From WNYC Studios, it's Brian Lair, a daily politics podcast.

It's Monday, May 16th.

That 180-page online rant by the alleged shooter and the Buffalo Massacre is one of the latest

examples of the dangerously divisive products of social media in our time. Not that racist

massacres didn't take place before social media, before the internet, but it's a factor today,

undeniably in things like the spread of the hateful ideology of replacement theory that the alleged shooter

referenced, the false conspiracy theory that there is a plot to replace whites and Christians in

America that is a fringe theory but is spreading more widely, largely because of how easy

that spread is to accomplish. NYU social psychologist and professor of ethical leadership,

Jonathan Haidt, has an article in the May Atlantic magazine that takes a deep dive into how

social media went from something people first thought would be culturally unifying as people

shared posts with each other to the highly divisive thing it has become.

The article, of course, was published before Buffalo, and Jonathan Haidt was already scheduled for the show today.

We'll talk about the Buffalo massacre in the context of this piece, as well as the themes that it now connects with that Professor Haidt writes about.

Jonathan, thanks for coming on.

Welcome back to WNYC.

Thanks so much, Brian.

Great to be back with you.

Your article begins with the biblical babble.

Why babble?

Well, because it just felt to me like something had gone terribly wrong in the 2010s.

And I've been casting around from metaphors to explain how everything seemed to change.

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