more national unity. I will grant that broadcast had an enormous homogenizing effect.

But social difference and disagreement did not disappear from America in this period. Far from it. And beneath the heights of the Big Three, the more fractious and conflict-prone print media continued to exist. In 1970, total daily newspaper circulation in this country was over 62 million, not so terribly far off from the Big Three total audience. But this audience was divided up among many, many more than three newspapers.

The largest were not the buttoned up New York Times, which in many ways defined itself against the norm of its industry. It became known as the Gray Lady precisely because of its austere refusal to print attention-grabbing graphics on its front page. Because of this highbrow choice, and of course its location, the Times was thereby able to enjoy a great deal of indirect influence by becoming the paper read by broadcasters. But the Gray Lady was the exception that proved the rule.

The largest daily in the country was the New York Daily News, whose daily circulation peaked in 1947 at 2.4 million, and hovered around 2 million in subsequent decades. Let’s see how this staid publication treated a difficult topic, such as the Central Park Five:

It’s a good thing that the pre-Internet press lacked sensationalism in its rhetoric or a willingness to jump to conclusions on the facts, right?

This was in 1989, when the Big Three broadcasters still held a supermajority of prime-time audiences. The broadcast monoculture did not do a thing to help the Central Park Five, and the worst aspects of print media loomed very large in the case—as they did in response to the campaigns of the Civil Rights Movement, and as they always have, throughout our entire history. The First Amendment singles out the press for a reason; freedom of the press was a specific, concrete demand, distinct from mere freedom of speech. “Media” in their day simply was the press, as it was for the bulk of liberalism’s history.

And the press, on the whole, has been terrible. But this terrible muck co-existed with the republic of letters. It coexisted alongside the journals and periodicals and societies that produced the Scientific Revolution. And of course, the heyday of the New York Daily News and its kind occurred during Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the crushing of Jim Crow.

The choice is not between a truthful media and a dishonest one. It is between a free media, full of both truth and lies, goodwill and malice, inquiry and mudslinging—and a censored media, whose lies are the regime’s lies.

One difference between now and then I would say is that elites were a bit more clear-eyed about the nature of tabloids than they appear to be about the nature of social media. As I said, broadcasters by and large would read more respectable publications that held themselves to higher standards, rather than the New York Daily News or worse.

But in the last 15 years, elites were active and responsive on Twitter specifically to an extraordinary degree. Even now, after Elon Musk transformed that platform into X, a vehicle for his white supremacist, genocidal ideology, far too many of those liberal and leftist elites have remained.

The old elites were hardly immune to being captured by this kind of thinking. Broadcast was right there with the rest of the media during the Satanic Panic. To give just one example, in 1988, NBC specifically commissioned Geraldo Rivera to produce a documentary about “Satan worship” for their prime-time slot. Though there was internal resistance by those who “felt that the program was below the standards of the network” and apparently they had to “sell some commercials at rates as low as half-price,” in the end they went forward. Nearly 20 million people watched the broadcast, or around 8 percent of the national population.

The top elites of the old media system were not perfect, in other words, but they did by and large hold themselves to higher standards than do their counterparts in the age of social media. And what that meant in practice was navigating the reality of the bottom end of the system, something that at times needed to be answered but could not be allowed to shape your worldview. In the case of the Satanic Panic, they failed. In other cases, they were undeniably a moderating voice.

We cannot go back to the pre-Internet media system, nor should we want to. But we will need our elites to be better adapted to the media system that we do have.

Listen, I love social media. Some of my best friends use social media. Most of them. All of them?

But it is unquestionably a structure—especially in its classic “microblogging” feed format—that brings out the worst in everyone. Ezra Klein recently observed that “This has been a crazy era, on all sides of politics, because much of it has taken place atop platforms that derange us for profit.”

We know these spaces are unhealthy. We know that we feel worse about our world and one another the more time we spend on them. We just don’t quite know what to do about it.

This is something that Katherine Alejandra Cross has written about for us at length. In January of last year, she wrote:

In How Emotions Work, sociologist Jackson Katz explores, among other things, why road rage happens. The long and short of it is that we treat a car as not just a possession, but an extension of our very bodies. We interpret the intrusion of someone cutting us off on the freeway as not merely an inconvenience, but a transgression upon our persons, like a stranger laying their hand on you to bar your way. He calls this ‘embodied loss.’

