How doom-loop of fear from left and right has real effects
Plunging into the darkest recesses of the human mind, the Malleus Maleficarum depicted women partaking in cannibalism, having sex with the devil, causing crops to fail and engaging in “weather magic”. There was particular emphasis on children and babies: witches caused their death and did unspeakable things with their bodies.
Yet ultimately the popularity of Malleus Maleficarum can be attributed to a phenomenon I have touched on previously: an information cascade. In such a cascade, information spills through a social network causing a chain reaction. In medieval Europe, people became afraid of witches because they saw that other people were afraid of them, and because books told them to be afraid. This created a doom-loop of fear that would lead tens of thousands of men, women and children to be accused of witchcraft, tortured for confessions and burned alive at the stake.
We’ve come a long way since the 16th century, thankfully. We no longer believe that witches fly at night or that black magic causes crops to fail. We no longer torture people for confessions.
But information cascades still can, and sometimes do, wreak havoc on our societies. And while we tend to think of the spread of information as an unalloyed good, history shows us that when new communications technologies emerge, such as the printing press, so do malicious gossip, conspiracy theory and fake news.
Information cascades today are not driven by books about witchcraft but by the viral dynamics of social media. In medieval Europe, a book about witches might take years to spread across the trade routes of the continent but on Facebook and Twitter we can watch cascades form in a matter of days, hours, minutes and seconds.
Last week I wrote about the cascade of the #MeToo movement that undoubtedly has led to the persecution of innocent men in the search for the next Harvey Weinstein. The panic of #MeToo mostly has settled since 2017-18, yet the fallout of the panic may end up harming women the most.
A recent investigation into the impact of #MeToo in the workplace, led by University of Melbourne scholar Marina Gertsberg, has found that since #MeToo there have been fewer collaborations between male and female colleagues in the discipline of economics. Her research found that senior male researchers were opting out of collaborating with their junior female colleagues. While this trend will not affect men who have already reached senior positions in their careers, it will disadvantage those women who ordinarily would have benefited from male mentorship and collaboration.
Another cascade that has had serious consequences is that of the Black Lives Matter movement. When the horrific footage of a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on George Floyd’s neck exploded across social media, it sparked nationwide protests and riots in the US in response. America’s largest corporations lined up to support BLM, and politicians, celebrities and sportspeople tripped over themselves to pledge solidarity with the cause.
Yet in 2020 the homicide rate in the US increased by 30 per cent, the largest 12-month increase ever recorded. Writing for conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, Mike Gonzalez notes: “That is an extra 5000 Americans killed in 2020, a majority of them African-Americans, as they make up 53 per cent of homicide victims.”
A contemporaneous investigation by Paul Cassell, a criminal law professor at the University of Utah, found that crime started to increase after Floyd’s death and corresponded with police pulling back from proactive patrols in known crime hot spots. Police appear to have gone on strike in response to nationwide anti-police protests. Contrary to its cause, the BLM movement may have led to the loss of black lives.
Yet cascades and their consequences are not just a phenomenon that affects the left side of politics. On the right, cascades that have emerged on Facebook and other internet forums are as unhinged and bizarre as the Malleus Maleficarum. From the conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton ran a pedophile ring out of a pizza parlour to the widespread belief that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, online information cascades have created entire fantasy worlds that have attracted hundreds of thousands of diehard believers.
The difference between left and right-wing cascades is that when a cascade promotes a left-wing cause, such as #MeToo or BLM, it tends to be picked up by mainstream media and often attracts support from large corporations, celebrities, athletes and politicians. Cascades that promote right-wing causes, however, tend not to affect mainstream culture. But they arise in social media echo chambers where incentives for fact-checking and verifying lurid claims are virtually non-existent.
Historians have noted that the medieval witch craze emerged most frequently in the borderlands between Germany and France where villagers understood both languages, which increased their exposure to new information. Today, thanks to the internet and social media, we are exposed to torrents of new information at a scale that would be unimaginable to our ancestors.
It may take many years, or perhaps decades, before we build the institutions and norms that mitigate against harmful information cascades fuelled by social media, but it is likely that a new equilibrium will eventually be established – just as it was after the printing press.
In the short term, however, we can expect more chaos.
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In 1486 a German Catholic churchman, Heinrich Kramer, published a treatise on witchcraft called Malleus Maleficarum, roughly translated as Hammer of the Witches, which argued that witchcraft was a form of heresy and that torture was necessary to flush it out. It went on to become the second bestselling book in medieval Europe for two centuries (surpassed only by the Gutenberg Bible). Many historians credit the text, together with woodcut illustrations of witches and demons, as being a catalyst for the 16th-century witch craze.