Social Media Doesn’t Have To Undermine Human Agency

On Tuesday 31st March, hundreds swarmed the streets of Clapham and six teenage girls were arrested for anti-social behaviour. The youth riot, said to have been organised through TikTok and Snapchat, led to the rampaging and looting of several local stores and restaurants. 

Chief Constable Emma Bond stated that: ‘Events like this, fuelled by online trends and viral content on platforms such as TikTok, can quickly escalate and lead to serious outcomes’. However, the issue of these riots wasn’t that they were organised on social media, but that they were debased demonstrations with no clear rhyme or reason. Such anti-social behaviour is better understood not as an expression of coherent political grievance, but as a performative and directionless ‘link up’; the result of the profound boredom experienced by an alienated generation of young people. 

It is easy to scapegoat social media platforms for the loss of respect, responsibility and direction of teenagers, leading them down a casual descent of low level criminality. But in doing so, we are willfully ignoring the central crux of the issue. The hollowing out of social norms, alongside the loss of collective responsibility and belief in human agency, has given rise to distinctly anomic generation. 

Only a couple of weeks prior to the carnage in Clapham, Meta and Google lost a landmark case to Kaley – also referred to as K.G.M – (whose surname has been kept private for anonymity), a 20-year-old girl from California. Following her claim that the addictive nature of platforms, such as Instagram and YouTube, have significantly damaged her mental health. She was awarded $6 million in damages. Many celebrated this ruling, seeing it as a long awaited recognition of the harms that social media can inflict. K.G.M’s lawsuit perhaps signals the onset of court cases taken against big-tech. 

But can it really be the case that social media alone caused K.G.M’s despair? There may be something more to be said about why British youth are spending increasing time online. As communities and activities for young people have continued to decline, evidencedby the closure of more than two-thirds (over 1,200) of council-run youth centres in England and Wales between 2011 to 2023, opportunities for meaningful, real world engagement for young people are diminishing. As a result there is increasingly less for them to be excited about.   

Amplifying harm: are we run by algorithms? 

There is no doubt that social media is a powerful tool. Freya India, a 26-year-old journalist from the UK who has just published her first book, GIRLS®, argues that internet platforms ‘prey on the insecurities’ of young girls, commodifying their misery, trapping them in endless cycles of comparison and immediate attention or gratification. And with the government launching a public consultation on social media bans for under-16s, these arguments have clearly taken hold across the UK. 

Even though it is clear that social media platforms are designed to capture attention and exacerbate vulnerability, insecurity and isolation, to treat these as determinative to individual behaviour denies human agency, stripping individuals of the ability to overcome these challenges through regulation and self control. The move to clamp down on social media, through bans and mass regulation by tech companies and external regulators, is setting a dangerous precedent. One that doesn’t trust people to harness the power of technology and the opportunities it gives us for knowledge, growth and time. Instead, it grants that power to the state. 

Not only is the discourse of protection from big tech and technological developments being used to infantilise children, suggesting that they are incapable of managing the rapidly changing nature of information and communication; they are now being used to undermine the agency of adults too. The psychological ‘harms’ of social media, and the power of algorithms, are increasingly being used to account for the falling standard of political communication. 

Social media has proliferated to amplify division. But it has proliferated in an already fragmenting society, where common values, social norms and communities were previously disintegrating. Individuals who have long been desperate to belong to a group, or some collective endeavour, have moved to echo chambers to fill this void. 

Mary Harrington, who has long stood proudly against technological progress, argues that the ‘hyper-partisan, reduced to viral slogans and simplistic binaries, policed via social swarms and scapegoating’ style of politics has risen dramatically over the last 10 years, as social media algorithms have incentivised extreme political statements in order boost engagement and popularity. Political platforms have prioritised ‘antagonistic’ tones, emotive language, tribalism and shallow moral certainty. These are especially prevalent in discourses surrounding immigration. Platforms, such as X, have been used to spread prejudice, false claims, grievance and fear, rather than to proactively engage with the concerns of the general public. 

