Tag: social media

Zeynep Tufekci on how the idealism of social media went wrong

In a new, must-read article at MIT Technology review, Professor Zeynep Tufekci at the the University of North Carolina describes How social media took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump.  Beginning with the euphoric naivete of just a few years ago that universally assumed Facebook and Twitter would save democracy, Tufekci details the mechanisms by which social media became a weapon aimed at destroying democracy–and not just by Russians.  Advocating that we look beyond the technology–and especially not seek exclusively digital solutions–she places the role of social media in its proper context, I think, as a tool for exacerbating social, political, and economic ills that were already in place well before Mark Zuckerberg began shaving.  Some pull-quotes below, but read the whole article here.

“Digital platforms allowed communities to gather and form in new ways, but they also dispersed existing communities, those that had watched the same TV news and read the same newspapers. Even living on the same street meant less when information was disseminated through algorithms designed to maximize revenue by keeping people glued to screens.”

“Throughout the years of the Obama administration, these platforms grew boisterously and were essentially unregulated. They spent their time solidifying their technical chops for deeply surveilling their users, so as to make advertising on the platforms ever more efficacious.”

“… the weakening of old-style information gatekeepers (such as media, NGOs, and government and academic institutions), while empowering the underdogs, has also, in another way, deeply disempowered underdogs.”

Really, DON’T Believe Anything You See on the Internet

When that cliché first entered our consciousness, it wasn’t really fair. The internet between the mid-90s and the mid-aughts wasn’t what it is today. It actually was just a dumb pipe through which content could could be delivered from creator to consumer in a new way. It was silly to imply that one should not believe a news story published by the Washington Post just because it was on a screen instead of  paper — and that principle still holds true for most professional journalism.

But now, every legitimate news source swims in the same stream with all the garbage—from raw clickbait to lazy aggregators to hackers purposely trying to exploit underlying divisions in democracies—and the tools of manipulation are so sophisticated that many of the manipulators themselves don’t have to be. With a little practice using software that anybody can steal, a kid can create a video that makes it look like Hillary Clinton said that “all veterans are pussies,” and…well, here we are.

“One of the things I did not understand was that these systems can be used to manipulate public opinion in ways that are quite inconsistent with what we think of as democracy.”

That’s what Alphabet (Google parent company) Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said, recently quoted in an article on FastCompany. And in keeping with the theme of this post, I don’t know what to believe. Were Schmidt and the rest of the leadership at Google honestly so drunk on their own utopian rhetoric about how wonderful their systems are that they failed to imagine—to say nothing of observe—how their products could be toxic for democracy? Or did they recognize it and not care until they were forced to care amid the fallout from the investigations into Russian meddling?

Facebook’s founding president Sean Parker—he was also the co-founder of Napster—told Mike Allen of AXIOS in a recent interview that Facebook was designed to “exploit a vulnerability in human psychology” in order to keep people on the site as much as possible. Parker told Allen that the creators of Facebook understood what they were doing and did it anyway, though perhaps did not quite imagine what the results would be when a billion people voluntarily spend hours in Zuckerberg’s ant farm. “…it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other … It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

How much has changed in such a very short time. It seems like only yesterday the cheerleaders of Silicon Valley, with all the confidence of Camel-smoking doctors, kept telling us just how good their products were for democracy and for society overall. All this goodness was packaged into a single generic word innovation, and anything that stood in the way of innovation—like maybe the rule of law—was bad. Now, all of a sudden, we hear a lot of “Wow, we had no idea our systems could be used to totally fuck up the world! We’ll get some people on that right away!”

Of course, these companies either will not or cannot fully address the underlying reasons why their systems can be so toxic; and Parker put his finger on it when he admitted that Facebook was designed to take advantage of human folly. Facebook may clean up its act in certain regards—I actually believe Zuckerberg wants to—and Congress may enforce some effective regulations upon these platforms; but none of this will address the flaw in human nature that makes us more susceptible to emotional triggers than we are to reason and information. That’s why the underlying promise of the information age—that information can only have a moderating effect on discourse and interaction—is proving to be untrue.

