Erick Erickson of The Resurgent suggests we’re seeing the weaponizing of information:
I am sure people are behind these decisions, but I am also sure they know that stuff like this gets clicks. Clicks generate traffic. Traffic generates revenue. Hate clicks generate the most traffic and so the most revenue. News sites are now specializing in outrageous content that gets the most clicks and that most often is caused by hate clicks.
Those hate clicks then get shared online, fed into algorithms, and recirculated to increase the hate and increase the traffic. Clickbait headlines compound the issue and for good measure outrageous videos and cute puppies pile on too.
I have been thinking a lot about all of this after seeing two separate and unrelated, but very connected, pieces this past Friday. The first is this katherine Miller essay at BuzzFeed on how the 2010s broke our sense of time. The second is the Georgetown University Battleground survey where in a majority of voters think we are headed towards a civil war. In fact, the average voter thinks we are two-thirds of the way to the “edge” of a civil war.
Now I have no idea what the edge of a civil war is, but I do think we are at a moment of serious discontent in the country and I think it is directly related to Katherine Miller’s point about the algorithm. We no longer live chronologically online. We live algorithmically. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the rest of the internet now shows us content in a timeline designed to increase our interaction and increase our clicks. It has taken us out of chronology.
NewScientist’s Carl Miller (19 October 2019, paywall) is all over it and more. A couple of small excerpts:
A powerful illustration of that fragility came on 7 March 2019, when Facebook made an announcement. Among the billions of accounts, groups and pages that inhabit its site and its subsidiary, Instagram, it had identified a network of 137 engaged in what it termed “inauthentic” activity targeting the UK. Yet to the 180,000 people who followed all or part of this network, it would have seemed utterly unremarkable. Tedious even.
On the one hand, nationalists were sharing slogans. “Being a leftist is easy!” one meme said. “If anyone disagrees with you, call them a racist!” But others in the network pushed a different angle. One account called for the leader of the pro-Brexit party UKIP to be charged with hate crimes. Others drew attention to stories that LGBT Christians were being bullied because of their faith. The vitriol and polarisation would be familiar to anyone who has spent time on social media. The one key difference was that none of it was real. Neither the nationalists nor the anti-racism campaigners existed. Both were online masks worn by a single coordinated and hidden group.
This ecosystem of fake identities, false voices and deceptive groups was attempting to provoke broad social change. Its members pumped polarised messages to both ends of the political spectrum not to change anyone’s mind, but to confirm the beliefs their viewers already held. The aim was outrage: to make people angrier and angrier about the injustices they were already convinced were happening. To alter the way that people behaved and thought, they had lured them into a fake society that only existed online.
Having started using telecommunications and social media[1] near its birth in the early 1980s, I found it was already a tired trope that telecommunications lacked several of the attributes we humans use to communicate, such as body language and sarcasm. Those days were simply text on a computer monitor; today’s Web is far more expressive, but it’s an expressiveness under the direct and total control of the entity pushing the message.
It’s really no surprise that right wing commentators such as Erickson as well as scientific researchers are discovering that the Web, used by so many as a free news source to the extent that it’s superseding and destroying the old news media which had spent decades building operations, reputations, and community trust[2]. Whether you’re conservative or liberal, if you are a communicator and consider yourself to be, to use an old-fashioned word, earnest, then to discover you’re keeping unintended company with national adversaries for whom concepts such as truth and facts are no more important than lies is a trifle galling. For the earnest, the goal is not to win at all costs, but, in the best cases, to discover truth and uncover the best solution to whatever the problem du jour might be. Not all commentators adhere to such a credo. For some, ideology comes before reality; and, of course, perceiving reality is can be a very tricky business. But, for the best of commentators, pundits, and etc, the ideal is truth, not merely winning an argument.
This frustrating discovery leads to this observation from Miller:
Since the end of the cold war, the militaries of liberal democracies have been bigger, better funded and more powerful than the military of any country that wishes to do them harm. The dangers, however, are no longer physical. Now, coordinated groups can step right into the middle of the politics of any country with an online presence. And this poses a problem that no state can answer alone.
That is, if the liberal societies tear themselves apart at the instigation of authoritarian adversaries such as Russia, then who needs a big military? The authoritarian nation need merely do what it does best – repress its own citizens and sow dissension against its enemy. Simply keeping the enemy in a state of back-biting may be adequate to the needs of the authoritarian, depending on national or religious mythology.
While Facebook and other New Age publishing entities work on solutions – which seems fruitless to me – people like you and me need to take responsibility for how we treat information from the Web, especially free information. Miller presents a good starter list of rules, which I will shamelessly borrow in its entirety:
Seven rules to keep yourself safe online
1. Actively look for the information you want, don’t let it find you. The information that wants to find you isn’t necessarily the information you want to find.
2. Beware the passive scroll. This is when you are prey to processes that can be gamed and virals that can be shaped.
3. Guard against outrage. Outrage is easy to hijack, and makes you particularly vulnerable to being manipulated online. What’s more, your outrage can induce outrage in others, making it a particularly potent tool.
4. Slow down online. Pause before sharing. Give time for your rational thought processes to engage with what you are reading.
