The Grand Illusion
Decades ago, in school, I had to read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a book about middle-school-age boys marooned on an island, and how all the social norms quickly disintegrate into unvarnished cruelty in the absence of adult supervision.
I found the book all-too-true-to-life then, and recent revelations in social media suggest that the nature of “pre-adults” hasn’t changed much from what Golding perceived, if in a different context, that context being social media, where “adult” supervision is sadly lacking.
A recent New York Times story revealed how “seventh and eighth graders in a Pennsylvania town set up fake TikTok accounts impersonating teachers and shared disparaging, lewd, racist and homophobic videos.” Investigations revealed that roughly a quarter of the school’s faculty discovered they were victims of fake teacher accounts rife with pedophilia innuendo, racist memes, homophobia and made-up sexual hookups among teachers. In addition, students created 22 fictitious TikTok accounts impersonating teachers at the middle school. Hundreds of students soon viewed, followed, or commented on the fraudulent accounts.
The only disciplinary action was the brief suspension of several students and a lecture to an eighth grade class. Most interestingly, few of the perpetrators exhibited any remorse for their actions.
Not only has social media helped normalize anonymous aggressive posts and memes, leading some children and teenagers to weaponize them against adults, but it’s also fostered an attitude that destroying reputations, bullying other users, and attacking others with falsehoods is acceptable. Teen suicides have increased by more than 60% since 2007 and continue to rise with the growth in social media use.
Currently, social media linked suicides are primarily in the 10-25 age group, but what will happen when older individuals are increasingly targeted and their reputations savaged anonymously? And with the increase and technical sophistication of “deepfakes,” how long before no one will be able to verify the difference between real and fake – and what happens in an increasingly “online” world, when no one can trust anything or anyone?
My feeling is that “reputation” is a relic that means more to older generations.
There’s a lot of hand-wringing in the media about young folks who will have trouble when their adolescent posts come to haunt them. Frankly, the culture of the United States has been “defining deviency down” for quite a long time.
I think we’ve reached the tipping point, and the only people who can invoke “reputation” are unapologetic hypocrites.
Anyone seriously invoking “reputation” invites attacks which will succeed, because explaining is failing.
But there’s a difference between “reputation” and essentially falsely reporting activities that would be criminal in nature were they real — and such reports can have real and damaging effects.
There’s always been a scurrilous part of human nature that loves to throw dirt at a clean slate. For example, Yellow Journalism that prints lies and innuendo about anyone and everyone.
But smearing has become widespread in the Internet Age. If you have character, there’s someone out there that will vilify you. It’s only people with character that are subject to character assassination.
That’s why I said that character or reputation was passé. Because it just opens you up to attacks that cannot be beat- as I said, “explaining is failing”. The nasty sound bite rules the day. The trolls will never stop.
The kids who attacked their teachers have tarnished the teacher’s reputations and their own reputations, and they don’t care. That’s 21st century logic.
I’m not happy about this, but this is the direction our society is heading.
Obviously there are still people who value a Dr. Fauci over Donald Trump, and I hope that they remain a majority. But trying to hold on to a good reputation is almost impossible.
Maybe Postagoras was considering reputation as a form of autobiography or exceptionalism. Whereas it appears to me that reputation is the opinion of others and exceptionalism is an opinion or form of self-oriented thinking. If so; then reputation can indeed be destroyed by others while destroying self-opinion or exceptionalism would be more difficult (not impossible, as noted by the increasing suicide rates of the 21rst century, in populations with easy access to social media).
For example I came across a ‘lesson’ from Lord of the Flies:-
… The strong-willed, egomaniacal Jack is the novel’s primary representative of the instinct of savagery, violence, and the desire for power—in short, the antithesis of Ralph. From the beginning of the novel, Jack desires power above all other things. He is furious when he loses the election to Ralph and continually pushes the boundaries of his subordinate role in the group. Early on, Jack retains the sense of moral propriety and behavior that society instilled in him—in fact, in school, he was the leader of the choirboys. The first time he encounters a pig, he is unable to kill it. But Jack soon becomes obsessed with hunting and devotes himself to the task, painting his face like a barbarian and giving himself over to bloodlust. The more savage Jack becomes, the more he is able to control the rest of the group. Indeed, apart from Ralph, Simon, and Piggy, the group largely follows Jack in casting off moral restraint and embracing violence and savagery. Jack’s love of authority and violence are intimately connected, as both enable him to feel powerful and exalted. By the end of the novel, Jack has learned to use the boys’ fear of the beast to control their behavior—a reminder of how religion and superstition can be manipulated as instruments of power. …
Bet you cannot guess with whom, in our exceptionalism filled nation, I automatically equated Jack with?
The other factor that will follow these kinds of fakes around is the steady encroachment of unintelligent AI. The entire structure of the LLMs like ChatGPT – as has been shown by the many errors spotted by users – is that they have no way at all of distinguishing between current and past ‘facts’, and true and false. So, if the dominant mention of someone in the source material is false or out-of-date – or even defamatory, that will be the one that the ‘AI’ will choose as being most likely – and by doing so strengthen the prevalence of the false over the real
LLMs aren’t even that clever. They don’t know what a ‘fact’ is, they simply know that this word follows that one in x% of the time, while y% it is this one instead. It’s all mathematics and probability fields, which gives a combination of the wisdom of crowds with the lowest iq of the mob.
The art ones suffer from the same problem – they don’t know what lettuce is, they just know that a burger should have a green line below the bun. Ask them to remove the lettuce and they might replace it with pickles or do something really weird.
Things appear to be going downhill pretty fast, as far as believing what you see online goes. As for exhibiting escalating cruelty online,I think the general culture in which kids are raised can make a big difference.
Three points of optimism:
1) In the real-life Lord of the Flies inspiration, the six castaway schoolboys cooperated and helped each other to survive. They were raised in a culture where cooperation is important, working together towards common goals.They were all rescued safely, in contrast with the dreadful results envisioned by the American writer based on his highly competitive individualistic outlook: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months
Human beings do not automatically default to cruelty without supervision, though the internet is showing a lot of that; culture plays a large part in defining which direction we go, and the billionaire tech bros with autocratic and libertarian tendencies running a lot of the internet may be putting a heavier stamp on internet culture than we realise by enabling bad actors and bad algorithms.
2) Finland has a lot of experience being targeted by Russian disinformation and troll farms, and they have now incorporated how to recognise and deal with such things in their primary and secondary school curriculum, preparing the kids to deal with disinformation and cyber-bullying but also making future voters less easily swayed by malignant outside influences.
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/28/fact-from-fiction-finlands-new-lessons-in-combating-fake-news
So it’s possible to arm (young) people to deal with these developments.
3) When young schoolboys in a small town in Spain used a nefarious app to create nudes of the girls in their school to embarass them, the parents, teachers and authorities took concerted action to make clear how bad this was, and to make sure nothing like this would happen again. Making sure that all the kids understood what the personal consequences of such actions are, and not leaving the individual victims to sink or swim on their own, were important parts of a shift in online culture for the kids in that town. https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/09/spain-sentences-15-school-children-over-ai-generated-naked-images
So even in places where nothing has been done about it so far, it’s not too late to take action to shift the norms back towards civility.