As a communication medium, Twitter's brief messages naturally lend themselves to headline-style shallow sensationalism and rabble-rousing slogans. These inputs provide immediate signifiers of...
As a communication medium, Twitter's brief messages naturally lend themselves to headline-style shallow sensationalism and rabble-rousing slogans.
These inputs provide immediate signifiers of tribal identity - it's easy to find people whom you agree with, and follow them.
The MIT story provides some elegant graphical presentations to illustrate the results. There are interesting principles to derive for more balanced social media:
Following topics may create less bias than following accounts.
The bare "middle" position is not necessarily a better or more truthful representation of reality in a system of highly polarized, closed positions.
Propaganda matters - the most active sources draw followers, even if they're bots or fakes.
[I'll note that I've refrained from the most heated of the recent Tildes discussions, following the "Three Questions" principles. That behaviour may explain how the absence of less-polarized commentary arises.]
I'm sort of tired of the narrative that the issue is ideologically similar across the political spectrum. On one hand, you have people on the left insulating themselves from hate speech, racism,...
I'm sort of tired of the narrative that the issue is ideologically similar across the political spectrum. On one hand, you have people on the left insulating themselves from hate speech, racism, and literal trolls whose only goal is to disrupt earnest discussion. What normal, well adjusted person wants their daily internet experience filled with hate and vitriol?
On the other side, you have the right insulating itself from reality inside of a propaganda bubble. What is it they are protecting themselves from? Being exposed to compassion and empathy? Please.
We really need to stop falling into this trap that these insulating paradigms are symmetric. It simply is not, and the idea that I don't want to see people ranting about "nigcucks" is the same as someone not wanting to hear about tolerance, erodes the very notion of objective reality. And that's a much bigger problem in my view than ideological bubbles.
I'd postulate that the two extremes in US politics have different ways of bubbling. But the bubbles on either side are pretty severe. It's not that interesting to me to suggest if one side is...
I'd postulate that the two extremes in US politics have different ways of bubbling. But the bubbles on either side are pretty severe. It's not that interesting to me to suggest if one side is worse than the other. My view is that both sides (think /r/politics) turn a ton of regular people off from getting involved in their own civics at all.
On the left you have tremendous volumes of threats, wishes of harm to political candidates, calls to arms against "traitors" and so on. People have to know they're wrong but espouse their non-left political opinions for personal gain nonetheless. Disagreeing with accepted incontrovertible truths leads to dogpiling and being harassed away from participating systematically. Middle-ground opinions aren't radical enough; people holding them need to be especially hounded to start toeing the party line in the war of us against them.
On the right you have tremendous volumes of denigration based on race/gender/sexuality rather than personal politics. The view on the far right is that everyone is "against us" and scheming. Everyone knows that's true but personally gain from it not being acknowledged. Disagreeing with accepted incontrovertible truths leads to dogpiling and being harassed away from participating systematically. Middle-ground opinions aren't radical enough; people holding them need to be especially hounded to start toeing the party line in the war of us against them.
An ideological bubble where you've known for months it's just a matter of time before Trump is impeached based, where the DNC stole Bernie's presidency, where every conservative is deliberately evil and actively complicit for their personal gain is dangerous.
As are communities where you have to disagree with scientific proof or facts because those facts are inconvenient, and just knowing that things would be just that little bit better if white men decided a little bit more and everyone else found their place.
The result of both is the same: extreme polarization to the extent that you render public policy debate impossible. When you can't treat people who disagree with you publicly with good faith, it's impossible to have well-functioning democracy.
An exchange of ideas requires a basic level of decency and civility, a tolerance for a multitude of views. That doesn't mean you have to take junk views seriously, but it means I don't get to be a dick. That goes for everyone.
I definitely don't think the ideological motivations are the same, but the insulation still makes the leftist spaces vulnerable to the same sort of viral propaganda and blind reposting by...
I definitely don't think the ideological motivations are the same, but the insulation still makes the leftist spaces vulnerable to the same sort of viral propaganda and blind reposting by misguided or malicious individuals / groups that the far right absolutely eats up.
Instead of trying to force their messages into the mainstream, these adversaries target polarized communities and “embed” fake accounts within them. The false personas engage with real people in those communities to build credibility. Once their influence has been established, they can introduce new viewpoints and amplify divisive and inflammatory narratives that are already circulating.
These sort of attacks don't care about political standing. They work on any group, the more insulated the better.
