‘Destructive’ social media cancel culture making people ‘afraid to speak up,’ harming ‘our institutions’ says Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist at the NYU’s Stern School of Business and author of an extraordinary article, “Why the Past 10 years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid”. The psychologist discusses the political strife of cancel culture and how it has become exasperated by social media, commenting that, “what makes it so destructive is the fear. That's what's changed our institutions that people are afraid to speak.” Haidt comments, that we can’t have “democracy without good institutions”, and the events of the last eight years has been an uptick in cancel culture, is “making our institutions and our group dumb because when people are afraid to speak up and challenge the orthodoxy, then decision making goes off kilter.” He also says that most people on social media, “are reasonable people who love our country, and it's the extremists on the right and the left, plus trolls” and “Russian agents,” there are the only “four groups that have really benefited from Twitter and other social media platforms and the rest of us the other 80% of the country, we're just fed up.” He also offers up what he says is his solution for this, which is for Congress to reform current social media laws, but says that the single most important reform for change is to “require identity authentication in order to open an account.”

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