Almost anything gets a bad name when people try to use it to promote their vested interest. Religion got a bad name through the centuries when people tried to use it to gain power or forward political agendas. Social media gets a bad name when people use it to spread propaganda or disinformation that supports some vested interest.
Not every vested interest is “the government” or a vast conspiracy. A few of them are, and they’re very powerful and very noticeable. But even individual people do this sort of thing, and it contributes to the decay of important pieces of our society.
For example, sometimes a person semi-innocently (but knowingly) tries to start a viral marketing campaign using information that has some slightly misleading information in it. Sometimes a business executive, desperate to preserve the business that they feel is so important, spreads a deceiving message in the hope that the end will justify the means.
There are even many politicians who are good people, put into impossible situations where in order to do good they must retain their position, and to retain their position, they feel they must spread misleading information to their voters.
These aren’t fundamentally evil people. They aren’t intentionally seeking to destroy the world and the institutions they depend on. They are people with a poor understanding of the consequences of these actions (both to the society and to themselves).
Yes, the individuals who do this aren’t, all by themselves, damaging the trust that people place in things. But collectively, when lots of people do it, then the tool they use (religion, social media, television, pamphlets, public gatherings, chat rooms, etc.) tends to be attacked.
The solution isn’t to destroy the tool. That doesn’t change the motivations of these individuals. They will find another way to accomplish the same goals. They feel their survival or the survival of others depends on it.
The only solution that I can think of is to raise the awareness of ethics in the civilization as a whole, and to educate people on the consequences of these sorts of decisions. Yes, that’s a lot of work. But all too often, people avoid actually solving problems because the solution “sounds too hard,” and instead they go off and do things that will never solve the problem, because those things seem “easier.”
Probably there are stopgaps. You can try to create automated systems that detect misinformation. You can contract with fact-checking organizations. You can try to write regulations. But as we have seen, all of these solutions eventually become a whole new problem, sometimes just as bad as the problem they were trying to solve! We can’t just keep solving problems with things that create new problems. We need to see and resolve the real root cause of things, and on the subject of civilization, the answers there are always in the human mind, not in some system, tool, or rule that will magically make all our problems go away.
Max Kanat-Alexander 