There’s something fundamentally harmful about taking complex topics and issues and transforming it all into advertising, but that’s essentially what a platform like Facebook or Twitter does. “The sad truth is that Facebook and Alphabet have behaved irresponsibly in the pursuit of massive profits,” writes Roger McNamee for The Guardian. “They have consciously combined persuasive techniques developed by propagandists and the gambling industry with technology in ways that threaten public health and democracy. The issue, however, is not social networking or search. It is advertising business models.”

McNamee, who is identified as an early investor in Google and Facebook, describes how the advertising revenue models of these platforms drive, for instance, Facebook to deliver content based on user preferences, creating feedback loops called “filter bubbles.” People have been writing about the filter-bubble problem for several years now, but I suspect the problem is far too subtle to expect that the platforms themselves, with or without legislative mandates, will solve it.

Amid the recent flurry of allegations of sexual assault, satirical posts have appeared on Facebook with photos of Tom Hanks and leads saying, “Dozens of women come forward to…” And then, you click on the story, and it completes, “…say that Tom Hanks is a really nice guy.” Variations on this gag appear all the time, like the reports that Keith Richards is still alive. But you can bet the beer money that any number of people just scrolling through a feed on their phone, perhaps waiting in the supermarket line right next the old-school tabloids, will come away with the impression that indeed Tom Hanks was implicated in some sexual abuse claim. Then, the rumor gets repeated to a friend, and that’s more or less the state of “information” in the digital age. It’s the National Enquirer at “Google scale.”

According David Roberts, writing for Vox, America is in the middle of an epistemic crisis, suggesting that at least many citizens are beyond the problem of separating fact from fiction and are instead living in a world in which facts simply don’t matter. It is a mindset he calls “tribal epistemology—the systemic conflation of what is true with what is good for the tribe.”

For the time being, analysis of the online media universe reveals this problem is more prevalent on the political right (see support of Roy Moore even if he did assault a teenager), but the political left is hardly immune to this kind of tribalism. In fact, this blog was inspired five years ago when I witnessed this exact behavior among left-leaning friends, who were willing to share false information because it supported the outcome they believed to be right. So, although it is somewhat encouraging that this year marks the turning point when internet platforms will no longer be given a free pass — either by lawmakers or the public — to simply do what they want “for the greater good,” that hardly addresses how we individually and collectively will learn to cope with “God knows what’s happening to our brains,” as Parker puts it.

America is a Creative Expression

Image by miflippo

This past July 4th, NPR posted the Declaration of Independence in a series of 113 consecutive tweets; and in response, a number of supposed Trump supporters took issue with the news organization, having no idea what they were reading, assuming for instance that statements denouncing the tyranny of George III were directed at the president.  And while the taste of such irony-rich schadenfreude may indeed be sweet, it would be fatally naive to think for a moment that only the most eager acolytes of Team Trump are so ignorant about the contents of the nation’s founding document.  After all, Trump’s presidency is merely a variation on a much broader theme of anti-establishment sentiment where we also find an ample supply of citizens splashing about in the kiddie pools of “liberalism,” equally uninformed and equally committed to views that are corrosive to democratic principles.

In fact, according to data collected by the World Values Survey, only about 30% of Americans born after 1980 believe that living in a country that is democratically governed is of paramount importance.  Although an unsettling statistic, it isn’t necessarily a surprising one given that its anecdotal accompaniment can be heard reverberating throughout Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, et al. This anti-democratic trend is one that defies traditional political affiliation; it cannot be ascribed to either liberal or conservative groups; and it is manifest in democratic nations other than the United States. In a paper for The Journal of Democracy, one filled with startling revelations, Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, write …

“As party identification has weakened and party membership has declined, citizens have become less willing to stick with establishment parties. Instead, voters increasingly endorse single-issue movements, vote for populist candidates, or support “antisystem” parties that define themselves in opposition to the status quo. Even in some of the richest and most politically stable regions of the world, it seems as though democracy is in a state of serious disrepair.”

