LOVE HATE

You’re Hardwired to Love Social Media

There’s no more denying the harm — so it’s time to deprogram

Photo: Muhammed Selim Korkutata/Anadolu Agency/Getty

It should be impossible to feel ambivalent about social media anymore. The horse is dead and beaten, its bones picked over: We know services like Facebook harvest our data, spur violence, and elect madmen. Using products like the social network implicates us in a system that has, on occasion, made the world worse in very vivid ways: Rodrigo Duterte, the authoritarian president of the Philippines, has “turned Facebook into a weapon,” and you can see the end result in the bodies lining Manila’s gutters.

Or maybe you won’t see the victims in Southeast Asia, and your pain comes instead over the airwaves as Tucker Carlson goes bonkers over some inane viral tweets about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, for crying out loud. Maybe your kid watches some nightmarish Peppa Pig simulacrum on YouTube that an algorithm pieced together based on engagement metrics.

This is all pretty much awful, and there’s no room for ambivalence. Yet ambivalence prevails, and one four-letter word can help explain why: love.

I finally deactivated my Facebook account last week after years of problems: Cambridge Analytica, a recent data breach exposing the personal information of many millions of…