...Your online presence is an extension of your being. Even in the deadening age of Web 2.0, where fully customisable profile pages—a la MySpace or Livejournal—are a distant memory, you still apprehend your social media page as personal property, and perhaps even some kind of expression of yourself.

While we view our cars and our accounts as extensions of our self, those other cars are just vehicles—and those other accounts are just pixels on the screen. You can feel genuine outrage when those pixels transgress against you, while feeling at ease or even amused watching someone else being piled upon—or indeed, while gleefully joining in.

We exist in a world where “One can build trust among those on your side by attacking someone recognizably on the other side, but one can also gain trust by being attacked.” That has intensified lately, but frankly it is a tale as old as politics. The only circumstances under which this gets relatively tamed is when the conflict becomes highly institutionalized and the institutions obtain a broadly recognized legitimacy. The asymmetry between short-staffed moderator teams and tens or hundreds of millions of active users makes social media platforms relatively anarchic places where honor culture dynamics are the norm. That means people overreact to perceived slights, and combativeness is a key to success.

I think it should be abundantly clear by now that I do not have a romantic notion of what social media has replaced. But it is a genuine problem that our elites are actively having their worldviews warped by these platforms. As Cross put it yesterday:

It’s no coincidence that the examples I give here are billionaires, prominent activists, journalists, and writers. The epistemic and financial elite who spend all day online, exposing themselves to a pinhole view of screeching madness, and then using their power to drag that madness offline and into the lives of people who barely use social media.

To be Extremely Online is to believe that such madness is a perfect description of reality, to believe that social media is showing you the entirety of the real world—or the only bits of the real world that matter—and that the people you see populating spaces like Reddit or Bluesky or TikTok are a representative slice of the population. To see one’s feed as telling the truth about society rather than a truth, to see it as the whole ocean of humanity rather than a mere tributary, is to be Extremely Online.

The problem is not truly that the media environment is full of conflict, lies, and racist conspiracy theories. The problem is that our epistemic and financial elite spend all day exposing themselves to an environment that cooks brains until they are well-done Bircher burgers.

Klein notes:

Politics, all over the Western world, has become wilder and worse since we began outsourcing our pictures of the world and one another to algorithms that care only for engagement and profit. Making the overall political communication environment more hysterical and outrageous does not produce more just societies or wiser leaders.

But the problem is not truly algorithms. The problem is us. Put people in these social conditions, and this is the behavior it will produce. In the unlikely event we were to pass a law banning algorithmic sorting of feeds, and moved to purely reverse chronological ordered posts based on explicitly followed accounts, you will still get “mobbing,” you would still get “dunking,” you would still get all of it. This isn’t to say that algorithms can’t make things worse or better, or that Musk in particular hasn’t wielded them to bend his platform towards nefarious ends. It is simply to say that the underlying, general problem is far more elemental. As Alan Elrod put it, “even among the most responsible of us, the deleterious effects of engaging our fellow citizens through a screen are nearly impossible to avoid.”

A little distance goes a long way

At Liberal Currents we make no secret of the fact that we think you should leave X entirely.

But one politician who has adapted to the social media age very adeptly is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. And, sad to say, his office actively posts on X.

What is more, Mamdani is responsive to things that people say to him on social media in general. When locals started tagging him with videos of water fountains that had been removed in Prospect Park, his team produced a video response:

@nycmayor
We got you. Stay hydrated, New York.
♬ original sound - Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani

This seems like social media PR 101 stuff. Isn’t this just what politicians should be doing? A quick scroll through Mamdani’s TikTok feed shows many many videos that were viewed millions of times—videos that likely saw similar numbers on Instagram. There’s simply no world where the ability to reach large audiences directly like this is not made use of by politicians and other elites.

But wait a moment. Let’s return to Mamdani’s account on X. Click his replies tab and you’ll notice something interesting: neither he, nor a social media account manager employed by his office, ever replies to anyone.

The Internet in general and social media in particular destroyed the old bifurcation in communications technology between one-to-one and one-to-many. Many-to-many and many-to-one were added as daily realities of the information system, and the means for producing any of these relations is identical. On X you can DM someone or have a group DM, you can join a group attack on an individual, or you can join a thread in which many people talk to many other people simultaneously. The potential for all of it is in the same place; indeed one can pivot from one mode to another seamlessly.

