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    Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society
    Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society
    Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society
    Ebook452 pages4 hours

    Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society

    By Ronald J. Deibert

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    About this ebook

    In the 2020 CBC Massey Lectures, bestselling author and renowned technology and security expert Ronald J. Deibert exposes the disturbing influence and impact of the internet on politics, the economy, the environment, and humanity.

    Digital technologies have given rise to a new machine-based civilization that is increasingly linked to a growing number of social and political maladies. Accountability is weak and insecurity is endemic, creating disturbing opportunities for exploitation. 

    Drawing from the cutting-edge research of the Citizen Lab, the world-renowned digital security research group which he founded and directs, Ronald J. Deibert exposes the impacts of this communications ecosystem on civil society. He tracks a mostly unregulated surveillance industry, innovations in technologies of remote control, superpower policing practices, dark PR firms, and highly profitable hack-for-hire services feeding off rivers of poorly secured personal data. Deibert also unearths how dependence on social media and its expanding universe of consumer electronics creates immense pressure on the natural environment. In order to combat authoritarian practices, environmental degradation, and rampant electronic consumerism, he urges restraints on tech platforms and governments to reclaim the internet for civil society.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHouse of Anansi Press
    Release dateSep 29, 2020
    ISBN9781487008062
    Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society
    Author

    Ronald J. Deibert

    RONALD J. DEIBERT is professor of Political Science and director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. The Citizen Lab undertakes interdisciplinary research at the intersection of global security, information and communications technologies, and human rights. The research outputs of the Citizen Lab are routinely covered in global media, including more than two dozen reports that received exclusive front-page coverage in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other global media over the last decade. Deibert is the author of Black Code: Surveillance, Privacy, and the Dark Side of the Internet, as well as numerous books, chapters, articles, and reports on internet censorship, surveillance, and cybersecurity.

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      Book preview

      Reset - Ronald J. Deibert

      the massey lectures series

      The Massey Lectures are co-sponsored by CBC Radio, House of Anansi Press, and Massey College in the University of Toronto. The series was created in honour of the Right Honourable Vincent Massey, former Governor General of Canada, and was inaugurated in 1961 to provide a forum on radio where major contemporary thinkers could address important issues of our time.

      This book comprises the 2020 Massey Lectures, Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society, broadcast in November 2020 as part of CBC Radio’s Ideas series. The producer of the series was Philip Coulter; the executive producer was Greg Kelly.

      ronald j. deibert

      Ronald J. Deibert is professor of Political Science and director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. The Citizen Lab undertakes interdisciplinary research at the intersection of global security, information and communications technologies, and human rights. The research outputs of the Citizen Lab are routinely covered in global media, including more than two dozen reports that received exclusive front-page coverage in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other global media over the past decade. Deibert is the author of Black Code: Surveillance, Privacy, and the Dark Side of the Internet, as well as numerous books, chapters, articles, and reports on internet censorship, surveillance, and cybersecurity. In 2013, he was appointed to the Order of Ontario and awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medal, for being among the first to recognize and take measures to mitigate growing threats to communications rights, openness, and security worldwide.

      Also by the Author

      Black Code: Surveillance, Privacy, and

      the Dark Side of the Internet

      Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia:

      Communications in World Order Transformation

      Reset

      Reclaiming the Internet

      for Civil Society

      Ronald J. Deibert

      Logo: House of Anansi Press Inc

      Copyright © 2020 Ronald J. Deibert

      and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

      Published in Canada in 2020 and the USA in 2020

      by House of Anansi Press Inc.

      www.houseofanansi.com

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Title: Reset : reclaiming the internet for civil society / Ronald J. Deibert.

      Names: Deibert, Ronald, author.

      Series: CBC Massey lectures.

      Description: Series statement: CBC Massey lectures

      Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200203983 |

      Canadiana (ebook) 20200204025 | ISBN 9781487008055 (softcover) |

      ISBN 9781487008086 | ISBN 9781487008062 (EPUB) |

      ISBN 9781487008079 (Kindle)

      Subjects: LCSH: Social media—Social aspects. |

      LCSH: Social media—Political aspects.

