Travis Hawley

It’s kind of insane to me that social media platforms have been aware of the problems with their algorithms for years and have done virtually nothing to address them. If anything, the exploitation of these platforms by foreign (particularly authoritarian) regimes to manipulate public opinion has gotten worse. The more absurd, racist, inaccurate, hateful, and conspiratorial a post is, the more engagement it generates. Russia, China, Qatar, and the Islamic Republic of Iran understand this well. That is why they invest enormous resources in media and social media manipulation through bots, sock puppet accounts, paid influencers, media outlets, and countless other methods. But there is something even more disturbing happening here… Foreign interference doesn’t just involve creating false narratives from scratch. Authoritarian regimes are focused on identifying and amplifying narratives that already exist within Western societies. They exploit legitimate grievances, political divisions, and existing controversies, amplifying the most extreme voices until fringe positions appear mainstream. This is much harder to combat… Which brings me to the other major problem: influencers. Unfortunately, the response to the destructive behavior of these foreign agents of chaos has largely been for domestic opportunists to join in, while tech platforms, media networks, and political leaders do virtually nothing about the self-destruction of Western civilization being accelerated by foreign regimes. This is an enormous strategic mistake that has helped create a massive influx of grifters on every side of virtually every political issue. People who suddenly realized they could financially profit from tragedy, war, political polarization, and human suffering are now dominating conversations they have no expertise in and often have absolutely nothing to do with. Some are being paid to push particular narratives. Others are simply chasing engagement because outrage has become a business model. We have created an information ecosystem in which the incentives of authoritarian propagandists, domestic political grifters, and social media companies increasingly align. That is a national security vulnerability, not merely a cultural problem. Authoritarian regimes want to destabilize the West, undermine trust in democracy, and exacerbate internal divisions. Political grifters want clicks, followers, money, and attention. Social media companies want engagement. We created a system in which all three benefit from the exact same destructive behavior. Meanwhile, instead of tech platforms taking a step back and asking, “Maybe we should rein this in?” the situation just keeps getting worse. And as my friend @talk2trav always says, the influencerization of everything is killing society. I couldn’t agree more. We’ve created an entire class of people whose primary qualification for influencing public opinion is their ability to attract attention. Not knowledge. Not expertise. Not accuracy. Not even basic intellectual honesty. And somehow we’ve decided these people deserve enormous influence over politics, international affairs, public health, national security, and virtually every other issue of consequence. Worse, traditional media outlets increasingly reward this behavior by treating follower counts as a substitute for credibility. It’s an absolutely absurd way to organize public discourse. We’ve built an information economy that financially rewards the very behaviors hostile foreign governments are actively trying to encourage. Instead of recognizing that as a profound strategic vulnerability, we’re celebrating the people who are exploiting it. This is not a recipe for a healthy, successful, happy, or productive society. It’s a recipe for societal decay. If we don’t fundamentally rethink what we’re rewarding, who we’re elevating, and how these platforms operate, we’re going to keep allowing our adversaries to exploit our own systems against us