5. Lean away from the metrics that can be spoofed. Don’t trust something because it is popular, trending or visible.
6. Never rely only on information sourced from social media. This is particularly the case for key pieces of information, such as where polling booths are or whether you can vote.
7. Spend your attention wisely: it is both your most precious and coveted asset.
Some of these I’ve put together myself over thirty years in social media, but #3 concerning outrage, which I think is particularly important, I’ve only begun noticing its usage as a tactic in the last few years. The outrage is secular, as you can see it in both hard line conservatives towards liberals, and progressives towards conservatives.
Long time readers will know that I occasionally will take a mass e-mailing, usually of the conservative variety, and pull it apart to understand how its presentation, half-lies, and lies are used to divide American society along racial, geographical, and ideological lines, much to our collective detriment. This would be a sample of understanding and rebuffing attacks of the type mentioned in #3.
So it appears to be in our best collective and individual interests to treat information from the Web with care and even suspicion. In the past, I’ve mentioned that if you’re not paying for the information, say through a subscription, then that information should be more suspect than if you had[2]. I subscribe to several publications, including NewScientist, The Washington Post, and Skeptical Inquirer, all with long and reputable publishing histories.
But I must ask: how are you, my reader, safeguarding yourself from false and malicious information?
Let me give you an example from my own experience. Back in 2014, Politico published an article by Randall Balmer, a Dartmouth College professor, on the origins of the Religious Right entitled “The Real Origins of the Religious Right,” and subtitled,
They’ll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record’s clear: It was segregation.
I am pro-choice, but more importantly I regard the abortion issue as one of the greatest and most puzzling divides in American society; perhaps only the anti-science antipathy implicit in the specious ideologies collected under the heading of Creationism (and, if you’re paying attention and have creationist sympathies, you should realize I just tweaked your sense of outrage, for which I’ll now apologize, although I continue to have no sympathy for creationism and its most frenzied adherents, the leaders of which I regard as no more than power-thirsty hypocrites) holds greater sway.
But I have chosen not to publish a post using this article, even though I find it appealing and have hung on to it for several months. Why?
First, I don’t have a subscription to Politico. That means I’m not paying for factual information. While I may think Politico has a good history of publishing, for a subject of obscure historical fact or fiction like this one, I simply don’t have the tools nor the time to verify Balmer’s article.
Second, given the article’s incendiary nature, I want the assurances that I lack as noted in my first point. I’m not often a metaphorical bomb-thrower, creationism aside, but even then I want truth and facts.
Third, how will it help heal this societal rift? Accusing the anti-abortion movement of have its origins in racism and the Klan is not the mark of a persuasive writer. Indeed, it smells of societal division, doesn’t it? The sort of which Miller and Erickson warn.
I’ve seen CNN articles claiming abortion was legal and freely available during the 19th century in the United States, but was made illegal because the trade was controlled by women, and thus was considered unseemly. Were they true? False? I don’t know. I did not use them, despite the fact that I found them interesting, if only historically.
The point Erickson raises and Miller covers in detail – I recommend buying that issue of NewScientist for the article – is of importance to all earnest users of the Web, or indeed any communications concerning subjects about which you do not have first-hand knowledge. How to manage your information intake is growing in importance as national adversaries work to poison our society. You may have already been poisoned. Do you get upset, angry, and outraged every time you think of your political opponents? Do you forget that they are Americans, too, and simply want what’s best for the country? If so, you may be poisoned, and there’s no doctor for this; you’ll need to remedy it yourself.
Explore the Web with those cautions in mind.
1 I refer to bulletin board systems, which newspaperman Steve Yelvington has identified as some of the earliest electronic social media to have existed. I ran one from the early 1980s to 2002.
2 I’ve remarked a time or two on the positives of paying for news. For the obverse, I suggest that free news is like a diet of sugar: it may taste great (play to your biases), but it’s quite likely that it’s empty calories (lies, partial lies, or portrayed in a manner at variance with reality), which is to say it leaves you fat, dumb, and happy. Or at least happy until it’s harvest time. And you’re the pig.
When it comes to abortion, the rhetoric from the right has become frenzied and surreal against a medical procedure with a long history of use during periods of it being both legal and illegal. In my view, it has little credibility in terms of medicine, due to the fetus’ complete lack of self-sufficiency, and, no, it’s not a baby, so the whole You’ve killed a baby! is unconvincing and merely irritating; in terms of social stability, as it contributes nothing to society and may, in fact, be lost to miscarriage, it cannot be considered a person, although for legal purposes, it can be considered a possession, although for those of a particular nature, the law does not deal well with potential persons.
And in a Christian context, it’s not clear that advocating for abortion to be against the law is justified. I’ve always been agnostic, but my wife comes from a fundamentalist background, and she states that she doesn’t recall any prohibitions against abortion. I do recall running across an atheist’s web site that stated that Jesus suggested that a woman who had an abortion should be fined a small number of shekels; a death penalty, as suggested these days by certain abortion opponents, is way out of line, and the small fine, and failure of abortion to make the Ten Commandments, is persuasive that the subject was of little interest to any of the divinities of Christianity.
Highly descriptive article, I loved that bit. Will there be a part 2?
None contemplated.