      Classification: LCC HM742 .D45 2020 | DDC 302.23/1—dc23

      Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk

      Text design: Ingrid Paulson

      Logos: Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council

      We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

      For Jane:

      my love, my lifeline,

      my morning coffee confidante

      CONTENTS

      Introduction

      Chapter One: The Market for Our Minds

      Chapter Two: Toxic Addiction Machines

      Chapter Three: A Great Leap Forward…

      for the Abuse of Power

      Chapter Four: Burning Data

      Chapter Five: Retreat, Reform, Restraint

      Notes

      Acknowledgements

      Index

      Constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go … To prevent this abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.

      Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws

      Introduction

      Look at that device in your hand.

      No, really, take a good, long look at it.

      You carry it around with you wherever you go. You sleep with it, work with it, run with it, you play games on it. You depend on it, and panic when you can’t find it. It links you to your relatives and kids. You take photos and videos with it, and share them with friends and family. It alerts you to public emergencies and reminds you of hair appointments.

      Traffic is light. If you leave now you will be on time.

      You depend on it for directions, weather forecasts, and the news. You talk to it, and it talks back. You monitor the appliances that in turn monitor your house (and you) with it. You book your flights on it and purchase your movie tickets through it. You order groceries and takeout and check recipes on it. It counts your steps and monitors your heartbeat. It reminds you to be mindful. You use it for yoga and meditation.

      But if you’re like most everyone I know, you also probably feel a bit anxious about it. You realize it (and what it connects you to) is doing things to your lifestyle that you’d probably be better off without. It’s encouraging bad habits. Your kids and even some of your friends barely talk to you in person any longer. Sometimes it feels like they don’t even look you in the face, their eyeballs glued to it, their thumbs tapping away constantly. Your teen freaks out when their device rings. You mean I have to actually speak to someone? How could something so social be also so curiously anti-social at the same time?

      You check your social media account, and it feels like a toxic mess, but you can’t help but swipe for more. Tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of people actually believe the earth is flat because they watched videos extolling conspiracies about it on YouTube. Right-wing, neo-fascist populism flourishes online and off, igniting hatred, murder, and even genocide.¹ A daily assault on the free press rains down unfiltered from the Twitter account of the president of the United States, whose brazen lies since taking office number in the tens of thousands. His tweets are symptomatic of the general malaise: like a car accident, they are grotesque, but somehow you are drawn in and can’t look away.

      No doubt you have also noticed that social media have taken a drubbing in recent years. The gee whiz factor has given way to a kind of dreadful ennui. Your daily news feeds fill with stories about data breaches, privacy infringements, disinformation, spying, and manipulation of political events. Social media executives have been dragged before congressional and parliamentary hearings to face the glare of the cameras and the scrutiny of lawmakers.

      The 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. election of president Donald Trump were both major precipitating factors behind the re-examination of social media’s impact on society and politics. In both cases, malicious actors, domestic and foreign, used social media to spread malfeasance and ignite real-life protests with the intent to foster chaos and further strain already acute social divisions. Thanks to investigations undertaken in their aftermath, shady data analytics companies like Cambridge Analytica have been flushed out from the shadows to show a glimpse of social media’s seamy underworld.²

      Then there’s the real dark side to it all. You’ve read about high-tech mercenary companies selling powerful cyberwarfare services to dictators who use them to hack into their adversaries’ devices and social networks, often with lethal consequences. First it was Jamal Khashoggi’s inner circle, then (allegedly) Jeff Bezos’s device. Maybe I’ve been hacked too? you wonder to yourself, suddenly suspicious of that unsolicited text or email with an attachment. The world you’re connecting to with that device increasingly feels like a major source of personal risk.

      But it’s also become your lifeline, now more than ever. When the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV or COVID-19) swept across the globe after its discovery in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, business as usual ground to a halt: entire industries shuttered, employees laid off in the millions, and nearly everyone forced into self-isolation and work-from-home. While all other sectors of the global economy were on a rapid downward spiral, the large technology platforms saw use of their services skyrocket. Video conferencing tools, like Zoom, went from obscure office contrivances to something so commonplace your grandparents or children used it, often for hours on end. Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other streaming media services were booming, a welcome distraction from the grim news outside. Bandwidth consumption catapulted to such enormous levels that telecommunications carriers were putting caps on streams and downgrading video quality to ensure the internet didn’t overload. Miraculously, it all hung together, and for that you were grateful.

