Since the storming of the United States Capitol Building, the most prominent social media firms—Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube—have suspended President Donald Trump’s social media accounts for inciting a riot that resulted in five deaths.
The firms’ decisions to restrain the president’s communication channels underscores the impact of social media platforms in shifting public opinion. The ease of spreading disinformation—or deliberately spreading falsehoods—is scrutinized heavily in the novel Reset, written by Professor Ronald Deibert, who is the founder and director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.
Reset is a warning by Dr. Deibert concerning how our collective social media habits are shaping the society we live in, and that such habits desperately require reform to prevent future violence and the suppression of civil liberty. He explains five main ideas of social media, separated by chapter, with interspersed anecdotes about the mission of Citizen Lab researchers—to conduct “counter-intelligence for global civil society,” often by investigating intelligence groups—and the consequences they have faced for carrying it out.
In the first chapter, “The Market for Our Minds,” Dr. Deibert explores the incentives for corporations to collect troves of information from private citizens, which are largely accessible by governmental authorities due to security vulnerabilities—as shown by files of the National Security Agency leaked by Edward Snowden to The Guardian. Snowden has incidentally written an endorsement of Deibert’s book.
The chapter opens with Dr. Deibert speaking to a CBC News investigative journalist over a secure internet connection at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport about the Snowden Files. He moves on to explain why Google and Facebook are among the most valuable technology companies in the US. The answer is surveillance capitalism, which, he explains, is the harvesting of user data to sell to advertisers in exchange for free or low-cost services for users. Leaning on accessible examples such as Google Maps and even Pokémon Go, Dr. Deibert engagingly reframes these seemingly innocuous services as vehicles for firms to record your data for personal profit.
But why should we care? As Deibert explores in the next chapter, users are hooked on “Toxic Addiction Machines”—put another way, users are drawn to spend excessive time on social media because the platforms are designed to be addictive. Social media engineers capture attention by highlighting “sensational, extreme, scandalous, and even horrifying content” that elicits an emotional response.
This emotionally charged content, he continues, has the side effect of reducing users’ willingness to fact-check the information, while reinforcing tribal identities and polarization. As Dr. Deibert persuasively writes, this sets the stage for malicious actors to introduce and spread misinformation, with flagging and reporting posts often ineffective due to the sheer volume of content. This misinformation has directly led to real-life effects, such as “mob violence and ethnic animosity,” notes Deibert, who highlighted the specific example of racism against Asians in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Building on the consequences of social media usage, Reset’s third chapter explores the impact of social media on the extinguishing of dissent by citizens of authoritarian governments, who can monitor their expression both at home and abroad. Underscoring this chilling effect, Dr. Deibert quotes Yahya Assiri, a Saudi activist that Citizen Lab researchers confirmed as a target of Saudi intelligence, who said: “I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said more than 90 percent of the most active campaigners in 2011 have now vanished.”
Dr. Deibert also persuasively counters the argument that for users in liberal democracies, “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.” He explains that a record of your actions today, even if they are perfectly legal, may eventually be used against you depending on the future government. He adds that corruption in the government is possible, citing episodes in the public memory, including as misconduct in the 1970s by the RCMP, the illicit spying leaked by Snowden, and the CIA’s experimentation with LSD on prisoners in the 1950s.
“Burning Data,” Reset’s fourth chapter, explores the environmental and human costs behind the production of the devices we use to consume social media, along with the environmental costs of the infrastructure for storing information. This involves the ecologically damaging extraction of rare earth metals, along with the use of forced labour. He implores: “Each time you swipe, text, or search, in your own small way you are contributing to a planet-wide syndrome that risks our very survival as a species.”
This idea ties the use of devices for social media to an environmental cost, further disincentivizing mindless browsing, though I still believe that worldwide technological usage would remain comparable, even in a world where social media plays a smaller role in society.
The concluding chapter of Reset explores solutions to the misuse of social media and the information it gathers. Popular strategies to limit the consequences of social media, Dr. Deibert notes, include taking a break from social media; asking executives to act with corporate social responsibility with limited enforcement; introducing fact-checkers to social media; and teaching users to think critically.
He pokes holes in these arguments and recommends lawmakers to consider the principle of restraint to regulate social media usage. This includes restraint regarding possible uses for the data that devices collect; increasing the transparency of how governments use spyware; and self-restraint with our own social media use. He also advocates for public education that encourages tolerance of differences, reducing polarization, and the importance of avoiding “frivolous data consumption,” among other proposals.
Dr. Deibert’s investigations of the impact of social media in Canada and abroad with Citizen Lab give him the experience and expertise unknown to other popular authors on the subject. His work makes Reset is a compelling addition to the literature on the impact of social media in our daily lives, and worth a close read.