Naturally, I blame Twitter.

Medium is message, right?  So, the one antagonist in this NPR Declaration story who interests me—a man highlighted in the coverage by The Washington Post—is the guy who realized his mistake and apologized.  He wrote, “I tweeted a VERY dumb comment. But ask yourselves; if read to the average American, would they know that you were reading the DOI? I do now.”  It is hard to argue with his assumption, especially when the Declaration is being fragmented into 113 pieces at 140 characters each, and then posted on a schitzy social media platform. I mean let’s face it:  if The Federalist had been distributed in a series of tweets, the American Republic would never have come into existence.

The real irony, of course, is lost on this man who apologized, as it probably would be on those eager to mock him.  The same medium, which obliterates context and practically demands mindless reaction, is the exact tool that a guy like Trump uses to manipulate citizens into reactionary behavior all the time.  But in this regard, Trump has merely capitalized on a trend that has been bollixing up our politics for years—and certainly not exclusively among his supporters. The president’s tweets are just the most prominent example of the information age having the opposite effect we were promised 20 years ago.

Given the manner in which social media atomizes and de-contextualizes information, should we be surprised that our politics have become so demonstrably tribal—and so utterly disconnected from the historical record?  Isn’t this what happens when we share common terms (like freedom!) but then destroy a common framework for interpreting those terms through digital remix?  Without meaning to do so, NPR remixed the Declaration, changed its context, and inspired some citizens to interpret individual phrases through their own arrogant, narrow, and absurdly contemporary lenses.  Isn’t that what social media inspires all day long on a thousand and one different subjects?

This seems particularly dangerous in America because ours is a uniquely fragile form of democracy. Fragile because the entire history of the nation begins with nothing but words on paper written a relatively short time ago; and stability depends on a degree of common context for what those words actually mean. Unlike our European forebears, the citizenry of the United States is not linked by any kind of common culture but is instead supposedly bound by a relatively common ideology.

In an 1825 letter to Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson notes that the Declaration of Independence did not articulate original principles but “…was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c.”

Jefferson’s explanation reminds me of the principle in copyright law known as the idea/expression dichotomy.  We recognize a difference between an idea (e.g. liberty) and an original expression (e.g. the Declaration) and grant temporary ownership to the latter but not to the former. Ideas are part of the commons and must be built upon and/or expressed in new ways; but original expressions of ideas are distinctive enough to be considered the property of their authors. Not all expressions are particularly compelling, but some are the most valuable of all human achievements.

I don’t mean to imply that the Declaration of Independence is a copyrighted work, but rather to note the significance that the American version of certain universal principles is unique to the country’s story and character. And this uniqueness matters. All creative expression is, of course, subject to interpretation—even to the extent that, at this nation’s founding, one man’s liberty was allowed to include the right to deprive another man of his liberty.  It took almost another century and then a war just to abandon the depraved hypocrisy of slavery—and another century after that just to begin to make policy out of basic compassion and humanity.

America is a creative work.  And like any creative work, it can be interpreted without context; but context makes a considerable difference in both understanding and valuing a work. Reinterpretation is also inevitable and essential. Although the elements of democracy had traveled through centuries, as Jefferson describes, to be present in the minds of the Framers, the precise expressions themselves were highly original at the time. “I confess that in America,” wrote de Tocqueville in 1835, “I saw more than America; I sought the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or to hope from its progress.”

Still, it has taken nearly all of our 2.4 centuries as a nation just to reinterpret the meaning of those first expressions in order to “secure the blessings of liberty” for a plurality of citizens. So, it is certainly disheartening to think that the next generation—the first to inherit the progress of all that struggle—is now supposedly poised to give up on democracy itself.  If this is truly the case, then the reasons are no doubt various; but one possible catalyst is that creative works like the Declaration are not meant to be interpreted through the scattered keyhole views of social media.