Opinion: Why Blaming Technology for Everything is Not Only Wrong, but Harmful

A favourite past time for mainstream media is to blame technology for everything. Drew Wilson talks about why this is harmful.

A favourite past time for many years now for mainstream media and politicians alike is to blame technology for everything. Social media in recent years is just the biggest thing to get the brunt end of the never ending stream of scapegoating. Is there misinformation? Blame social media. Do people suffer from mental health problems? Blame social media. Are there scams going around? Blame social media. Does human smuggling exist? Blame social media. Does income inequality exist? Blame social media. Do people have poor diets? Blame social media. Are people not getting enough exercise? Blame social media. Is there anything that social media hasn’t been blamed for? I honestly can’t think of anything.

The reality is that many of societal problems have always existed without social media. This includes crime, human smuggling, mental health problems, social inequalities, and poor personal health choices. Whenever I hear a politician or a mainstream media news reporter/anchor rail against something like social media for whatever the dart landed on that day, I generally immediately ask myself, “Self, this problem that they are talking about… did it exist before the technology exist and would it be solved if that technology were to somehow be removed?” It’s a great exercise to perform and, almost every single time, the answer I come up with is “no”.

For mainstream media, the motivation to constantly demonize things like social media is quite clear. For many decades, mainstream media, whether it is radio, television, or even the newspaper, was the dominant source of information. If they print or air their comments, that was basically the final say on what is going on in the world. If they feel a perspective isn’t worth considering, then that perspective doesn’t get a voice, end of story. With the advent of the internet, that monopolistic control over information no longer exists. People can fact check anything since the information is at their finger tips. As a result, anything can be double checked including whatever messaging the mainstream media is putting out there. The idea that mainstream media’s mistakes (whether or not it is intentional) can be called out on is a very unique and novel concept to them.

More importantly, people who can actually research topics can also create alternative news sites and organizations. News is no longer confined to the one hour cycle or controlled by a handful of powerful corporations who are frequently part of the wealthy insider 1% upper class. If a story doesn’t make the major news broadcast, then someone else can cover it. People such as myself can hold others to account – and that includes the mainstream media. The stories that get left untold are no longer being left untold. Perspectives that were seen by the upper class as not worth anything can now reach a wider audience. Without the internet, it’s safe to say a great site like Freezenet would not exist and the world would be a much more empty place without sites like mine.

This, unsurprisingly, has made the mainstream media nervous. Their role as the gatekeeper of all knowledge has diminished. Along with that, their revenues have been taking hits as they, for the first time, face actual competition. What’s more, the broader audience benefits from even more choice. If someone feels that Global News just doesn’t do a good enough job, they can turn to something like Rabble.ca for better coverage. If someone feels that CBCs coverage of technology leaves a lot to be desired, they can turn to Freezenet. I could go on. The point is, the mainstream media is livid that information has now been democratized and they are willing to do anything and everything to turn back the hands of time to go back to when they were the sole arbiters of truth and information. Is it really a surprise that things like social media has been the target of their hate? It is, after all, how a lot of independent news sources connect with their respective audiences.

Politicians are also not exactly thrilled about this situation for the most part. They wanted that exclusive control over what is and is not said on mainstream media. As long as the focus remains on the top two parties and third parties are continuously cast as some “insane” or “loony” political party that is unserious, then they can retain political control over the governing process. After all, people won’t know any different because that’s what they are told to think. The last thing many of these politicians want is for that messaging to get circumvented and the messaging from other political parties getting through to people. So, it’s not a surprise that they are also on board with the “let’s all hate technology” movement. This isn’t even getting into the role the rich and powerful in all of this.

Circling back to the “blame it all on technology” movement, more often then not, is false. A lot of the conspiracy theories pushed by mainstream media turn out to be false. Take, for instance, the 2024 Media Matters scandal. At the time, the trend was to bash TikTok for all things wrong with society. Media Matters argued that although TikTok promised to crack down on fake or manipulated media, they didn’t do anything to actually follow through with those promises. As a result, fake video’s are going viral. They pointed to a manipulated video of Joe Biden as proof that these things were going viral. The problem? They accidentally left the statistics of those videos in their own screenshots, showing that almost no one saw those videos. Oops!

