Social media platforms have weakened major forces that bind democracies together, especially after 2009 when the virality of social media started to intensify
What would it have been like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? In the Book of Genesis, we are told …
Context & Ripple Effects
This essay is the capstone of an arc that began with [[a:923166|The Atlantic's investigation into how Facebook eroded democracy's informational underpinnings during the 2016 election]] — a story its own author admits was hard to see coming. Facebook then conceded the point partially in its [[a:925993|Hard Questions series, admitting social media gives many a voice but also paves the way for false news, foreign interference, echo chambers, and harassment]].
What changed by 2022 is the diagnosis: rather than a moderation problem on one platform, the essay frames post-2009 virality as having structurally weakened three democratic binders at once — social capital, strong institutions, and shared stories — hence the Babel metaphor. That reframing lands alongside Foreign Affairs' proposal to strip Big Tech of its content-gatekeeper role entirely, signaling that the debate has moved from fixing feeds to redesigning who curates.
First-order effects
- Facebook faces a sharpened version of its own 2018 admission: the company acknowledged false news, interference, and echo chambers, and this essay argues those are symptoms of virality itself, not fixable content-moderation failures.
- Platforms built around engagement-driven amplification now carry the burden of proof that their core mechanics — not just bad actors on them — are compatible with institutional trust.
Second-order effects
- Proposals like Foreign Affairs' user-controlled curation gain traction as the alternative: if platforms cannot be trusted as gatekeepers, the push shifts toward taking the gatekeeper function away from them and handing it to users.
- Regulators and advertisers get a structural argument for intervention that no single policy fix addresses, raising pressure for rules aimed at amplification dynamics rather than individual posts.
Third-order effects
- If the post-2009 pattern holds, democracies may need to rebuild cohesion mechanisms — institutions, local social capital, shared narratives — designed for an environment where no central gatekeeper exists, rather than trying to restore the pre-social-media order.
- The industry's center of gravity moves from content moderation toward governance of distribution itself, making curation architecture — who chooses what is seen — the defining regulatory battleground.
The trend: The debate over social media and democracy is shifting from policing harmful content on platforms to questioning whether engagement-maximizing virality itself can coexist with democratic cohesion.