I fully support folks selecting their social media experience to keep it quality and interact with the people they want to interact with. That's a basic strategy to keep from burning out online. Regardless, the vulnerability to viral propaganda is still there, and I'm not sure if there's a good way to combat that vulnerability while still upholding the ability to choose your own experience online.
The entire issue as I see it, is that it is the right doing the herding in both cases. They herd the left out of right wing safe spaces by being - bluntly - horrible people. Knowing full well that...
The entire issue as I see it, is that it is the right doing the herding in both cases. They herd the left out of right wing safe spaces by being - bluntly - horrible people. Knowing full well that reasonable people are not going to stick around for the hate speech, but that those more sympathetic to their message will "see it as a joke" or whatever. And they herd the right into their safe spaces, where they can be radicalized, by exaggerating (and often falsifying) liberal talking points. This leaves them free to influence both groups with impunity. You rarely see liberal trolls trying to stir shit on right wing forums, but you see a lot of that behavior flowing in the other direction.
That's precisely why I think reddit and facebook's "live and let live" approach is so dangerous. That's how the entire progression from /r/conservative -> /r/KotakuInAction -> /r/the_Donald -> /r/GreatApes works. These social media forums are effectively enabling this cycle, and providing free hosting to it. It would be much less of a problem if these insincere actors were isolated into their own forums which they must fund themselves. It would dramatically reduce the effectiveness of their radicalization tactics by adding participatory friction, forcing anyone who doesn't want to participate in an openly hateful website to self-moderate, insulating them from the radicalization efforts.
You know what, that's an excellent point. I thought you were solely talking about the effects of insulation, but you're definitely right that it's primarily the far right that's responsible for...
You know what, that's an excellent point. I thought you were solely talking about the effects of insulation, but you're definitely right that it's primarily the far right that's responsible for the insulation on both sides.
That's precisely why I think reddit and facebook's "live and let live" approach is so dangerous. That's how the entire progression from /r/conservative -> /r/KotakuInAction -> /r/the_Donald -> /r/GreatApes works. These social media forums are effectively enabling this cycle, and providing free hosting to it.
Yeah, the idea of letting everyone go hog wild with free speech kind of falls apart once you introduce bad faith actors into the mix. Personally I might switch your progression around a bit (KIA -> T_D -> GreatApes I think is more common, and follows the introduction of alt right talking points through Gamergate / gaming platforms), but one of Reddit's fatal mistakes is pretending that progression doesn't exist.
I'm not saying I agree with the weighting (is the far left really as far from median, as the far right part of that graph?), or the implied both-siderism in the analysis. It's a connectome, and...
I'm not saying I agree with the weighting (is the far left really as far from median, as the far right part of that graph?), or the implied both-siderism in the analysis.
It's a connectome, and the relative size, position and interconnectivity of the "bubbles" are important. Isolated bubbles are more vulnerable to the effects of extremist propaganda; the most recent example is the Russian infiltration of both of the most vociferous and isolated extremes of the vaccine debate. I'll grant that the right-wing (or anti-vax) position is by far the more harmful, but it's the wedging apart and incitement of conflict that's the goal of manipulators.
As a communication medium, Twitter's brief messages naturally lend themselves to headline-style shallow sensationalism and rabble-rousing slogans.
These inputs provide immediate signifiers of tribal identity - it's easy to find people whom you agree with, and follow them.
The MIT story provides some elegant graphical presentations to illustrate the results. There are interesting principles to derive for more balanced social media:
[I'll note that I've refrained from the most heated of the recent Tildes discussions, following the "Three Questions" principles. That behaviour may explain how the absence of less-polarized commentary arises.]
I'm sort of tired of the narrative that the issue is ideologically similar across the political spectrum. On one hand, you have people on the left insulating themselves from hate speech, racism, and literal trolls whose only goal is to disrupt earnest discussion. What normal, well adjusted person wants their daily internet experience filled with hate and vitriol?
On the other side, you have the right insulating itself from reality inside of a propaganda bubble. What is it they are protecting themselves from? Being exposed to compassion and empathy? Please.
We really need to stop falling into this trap that these insulating paradigms are symmetric. It simply is not, and the idea that I don't want to see people ranting about "nigcucks" is the same as someone not wanting to hear about tolerance, erodes the very notion of objective reality. And that's a much bigger problem in my view than ideological bubbles.