      But the global pandemic also accentuated all of social media’s shortcomings. Cybercrime and data breaches also skyrocketed as bad actors capitalized on millions of people working from home, their kitchen routers and jerry-rigged network setups never designed to handle sensitive communications. In spite of efforts by social media platforms to remove misleading information and point their users to credible health sources, disinformation was everywhere, sometimes consumed with terrible effects. People perished drinking poisonous cocktails shared over social media (and endorsed by Donald Trump himself) in a desperate attempt to stave off the virus.

      The entire situation presented a striking contrast both to the ways in which social media advertise themselves and to how they were widely perceived in the past. Once, it was conventional wisdom to assume that digital technologies would enable greater access to information, facilitate collective organizing, and empower civil society. The Arab Spring, the so-called coloured revolutions, and other digitally fuelled social movements like them seemed to demonstrate the unstoppable people power unleashed by our always-on, interconnected world. Indeed, for much of the 2000s, technology enthusiasts applauded each new innovation as a way to bring people closer together and revitalize democracy.³

      Now, social media are increasingly perceived as contributing to a kind of social sickness. A growing number of people believe that social media have a disproportionate influence over important social and political decisions. Others are beginning to notice that we are spending an unhealthy amount of our lives staring at our devices, socializing, while in reality we are living in isolation and detached from nature.⁴ As a consequence of this growing unease, there are calls to regulate social media and to encourage company executives to be better stewards of their platforms, respect privacy, and acknowledge the role of human rights. But where to begin? And what exactly should be done? Answers to these questions are far less clear.

      The title of this book, Reset, is intended to prompt a general stocktaking about the unusual and quite disturbing period of time in which we find ourselves. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice, Martin Luther King Jr. once famously observed. Looking around at the climate crisis, deadly diseases, species extinction, virulent nationalism, systemic racism, audacious kleptocracy, and extreme inequality, it’s really hard to share his optimism. These days it feels more like everything’s all imploding instead. If there has ever been a time when we needed to rethink what we’re collectively doing, this is certainly it.

      More specifically, the title is also intended to signal a deeper re-examination of our communications ecosystem that I believe is urgently required, now more than ever. In the language of computers and networking, the term reset is used widely to refer to a measure that halts a system and returns it to an initial state. (The term reboot is often used interchangeably.) A reset is a way to terminate a runaway process that is causing problems and start over anew. Users of Apple products will be familiar with the spinning beach ball that signifies a process that is stuck in a loop, while Microsoft customers will no doubt recall the blue screen of death. We’ve all been there at one time or another.

      The term reset is also used more broadly to refer to a fresh start. As when parents tell their children to take a time out, a reset is usually suggested when something we are doing has become counterproductive and deserves some reconsideration. It’s also common to think about a reset when we do something entirely novel, like begin a new job or move to a new house. Resets allow time to regroup, clean house, take stock and look at the big picture, and launch a new plan. In broader parlance, a reset implies beginning again from well-thought-out first principles. It allows us to discard the errors of the old ways of going about things and start over with a solid foundation.

      During the COVID emergency, societies were compelled into an unexpected and enforced reset. Governments around the world, from the municipal to the federal level, mandated quarantines and self-isolation protocols. The global economy effectively went into an indefinite pause as entire sectors were shut down. Emergency measures were introduced. At the time of writing, in spring 2020, we were still at a relatively early stage of the pandemic’s spread, and it’s unclear how everything will resolve. However it all turns out, the enforced time out has prompted a re-examination of many aspects of our lives and our politics, and social media are certainly not exempt.

      I have several objectives in writing Reset. One aim is to synthesize what I see as an emerging consensus about the problems related to social media and — by extension — the organization of our entire communications environment. Think of this as a diagnosis of social media: an identification of the illnesses by a close examination of their symptoms. I organize these problems as painful truths — truths because there is a growing number of scholars and experts who acknowledge these problems, and painful because they describe many serious and detrimental effects that are unpleasant to contemplate and difficult to fix.⁵ In doing so, I am not so much putting forward a single original argument about social media as combining a lot of disparate research and reporting undertaken by many others who have studied the topic. Of course, not everyone will agree with my synthesis or characterization of these problems. But I have tried as much as possible to capture what I see as the latest evidence-based research and thinking on the topic — to provide a comprehensive picture of the state of the art at the time of writing.