Mamdani is not cooking his brain on X. He is taking a one-to-many approach to every single social media platform. He is walking a fine line between the appearance of closeness with his ordinary people and the reality of distance.

Mamdani and, more likely, his staff are reading social media, and seeing when he is tagged by others. But instead of treating his accounts as an extension of his self, he wisely views them as a branding exercise, a means of managing public perceptions. The things people are saying on social media are information. His office clearly has a strategy for how to respond to signals of that kind, especially given that they are made out in public. But the correct approach is to ultimately treat that information as just one kind of signal among many others.

Being able to dutifully represent all of a politician’s constituents requires creating some distance from the minority most actively chasing them on Internet platforms. As a longtime skeptic of sortition, I think there is much to be gained from the model of randomly selected citizen assemblies that act in an advisory function. As much as I hate the way politicians delegate their decisionmaking to poll results, polling is a valuable tool for gauging the thoughts and feelings of constituents. Leaders ought to lead rather than chase the polls, but polling is surely a better tool than either town halls or social media posts for painting a representative (if narrow) picture of a constituency overall.

But the bottom line is that a mayor in a city of more than 8.5 million people cannot have a direct relationship with all of his constituents. Distance is already created, it is already inevitable, because of that unbridgeable asymmetry. There will never be a mayoral staff large enough to connect with every constituent who has concerns.

Accepting this distance is the first step to accepting that perhaps immersing oneself in social media platforms is neither particularly small-d democratic, nor particularly good for you—or the country.

Winning the audience’s vote

We hold presidential elections every four years, and congressional elections every two years. Between campaigning for actual votes in those elections, politicians seek to take actions in the public sphere that win the audience’s vote.

There are people who think that, but for social media, or tabloids, or any of the mucky mess that comes with a free and open press, politics might be more deliberative, more collegial, more…nice. This perspective is captured in Klein’s column on social media:

Deliberative habits are good for democracies but bad for retweets; choosing your words thoughtfully is a virtue for a president but not for an entertainer or influencer.

But politics in the public sphere is never particularly deliberative, at least not when the audiences are large. Consider Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff’s recent jab at Trump that set off a whole news cycle about Trump’s relationship with aide Natalie Harp. In context, this was a tossed-off remark in a political speech. Ossoff was not attempting to make an argument about Trump or Harp. It was, to put it bluntly, a diss, and little more.

And it was a very effective one. In the small, tactical engagements that make up day-to-day political contestation, this was a clear point to Ossoff. We should also note that this point was scored by a man who appears to have no personal presence on social media at all. The success of his remark—made at a rally, not in a post—also hinged primarily on how it was picked up by traditional media organizations.

This kind of confrontational action is the bread and butter of politics. It is not elevated, it is not thoughtful, and it certainly isn’t deliberative.

But it is deliberate. Ossoff’s speech was written in advance. He is a professional politician who has a staff. He and they put some thought into what he is going to say, where and when he is going to say it, and why.

Mamdani and Ossoff are two recent examples of people who are skilled at winning the audience’s vote. This means, to be less metaphorical about the matter, driving news cycles rather than being driven by them, influencing narratives rather than surrendering to existing ones, building up towards electoral victories and ultimately real policy change.

This unfortunately means that they cannot afford to ignore social media entirely. The publics formed by social media platforms are not going away and are going to continue to be influential. But we would do well to treat them with the same suspicion that we would had towards tabloids in the past. If you are a politician, if you are working in a more deliberative space as Liberal Currents does, if you are a journalist or an academic—you would do well to create some distance, even if only an emotional distance, from your preferred social media platform. You should view such platforms as useful but dangerous tools that should be used with consideration. What goal do you actually wish to achieve by posting there? How is that goal served by jumping into the latest dunk pile?

Of course this is not a problem that can be solved individual by individual as a matter of conscience. This is a collective problem that will require collective solutions. Those of us in the pro-democracy coalition would do well to work together to produce norms and “reflective beliefs” that, collectively, produce a healthier relationship between the members of our coalition who are politicians, journalists, professors, and civil servants, on the one hand, and social media, on the other.

The reality of instant and global communication has been with us for over twenty years now. It’s time we started adapting.

Featured Image is Person looking at smartphone in the dark, by Japanexperterna