I'd postulate that the two extremes in US politics have different ways of bubbling. But the bubbles on either side are pretty severe. It's not that interesting to me to suggest if one side is worse than the other. My view is that both sides (think /r/politics) turn a ton of regular people off from getting involved in their own civics at all.
On the left you have tremendous volumes of threats, wishes of harm to political candidates, calls to arms against "traitors" and so on. People have to know they're wrong but espouse their non-left political opinions for personal gain nonetheless. Disagreeing with accepted incontrovertible truths leads to dogpiling and being harassed away from participating systematically. Middle-ground opinions aren't radical enough; people holding them need to be especially hounded to start toeing the party line in the war of us against them.
On the right you have tremendous volumes of denigration based on race/gender/sexuality rather than personal politics. The view on the far right is that everyone is "against us" and scheming. Everyone knows that's true but personally gain from it not being acknowledged. Disagreeing with accepted incontrovertible truths leads to dogpiling and being harassed away from participating systematically. Middle-ground opinions aren't radical enough; people holding them need to be especially hounded to start toeing the party line in the war of us against them.
An ideological bubble where you've known for months it's just a matter of time before Trump is impeached based, where the DNC stole Bernie's presidency, where every conservative is deliberately evil and actively complicit for their personal gain is dangerous.
As are communities where you have to disagree with scientific proof or facts because those facts are inconvenient, and just knowing that things would be just that little bit better if white men decided a little bit more and everyone else found their place.
The result of both is the same: extreme polarization to the extent that you render public policy debate impossible. When you can't treat people who disagree with you publicly with good faith, it's impossible to have well-functioning democracy.
An exchange of ideas requires a basic level of decency and civility, a tolerance for a multitude of views. That doesn't mean you have to take junk views seriously, but it means I don't get to be a dick. That goes for everyone.
I definitely don't think the ideological motivations are the same, but the insulation still makes the leftist spaces vulnerable to the same sort of viral propaganda and blind reposting by misguided or malicious individuals / groups that the far right absolutely eats up.
These sort of attacks don't care about political standing. They work on any group, the more insulated the better.
I fully support folks selecting their social media experience to keep it quality and interact with the people they want to interact with. That's a basic strategy to keep from burning out online. Regardless, the vulnerability to viral propaganda is still there, and I'm not sure if there's a good way to combat that vulnerability while still upholding the ability to choose your own experience online.
The entire issue as I see it, is that it is the right doing the herding in both cases. They herd the left out of right wing safe spaces by being - bluntly - horrible people. Knowing full well that reasonable people are not going to stick around for the hate speech, but that those more sympathetic to their message will "see it as a joke" or whatever. And they herd the right into their safe spaces, where they can be radicalized, by exaggerating (and often falsifying) liberal talking points. This leaves them free to influence both groups with impunity. You rarely see liberal trolls trying to stir shit on right wing forums, but you see a lot of that behavior flowing in the other direction.
That's precisely why I think reddit and facebook's "live and let live" approach is so dangerous. That's how the entire progression from /r/conservative -> /r/KotakuInAction -> /r/the_Donald -> /r/GreatApes works. These social media forums are effectively enabling this cycle, and providing free hosting to it. It would be much less of a problem if these insincere actors were isolated into their own forums which they must fund themselves. It would dramatically reduce the effectiveness of their radicalization tactics by adding participatory friction, forcing anyone who doesn't want to participate in an openly hateful website to self-moderate, insulating them from the radicalization efforts.
You know what, that's an excellent point. I thought you were solely talking about the effects of insulation, but you're definitely right that it's primarily the far right that's responsible for the insulation on both sides.
Yeah, the idea of letting everyone go hog wild with free speech kind of falls apart once you introduce bad faith actors into the mix. Personally I might switch your progression around a bit (KIA -> T_D -> GreatApes I think is more common, and follows the introduction of alt right talking points through Gamergate / gaming platforms), but one of Reddit's fatal mistakes is pretending that progression doesn't exist.
I'm not saying I agree with the weighting (is the far left really as far from median, as the far right part of that graph?), or the implied both-siderism in the analysis.
It's a connectome, and the relative size, position and interconnectivity of the "bubbles" are important. Isolated bubbles are more vulnerable to the effects of extremist propaganda; the most recent example is the Russian infiltration of both of the most vociferous and isolated extremes of the vaccine debate. I'll grant that the right-wing (or anti-vax) position is by far the more harmful, but it's the wedging apart and incitement of conflict that's the goal of manipulators.