      Reset is, therefore, not intended solely for a specialist audience, and it is not sourced in the same manner as a peer-reviewed academic book on the topic would be. I have tried to make Reset as accessible as possible, while still being faithful to the recent scholarship on the topic. For those who wish to get into the weeds a little bit more, and to give credit where credit is due, alongside this book I am publishing a detailed bibliography of sources. I feel as though I am part of a large community of scholars who have spent their professional lives dissecting these painful truths about social media — scholars like Rebecca MacKinnon, Tim Wu, Zeynep Tufekci, Siva Vaidhyanathan, danah boyd, Kate Crawford, Bruce Schneier, Ryan Calo, and many others too numerous to list here. In describing the painful truths about social media, I hope to be able to help convey those thinkers’ collective concerns as accurately as possible.

      Another aim of this work is to move beyond these painful truths and start a conversation about what to do about them. There is a very long and growing list of books, articles, and podcasts that lay bare the problems of social media, but few of them offer a clear alternative or a path forward. Those solutions that are proposed can feel fragmented or incomplete. At best, one might find a few cursory platitudes tacked on in the final paragraphs of an essay or book that hint at, but don’t elaborate on, what to do. That is not to say there is a shortage of proposals to reform social media in some fashion; those are plentiful but can also be confusing or seemingly contradictory. Should we break up Facebook and other tech giants, or reform them from within? Should we completely unplug and disconnect, or is there a new app that can help moderate the worst excesses of social media?

      My aim is to bring some clarity to this challenge by laying out an underlying framework to help guide us moving forward. However much it may feel like we are in uncharted territory, I don’t believe we need to invent some new cyber theory to deal with the problems of social media (and we certainly can’t pin our hopes on a new app). Humans have faced challenges in other eras similar to our own. We have done this before, albeit at different scales and under different circumstances. There is, in fact, a long tradition of theorizing about security and liberty from which we can draw as we set out to reclaim the internet for civil society. I hope to elaborate on what I see as some of the most promising elements of that tradition.

      Not that long ago — and I mean within my adult life — we used information and communications technologies self-consciously and as deliberate one-off acts. We made a telephone call. We watched television. We listened to the radio. We dropped a letter in the postbox. Later, we composed essays or undertook calculations on our desktop computers. These were all relatively self-contained and isolated performances, separate from each other and from other aspects of normal life. But beginning around the 1980s (at least for those of us living in the industrialized West), things began to change quickly. Those desktop computers were eventually networked together through the internet and internet-based subscription services like CompuServe or America Online.⁶ The World Wide Web (1991) brought a kind of Technicolor to the internet while unleashing a dramatically new means of individual self-expression. Thanks to improvements in cellular technologies and miniaturized transistors, telephones went mobile. Before long, Apple gave us the iPod (in 2001), onto which we could download digital music. The iPhone (released in 2007) combined the two and then integrated their various functions via the internet, producing a one-stop, all-purpose, mobile digital networking smart device.

      Before long, the internet was in everything, from wearables and networked kitchen appliances all the way down to the molecular level with digitally networked implants, like pacemakers and insulin pumps.⁷ (Perhaps not surprisingly, security experts have routinely discovered potentially life-threatening software vulnerabilities in many versions of the latter.⁸) Digitally networked neural implants that are presently used for deep-brain and nerve stimulation, as well as to enable mind-controlled prosthetics, are merely at the rudimentary stages of development; engineers are experimenting on systems involving thousands of tiny speck-sized neural implants that would wirelessly communicate with computers outside the brain.⁹ Whatever the future brings, we are all now cyborgs — a term that once described a hypothetical fusion of human and machine.¹⁰ One can no longer draw a clear separation between our normal and our digital lives (or, to use older lingo, between meat and virtual spaces). Our use of information and communications technologies is now less a series of deliberate, self-conscious acts and more like something that just continuously runs in the background. Much of it is rendered invisible through familiarity and habituation.¹¹ Disparate systems have converged into an always-on, always-connected mega-machine. This profound shift in how we communicate and seek and receive information has occurred largely within the span of a single generation.

