Billy Ball: The case for breaking social media in America
By Billy Ball
In 2024, I wrote at Cardinal & Pine that social media “is going to break America, or we’re going to break it.”
A year has passed, and things have gotten worse.
Depending on your political leanings, your Facebook or TikTok feed is either convinced that murdered right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk was the second coming of Christ or the Devil himself. And the damaged young man accused of shooting him? He’s either Che Guevara or Viktor Orbán with an Xbox and a 4chan account.
And social media, like a dog rolling around on a dead thing, is reveling in it all. It’s Charlie Kirk today. Next week it’ll be some new political chasm. The details are interchangeable, the chasm isn’t.
We will never have peace, at least not on social media, because we’re not meant to.
Americans can’t agree on much, but I’d wager they can come together around this idea:
Social media, the way it is constructed in 2025, is malignant. It is a civilizational succubus, a meta-sized Munchausen’s syndrome, the guardian who gives you a spoonful of poison every day to keep you sick.
It isn’t that Facebook and its ilk are left-leaning or right-leaning. Most social media companies say they have no ideology one way or the other. X, which is owned by right-wing activist Elon Musk, is the exception. But that isn’t the point. It’s that they profit, clearly, off everyone hating each other.
In 2025, it’s no longer a mystery how the algorithm works. Disdain, vitriol, and hate—they make you viral. Thoughtfulness makes you obsolete. Before you can see how your friend celebrated their birthday, you have to scroll past all the dreck—the half-true memes, the celebrity side-boob, and the fear-farming.
If the billion-dollar companies that profit from this space aren’t held accountable for their gleeful amplification of malicious information, we cannot maintain a functioning, healthy democracy. There’s no debating your differences if you can’t agree on what’s up and what’s down.
It’ll break us. You could argue it already has.
But there is a solution, and I’d wager that even our polarized nation would line up behind it.
Google ‘Section 230’
In the 1990s, politicians in America wanted to protect burgeoning tech companies from any potential legal liabilities of the information they hosted. So they wrote Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.
The internet is a place filled with many viewpoints. The idea is that companies that host those viewpoints on their platforms should not be held liable for them.
That immunity has helped to make companies like Facebook, Google, and YouTube fat and rich. And it’s helped influencers grow fast, especially if they elicit a strong emotion one way or the other.
Under that 1996 law, social media companies are not treated like your newspaper or local TV station.
“If a news site falsely calls you a swindler, you can sue the publisher for libel,” the Associated Press explained in 2023. “But if someone posts that on Facebook, you can’t sue the company — just the person who posted it.”
But what about if the company is amplifying it?
We know some social media companies like Facebook have been “juicing” content that makes people engage, meaning it encourages you to respond with an angry emoji or share it, and most people only do that when they feel strongly about something.
According to The Washington Post‘s 2021 reporting, “Facebook for three years systematically amped up some of the worst of its platform, making it more prominent in users’ feeds and spreading it to a much wider audience”
Is there any reason to believe Facebook, just the biggest and most visible of the perpetrators, is doing it differently today? Or that they’re alone in the way they push content?
Its impacts on our mental health are well-documented. Political debate is an ever-churning storm of crap. I think of it like the Sarlacc in “Star Wars,” an unquenchable, sentient hate hole that, as the story goes, slowly digests you over a thousand years.
It’s designed to be addictive too, especially for children and teenagers, keeping you coming back for that shot of good or bad energy.
Once, we cracked down on the tobacco companies that sold us a physically addictive carcinogen and marketed it to children. When is it TikTok or Facebook’s turn?
Because of social media companies, it has never been easier for people to tell lies that cause extraordinary harm, that spread unchecked, as it is now. Indeed, these are salad days for hate groups.
Your grandfather’s Ku Klux Klan—with their bedsheets, their horses, and their burning crosses—are gone. Too inefficient, too sweaty. Long ago, they rebranded, got a social media account and leveled up.
Take Section 230’s immunity away, or write some exceptions to it, and social media companies will have to moderate what they host on their platforms or be held responsible for it. They will have to place guardrails on this Mississippi River of bad information or pay for it.
It will not solve all our problems. There is no magic pill for this mess we’re in. But it will help.
If that sounds like censorship to you, consider this: In America, you can say anything you want, but that doesn’t mean there are no consequences for what you say. In the publishing industry, the consequences are specific—and potentially expensive.
It’s good for journalism. It means that publishers can’t just write false stuff. You violate that understanding and you can lose your job, your livelihood, and your platform.
Social media companies have no such incentive to be decent. And they are, clearly, more than neutral bystanders. Their algorithm feasts on our pain and misery and then the social media company makes gobs of money off it.
If someone wanted to break a people into shards, they could not do better than what Facebook or X or TikTok is doing right now—an IV drip of spiteful, false, unsourced information.
We don’t have to live this way.
[Full story at The Living South.]
Billy Ball is senior newsletter editor at Cardinal & Pine in North Carolina. He’s covered local, state, and national politics, government, education, criminal justice, the environment, and immigration in North Carolina for almost two decades. His reporting and commentary have earned state, regional, and national awards. He’s also the founder of The Living South, a journalism project about the most interesting people in the American South.