I wish I could say that this was a one-off incident of the media pushing disinformation about social media, but it is so commonplace that mainstream media lying to their audiences about things like social media is barely news. Whether it is the fake “trend” stories about social media trends that aren’t actually happening or the flood of disinformation that is unavoidable not actually happening or various forms of criminal activity that has “taken over social media” when, in fact, it has not and what video’s were reported were quickly taken down. The two common threads to all of these false reports is that there is that there is almost never any word on how many views or likes a certain post got or never any mention of a report being made to take the content down. Just “content went viral, social media bad”.

It’s easy to say that these are all just dubious claims made by mainstream media. Yeah, they make up bullshit claims all of the time, so what? Well, there are rammifications to all of the disinformation the mainstream media and politicians pump out. For one, bills are tabled specifically to crack down on free speech in general. It even got to the point where members of the mainstream media openly decry free speech as a threat to democracy and that free speech must be reigned in. It’s an extremely ironic call to be making given that the free and open press depends on the existence of free speech for their very existence in the first place.

Ultimately, this is how you get legislation like the Online Streaming Act, Age Verification, link taxes, anti-moderation bills, Section 230 sun-setting bills, and a whole bunch of other obviously anti free speech and nasty internet bills. The whole point of these efforts is to either shut this whole internet thing down or to “reign” it all in so that it only serves the interests of the mainstream media to the detriment of everyone else. More often then not, this is typically disguised as efforts to “reign in Big Tech” which is a favourite line among those seeking to pull back civil rights. All in all, though, it is ultimately an anti-democratic campaign through and through.

Moreover, the threats being posed aren’t just democratic and civil rights ones, either. What sometimes gets forgotten is the fact that so much time and energy is put into trying to erase peoples democratic rights that they very issues that the anti-technology crowd are crowing about are actively getting undermined by their messaging.

Take, for instance, the issue of mental health. We see stories about the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting or various other stories where people experience a mental health episode. The real questions we, as a society, should be asking are questions like, “Are the mental health services accessible to these individuals?”, “Is their appropriate funding for such services?”, “Are there enough staff to handle mental health issues facing people?”, “Is the level of awareness for such services at the levels that it needs to be?”, and so on and so forth.

Yet, whenever there is mention of incidences like the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting, guess which questions weren’t top of mind throughout the coverage? All of the above. What were the questions being asked? The questions were, “What role did technology play in this?”, “Did OpenAI know something others didn’t and choose not to say something?”, or “Should there be new regulations to enforce the disclosure of potentially harmful activity?” Those were the questions that were asked.

The reality is that, at best, the questions that were asked are merely secondary questions. It shifts the blame from where we are as society and offloads it onto technology. It’s a theme I see over and over again when it comes to tragedy or some other incident. The immediate knee jerk reaction basically rallies around “how can we blame technology for this?”

When we, as a society, do this, we ultimately end up ignoring the root causes of these issues. The most we can hope for are Band-Aid solutions to a much deeper problem we are facing with society. Yes, tabling legislation to crack down on technology feels like something is being done, but all it serves is to further allow the underlying problems to fester even further.

So, if someone who is under age has some sort of traumatic episode, and it is found out that the person in question just so happened to have a Facebook account, banning that person from using Facebook might feel like the right solution, but it is unlikely to make things any better. That underage person might have reached out to people he knew to try and address the mental health issues he happened to have only to be told to suck it up or man up. That underage person might have tried to look for mental health services only to be turned away because the local clinic wasn’t taking new patients. At that point, resentment starts festering, the feelings that the whole world is out to get you start to bubble, and eventually, that pressure cooker boils over and results in something that isn’t pretty.

At that point, did the fact that this underage person had a Facebook account really mattered? No. Will banning underage people from accessing Facebook fix similar problems elsewhere? Absolutely not. The lack of access to such services is still a problem. Yes, the politicians will feel like they did something good in society by banning under age people from social media like Facebook, but the only thing that move served is to give a whole age demographic fewer options to connect with people which ultimately causes more harm than good. At the same time, the same lack of services continues to be a problem. It only makes the situation worse.

This is the harms that I see when the default position is to blame technology. Not only are rights being taken away, but all the energy that could have gone into trying to address systemic shortfalls continue to go unaddressed. As a result, the problems continue to get worse while politicians and media types get to pretend that something is being done. That is the real harm I see in these issues. The sooner we get off of the “blame technology for everything” meme, the better.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.