by Rachel Robison-Greene
In the past decade, we have witnessed the fallout from the largely unrestricted spread of bullshit on the internet. People have died or have become seriously ill as result of following bad medical advice that they heard on social media. A recent Healthline study found that, among those who had started a new wellness trend in the past year, 52% of them discovered the trend in question on social media. The same survey found that only 37% of participants viewed their doctor as their most trusted source of medical information. There is a concerning new trend of children self-diagnosing mental disorders, and sometimes even developing symptoms of those disorders that they did not previously exhibit in response to watching the videos. The spread of conspiracy theories on social media has led to people falling deep into rabbit holes, often losing their most valued relationships with friends and family members as a result. People sometimes develop racist, sexist, and xenophobic attitudes toward people they have never met on the basis of internet bullshit. We are staring down the barrel of even fewer restrictions on bullshit in light of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement that his platforms would no longer include fact checking of questionable posts. The White House has also announced that it will open press briefings up to “new media”—podcasters, YouTube personalities, and social media influencers who need not have any formal training in journalism or commitment to codes of conduct that govern ethical behavior in the field.
Why should we allow this to happen? Should we continue to allow social media influencers to say whatever they want on their platforms? Should we do something to stop the AI powered bots that serve no purpose but to generate chaos from entering and participating in the marketplace of ideas? Belief formation is a social practice and we have social obligations. Shouldn’t we put into place some guardrails to ensure that the practice is healthy for our communities and our children? The public figures who suggest that we ought not to provide any flags on misinformation or context for out of place content ask the rhetorical question “who are we to say what’s true?”. Such a question suggests that there is no reliable process we can use to discern truth from falsity or good faith discourse from bullshit.
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt gives the concept of bullshit a serious treatment in his famous essay On Bullshit. He argues that liars and truth tellers are playing the same game from different sides. Bullshitters are doing something else altogether. They simply don’t care whether what they are saying is true or false. They have an indifference to truth and may have even embraced the conclusion that there is no such thing as truth. Frankfurt says,
Someone who ceases to believe in the possibility of identifying certain statements as true and others as false can have only two alternatives. The first is to desist both from efforts to tell the truth and from efforts to deceive. This would mean refraining from making any assertion whatever about the facts. The second alternative is to continue to make assertions that purport to be about the way things are but that cannot be anything other than bullshit.
Imagine, for instance, a health and wellness social media influencer who is concerned, primarily, by growing her following and monetizing her channel. She is motivated not by what she thinks she has most reason to believe, but by what she can be confident will generate post engagements. She is not motivated by truth nor is she trying to deceive. She is playing a different game entirely—she is bullshitting.
There is good reason to be skeptical about whether Zuckerberg is acting authentically when he claims that his platforms ought to be havens of free speech and that fact checking is inconsistent with that mission. In the spirit of good faith philosophical discourse, however, let’s take him at his word for the moment. Can such a space, in its largely unmoderated form, be the haven that he describes?
There is an honorable intellectual tradition of defending free speech. John Stuart Mill famously argued that speech ought to be largely unconstrained. Allowing for robust free speech allows truth to come into contact with error. When it does so, we are in a better position to distinguish good arguments from bad, to reassess the evidence we have for believing that certain propositions are true, and to become better reasoners and wiser people.
The big question that we face then, is whether Mill’s vision of truth conducive discourse is consistent with or even possible alongside the astonishing quantity of bullshit proliferating on the internet. Let’s consider first the role that free speech is supposed to play when it comes to the powerful.
According to Mill, maintaining a robust marketplace of ideas is, as we might put it now, an important way to speak truth to power. The rich and powerful person that Mill describes doesn’t seem that different from a similarly positioned person today. Describing the barriers to forming true beliefs that such a person faces, he says, “Absolute princes, or others who are accustomed to unlimited deference usually feel…complete confidence in their own opinion on nearly all subjects.”
Confident assertions made by powerful people are all too common. They have the potential to create a feedback loop. Less powerful people are often naturally inclined to take the testimony of powerful people more seriously. In his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith, writing in the 17th century, lamented this tendency as an already well-established fact,
This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and despise, or, at least, to neglect, persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary to both establish and maintain the distinction of ranks and order in society is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.
The result is that powerful people engage in bullshitting, people believe what they say because they trust powerful people, and so the powerful never feel any need to consider counterarguments or evaluate the nature of the evidence that would establish a justified answer to the issue in question. This becomes an even more serious problem when the powerful control and regulate the most significant bullshit generators—social media platforms. The bullshit reinforces the power dynamic, making it more likely that powerful people get away with bad behavior and powerless people, especially marginalized communities, get demonized and attacked.
This concern is amplified by the fact that people form ideological bubbles online. The internet is somewhat new, but the tendency to define one’s circle narrowly is not. Mill describes the human tendency to create small in-groups,
“…the world, to each individual, means the part of it with which he comes into contact: his party, his church, his class of society: this man may be called, by comparison, almost liberal and large minded to whom it means anything so comprehensive as his own country or his own age. Nor is his faith in this collective authority at all shaken by his being aware that other ages, countries, sects, churches, classes, and parties have thought, and even now think, the exact reverse.”
For Mill, the free expression of ideas can potentially do much to burst our isolated social bubbles. The bubbles themselves can be the source of bullshit. Listening to the views of others may change our beliefs and cause us to widen our circles.
Social media provides platforms for engagement on a massive scale. Very few people actually explore the potential that free speech of that magnitude might have for discerning truth from error. Instead, many people use it to create new kinds of bubbles, many of which are not just sources of bullshit, but seemingly dedicated to it. Personalized algorithms encourage us to engage in confirmation bias and companies who have purchased our data make money off of what turns out to be very reliable predictions of our behavior. Far from shattering our bubbles and exposing us to more points of view, social media reinforces them with a steal core of monetized bullshit.
Finally, Mill claims that we become better reasoners when we are in a position to consider a wide range of opposing positions. There may be good reason to believe this when parties come to dialogue in good faith. However, regularly engaging with bullshit might have the opposite effect on our reasoning skills. It may be the case, as Frankfurt puts the point, that “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.” The dangers are significant for both bullshitter and bullshittee. As Frankfurt puts it, “Through excessive indulgence in [bullshitting] which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person’s normal habit of attending to the way things are may become attenuated or lost.”
What conclusion should we draw? It is hard to know how Mill would respond to the internet. I’d be interested to know whether he would think that bullshit is a form of discourse or whether it is more like incessant noise that prevents us from participating in conversations with people who are actually concerned with truth.
This is an academic question. The more interesting question, I suppose, is what we should make of it. What should those of us who care deeply about the ideals of enlightenment liberalism think about the value of protecting bullshit on the internet?
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