As was seen to be the case in Northern Somerset, where the proposal for the town to become a council of sanctuary was claimed (by Reform) to lead to an unmanageable ‘surge in “illegal immigrants”‘. Yet, in reality, it was unlikely to have an impact on the numbers of immigrants placed in the town. The Councillor Maggie Filipova-Rivers consequently argued that social media accounts were attempting to divide the town through ‘blatant, shameless spreading and encouraging of misinformation’.

According to Harrington, the false security of positive feedback loops has led to our enslavement to the silos that we have created. This has become evermore entrenched after the left’s move to the social media platform BlueSky, and, after Elon Musk’s acquisition, X’s evolution into a more right-leaning platform demonstrating ‘antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity’. 

These echo chambers have long been critiqued as the ‘necessary evil’ of social media sites, exacerbating polarisation as opposing opinions cease to occupy the same space. However, is this not a reflection of our own human desire to isolate ourselves from views we don’t agree with? Have we not always felt more comfortable with those we feel share our values? By blaming X for its right-coded algorithm are we not simply passing the culpability of our own behaviour and biases onto the platforms we use? Meanwhile, the deeper issues of social fragmentation have yet to be truly acknowledged. 

Information economy: how technology has expanded the human mind. 

The problem with this approach to political communication is that details cease to matter, as individuals cease the need to persuade. When you are no longer engaging with those who disagree with you; it is no longer necessary to engage with the grey areas. At its root, this reflects a condition of intense social dislocation. As individuals struggle to keep pace with rapid changes in the information environment they have favoured the ease of shutting out uncomfortable changes and conversations, rather than reconciling them. 

In her novel Too Much to Know, Ann Blair argues that even great philosophers, such as Kant and Wandsworth, lamented the rapid expansion of knowledge and information as the technology around printing changed. They experienced ‘temporary mental blockage due to “sheer cognitive exhaustion,” whether triggered by sensory or mental overload’. Yet, Blair also highlights that the rapid changes in information technology transformed the way knowledge was compiled, referenced and used. This process, thus, helped individuals to become more efficient at organising information and consequently, better at using it. 

Without the rapid changes of technology and information around the Renaissance, we would not have had the technological, social or political progress that fundamentally built modern society. Historically, humanity has, through the will to improve, advance, know more and organise itself better, propelled itself forward through taking technological risks. Without this, we wouldn’t have a society with washing machines, air travel or advances in education. We would still be bound by what is necessary for survival. 

This raises a broader question: why have we now become so willing to forgo our human agency to technology in the internet age? As with commentators, on both the left and right, blaming social media for our most contemporary social problems, have we forgotten who chooses how we use it? 

We have decided to use social media, and now AI, to sloganise our own politics. As Harrington suggests, the footnotes often exist; we are just opting not to read them. University students are, themselves, entering their assigned readings into AI, deciding not to engage with ideas or think for themselves, but relying instead on a technology that has been pre-coded and taught what to think. We have forgone our agency for convenience and ease, but this isn’t the fault of the technology itself, it is the change in motivation.

To frame the rise in political polarisation, social disorder, and mental health diagnosis as merely a consequence of technological change is working to accelerate the loss of responsibility and agency we award ourselves today. Everyday we collectively choose to use these platforms to forward fear, rage and emotion in discourse. We choose to follow trends because it is easier than actively and conscientiously making our own choices. 

Our future choices are not predetermined; they are not set in stone by the technology placed before us. We can choose to rebuild our politics, our community and our values through our own actions and interactions with others. It is not empowering to resort to legal action against big tech because we have failed to understand what modern technology is capable of. Instead, we need to build a better idea of what we want technology for and how we can harness its power to better our society and our individual lives. Social media should no longer function as the convenient scapegoat for problems that are, at their core, social and human. The more we attribute our failures to technology, the less capable we become of correcting them. 

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Emma Gilland, the Event Coordinator for ‘Ideas Matter’, is writing a one-off article for ‘Cutting Takes’. She writes more frequently on her Substack.

‘Ideas Matter’ organises the Living Freedom summer school, a place for 18-30 year olds to debate the ideas and ideals of freedom.