      To be sure, there is still vast digital inequality (nearly half of the world’s population has yet to come online), but those gaps are closing quickly. The fastest growth in mobile internet connectivity is in the global South, as entire populations leapfrog over older legacy systems and fixed line connections to plug directly into social media using mobile devices. But the uses towards which those populations (and all next-generation users, for that matter) are putting digital technologies are sometimes quite surprising, and different than what the original designers intended. Human ingenuity can reveal itself in many unexpected ways. The internet gave us access to libraries and hobby boards, but also gave criminal enterprises low-risk opportunities for new types of global malfeasance, like spam, phishing schemes, and (more recently) ransomware and robocalls. Early in the internet’s history, many assumed the technology would hamstring dictators and despots, and, to be sure, it has created some control issues for them. But it’s also created opportunities for older practices to flourish, such as the way "kompromat (Russian for compromising material used for blackmail and extortion") has taken on new life in post-Soviet social media. The entire ecosystem was not developed with a single well-thought-out design plan, and security has largely been an afterthought. New applications have been slapped on top of legacy systems and then patched backwards haphazardly, leaving persistent and sometimes gaping vulnerabilities up and down the entire environment for a multitude of bad actors to exploit.¹² It’s all an accidental megastructure, as media theorist Benjamin Bratton aptly put it.¹³

      The global communications ecosystem is not a fixed thing. It’s not anywhere near stasis either. It’s a continuously evolving mixture of elements, some slow-moving and persistent and others quickly mutating. There are deeper layers, like those legacy standards and protocols, that remain largely fixed. But caked on top of them is a bewildering array of new applications, features, and devices.¹⁴ Weaving through it all are rivers of data, some neatly contained in proper channels, others pouring through the cracks and crevices and spilling out in the form of data breaches. The phrase data is the new oil refers to the value to be gained from all the data that is routinely harvested by machines from both humans and other machines — the entire complex bristling with millions of pulsating data-sorting algorithms and sensors. The gradual rollout of fifth-generation cellular technology, known as 5G, will dramatically increase the speed and broadband capacity of cellular networks, fuelling an even greater volume of data circulating among a larger number of networked devices. The combined effect of each of us turning the most intimate aspects of our digital lives inside out has created a new emergent property on a planetary scale that has taken a life of its own — derived from but separate from us, a datasphere.

      Social media (strictly understood) refers to the breed of applications that emerged in the past decade and a half, thanks largely to the extraordinary business innovations of Google and Facebook, and gave rise to what the political economist and business management professor Shoshana Zuboff has termed surveillance capitalism. Merriam-Webster defines social media narrowly as forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos).¹⁵ But missing from this definition is the underlying business model, an appreciation of which is essential in order to fully understand the dynamics of social media. At their core, social media are vehicles for the relentless collection and monetization of the personal data of their users. Social media are so overwhelming and omnipresent in our lives, it may feel like they have been with us forever. Some of you reading this may have grown up entirely within the universe of Facebook, Google, Snapchat, and TikTok and not know what it’s like to live without them. I’m among those living generations that have experienced life before and after social media. I remember standing in a long line with nothing to do but think.

      Not everything is social media, but social media influence everything else, so prominent and influential is the business model at their core. The platforms that run social media have huge gravitational force and sweep up most everything else into their orbit (sometimes literally, through acquisitions), absorbing even non-social applications into the galaxy of social media. For example, narrowly understood, drones are not a form of social media. But both developed out of a common family of electronics, robotics, miniaturization, and digitization. Each drone is controlled by software-based, networked applications installed on handheld devices and tablets. The most popular drone is manufactured by a China-based company called DJI, whose apps send data on trips, models, locations, and more to its Shenzhen-based servers as well as numerous advertising firms and other third parties. Much like everything else these days, the influence of social media’s business model has infected those applications, and so they too are oriented around personal data surveillance. Overhead remote sensing data are also integral to the functioning of many social media applications, such as Google’s maps.

      Social media do not stand alone. They are embedded in a vast technological ecosystem. In order to participate in social media, you need some kind of networked device: a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or PC. (The number of networked devices is expanding quickly with 5G networks and the so-called Internet of Things, and now includes internet-enabled fridges, home security systems, dishwashers, and automobiles.) Those devices send electronic signals through radio waves or cables that are transmitted through a physical infrastructure of routers, servers, cell towers, and data farms, in some cases spread throughout multiple countries. Each of these elements is operated by numerous businesses, which can include internet service providers (ISPs), cable companies, cell service providers, satellite services, undersea cable providers, and telecommunications firms as well as the various hardware and software manufacturers supporting them all. Which companies operate the various components of this ecosystem, and according to whose rules, matters enormously for users’ security and privacy. For example, policymakers and analysts have raised concerns that China-based communications routing equipment manufacturers Huawei and ZTE may have designed secret back doors in their technology that would provide China’s security agencies with an intelligence toehold in 5G networks.¹⁶ However valid, these concerns are not unique to China or China-based companies. The history of communications technologies is full of episodes of governments of all sorts cajoling or compelling companies that operate the infrastructure to secretly turn over data they collect. (A decade from now, we’ll be worrying about whether the companies that control our brain implants have secretly inserted back doors.)

      The internet, telecommunications, and social media are so foundational to everything else that they have become an object of intense geopolitical competition among states and other actors on the world stage. Cyber commands, cyber forces, and electronic armies have proliferated. A large, growing, and mostly unaccountable private industry feeds their needs with tools, products, and services. The struggle for information advantage is a by-product of seemingly endless opportunities for data exploitation as a consequence of pervasive insecurity. Defence is expensive and difficult, so everyone goes on the offence instead. The ancient art of intelligence gathering is now a multi-billion-dollar worldwide industry that snakes clandestinely through the catacombs of the planet’s electronic infrastructure. To give one illustration of the magnitude of the issue, Google’s security team says that on any given day, it tracks around 250 government-backed hacking campaigns operating out of fifty countries.¹⁷ And yet, in spite of it all, the communications ecosystem somehow hangs together. Interdependence runs deep — even closed-off North Korea depends on the internet for illicitly acquired revenues.¹⁸ And so most of the offensive action (even among otherwise sworn adversaries) takes place just below the threshold of armed conflict.¹⁹ Subversion, psychological operations, extortion (through ransomware), and digitally produced propaganda are where the real action is to be found — less violent, to be sure, but no less destructive of the health of the global communications sphere.

      The entire ecosystem requires enormous energy to power, and that in turn implicates all of the various components of the global energy grid: power stations, transmission systems, hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, coal-fired power plants, and others. The awesome speed with which we can send and retrieve even large amounts of data tends to obscure the vast physical infrastructure through which it all passes. Last year, my family and I did a FaceTime video call between Sydney, Australia, and Toronto, Canada, which at roughly 15,500 kilometres apart are about as distant as two points on Earth can be, and it worked seamlessly … as if it were some kind of magic. But it’s not magic at all; it’s physics. However immaterial they may seem, our digital experiences rest on a complex and vastly distributed planet-wide infrastructure.

      To be sure, it’s not all physical. This enormous communications ecosystem could not function without rules, protocols, algorithms, and software that process and order the flows of data. Some of those rules and protocols were developed decades ago and remain foundational still, like the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) underlying pretty much all internet communications, or Signalling System No. 7 (SS7), which was developed in 1975 to route telephone calls but has now unexpectedly become a major source of insecurity used to track the location of smartphones. Other rules and protocols are pasted on top as new applications are developed. Many different terms have been used to describe this entire ecosystem: the internet, cyberspace, the World Wide Web, and more. But because these can quickly date themselves, I prefer to use the more generic communications ecosystem.

      It’s important to make this distinction clear, because while we may want to eliminate or temper some of the characteristics of social media, we do not necessarily want to (nor realistically can we) eliminate the vast communications ecosystem of which they are a part. Looking only narrowly at the effects of social media proper may also obscure some of the consequences connected to the broader (and continuously mutating) communications ecosystem. Throughout this book, I’ll use social media narrowly when referring to those platforms we traditionally associate with the term, but I’ll also be spending time examining other technologies connected to them that make up the communications ecosystem as a whole (like that device you hold in your hand).

      There is no shortage of blame placed on social media for all sorts of social and political pathologies. But assigning causality (in a scientific sense) to social media for any particular outcome, negative or otherwise, is not always simple, given the extensive ecosystem of which it is a part. Sometimes doing so is more manageable, such as through rigorously controlled and peer-reviewed experiments on the effects of digital experiences on human cognition and behaviour. It is from studies such as these that we are beginning to understand some of the addictive qualities of our digital experiences (which may help explain the panic you feel when you lose your device). But higher-level effects — e.g., the impact of social media on political polarization or authoritarianism — are far more difficult to untangle from other confounding variables (to use the language of social science). Societies are complex, and monocausal theories about them are almost always incorrect. Some of the effects people may attribute to social media — e.g., decline of trust in public institutions — are almost certainly the result of multiple, overlapping factors, some of which

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