Echo Chambers, Politics and Platforms, and Online Murmurations - Dinner Table Digest № 28
The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!
This edition of the Dinner Table Digest is brought to you by my recent interest in online speech, thanks in part to the class that I am auditing at the University of Waterloo - of course Musk’s purchase of Twitter also factors in to my recent thinking. Today’s first piece was assigned to the class to read, a Aeon Magazine revision of a much more technical academic article. The second piece was published by National Affairs, a news magazine project of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, and the third is a novel way of looking at online mobs, namely through the bio-ecological phenomenon of starling murmurations. Finally, a short piece describes why Musk’s purchase of Twitter reveals a major misunderstanding on the part of the supposed genius. As always, all links in the quoted material have been left in.
Why it’s as hard to escape an echo chamber as it is to flee a cult - C Thi Nguyen - Aeon
This piece, assigned to Jenny Saul’s Philosophy of Language class, looks at the difference between epistemic bubbles and echo chambers. Namely, the former consists of spaces where information is not available, while the latter’s “community’s belief system actively undermine the trustworthiness of any outsiders who don’t subscribe to its central dogmas.” While informational deficits are easy enough to repair, Nguyen argues that the community’s re-inforced lack of trust makes it so challenging that the only way to completely get out of an echo chamber is to undergo what he calls a social-epistemic reboot. In effect, this ‘social-epistemic reboot’ is what I have personally been doing over the past 20 years as I have looked to escape my childhood fundamentalist indoctrinations:
Let’s call the modernised version of Descartes’s methodology the social-epistemic reboot. In order to undo the effects of an echo chamber, the member should temporarily suspend all her beliefs – in particular whom and what she trusts – and start over again from scratch. But when she starts from scratch, we won’t demand that she trust only what she’s absolutely certain of, nor will we demand that she go it alone. For the social reboot, she can proceed, after throwing everything away, in an utterly mundane way – trusting her senses, trusting others. But she must begin afresh socially – she must reconsider all possible sources of information with a presumptively equanimous eye. She must take the posture of a cognitive newborn, open and equally trusting to all outside sources. In a sense, she’s been here before. In the social reboot, we’re not asking people to change their basic methods for learning about the world. They are permitted to trust, and trust freely. But after the social reboot, that trust will not be narrowly confined and deeply conditioned by the particular people they happened to be raised by.
The social reboot might seem rather fantastic, but it is not so unrealistic. Such a profound deep-cleanse of one’s whole belief system seems to be what’s actually required to escape. Look at the many stories of people leaving cults and echo chambers. Take, for example, the story of Derek Black in Florida – raised by a neo-Nazi father, and groomed from childhood to be a neo-Nazi leader. Black left the movement by, basically, performing a social reboot. He completely abandoned everything he’d believed in, and spent years building a new belief system from scratch. He immersed himself broadly and open-mindedly in everything he’d missed – pop culture, Arabic literature, the mainstream media, rap – all with an overall attitude of generosity and trust. It was the project of years and a major act of self-reconstruction, but those extraordinary lengths might just be what’s actually required to undo the effects of an echo-chambered upbringing.
Is there anything we can do, then, to help an echo-chamber member to reboot? We’ve already discovered that direct assault tactics – bombarding the echo-chamber member with ‘evidence’ – won’t work. Echo-chamber members are not only protected from such attacks, but their belief systems will judo such attacks into further reinforcement of the echo chamber’s worldview. Instead, we need to attack the root, the systems of discredit themselves, and restore trust in some outside voices.
Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics - Jon Askonas and Ari Schulman - National Affairs
I really liked this piece because it viewed both the left and the right as if they were both genuinely interested in finding a solution to the content moderation wars, while treating them both as if they have some interesting, if misguided ideas. While I don’t find the conclusion, which seems to be to hand more power to the corporate entities that make up our online social communities, very convincing, some of the arguments made along the way - namely that the there is no way to get out of seeing online social communities as political battlegrounds rather than a marketplace of ideas - make sense to me.
[The creation and design of the Newsfeed] fatefully merged the roles of admin and mod, of infrastructure-provider and content-police. Where previously groups and individuals controlled what was visible on their specific pages, the feed instead made platforms responsible for how posts were aggregated, and created the possibility that content would roam freely across the entire network, including in unfriendly ways.
Conservative or classical-liberal critics of online censorship often make gestures toward the “marketplace of ideas” without fully considering what is entailed in that metaphor. A marketplace is a social institution that requires underlying mechanisms uniting buyers and sellers. It requires a common language or currency. It functions best when buyers and sellers are motivated, whatever else their preferences, by a genuine desire to transact, rather than to be seen lounging about the market or making baseless offers or displaying goods that they have no intention to sell.
Moreover, the metaphor breaks down entirely in a post-scarcity, algorithmically mediated world, where there is no obvious relationship between the opinions a person puts forth and where that opinion shows up, often in a mechanically distorted way. The marketplace of ideas assumes a relatively even distribution of megaphones, or a random distribution of their power. Absent norms of and structures for productive exchange, a clear reason for why we’re all talking to each other, “meaningful communication” breaks down into a brute contest for power. Internet discourse, like the market, must be embedded in a community.
If we are to preserve freedom of online speech in the fullest sense—both legitimate freedom from the censorship whims of massive central powers, and genuine freedom for robust exchange and intellectual generation—the global town square must die. Our age is marked by a return to our given condition: tribalism. So be it. Rather than hoping for the restoration of a universalized intellectual culture, we would do better to ratify and manage the reversion to separate communities, to build institutions that encourage tribalism’s more fruitful expressions. Rather than shoving all our debates into a single, hellish town square, let each town have its own, and let us work to make each a place of fruitful exchange.
How Online Mobs Act Like Flocks Of Birds - Renée DiResta - Noema Magazine
This piece takes a well-known bio-ecological phenomenon - the murmuration of starlings - and applies it to how human beings interact with each other online. The ultimate aim of the piece is to show that content moderation is insufficient to solve the intractable problems of online mobs - only a system redesign can do that.
In truth, the overwhelming majority of platform content moderation is mostly dedicated to unobjectionable things like protecting children from porn or eliminating fraud and spam. However, since curation organizes and then directs the attention of the flock, the argument is of great political importance because of its potential downstream impact on real-world power. And so, we have reached a point in which the conversation about what to do about disinformation, rumors, hate speech and harassment mobs is, itself, intractably polarized.
But the daily aggrievement cycles about individual pieces of content being moderated or not are a red herring. We are treating the worst dynamics of today’s online ecosystem as problems of speech in the new technological environment, rather than challenges of curation and network organization.
This overfocus on the substance — misinformation, disinformation, propaganda — and the fight over content moderation (and regulatory remedies like revising Section 230) makes us miss opportunities to examine the structure — and, in turn, to address the polarization, factional behavior and harmful dynamics that it sows.
So what would a structural reworking entail? How many birds should we see? Which birds? When? …
… achieving real, enforceable transparency laws will be challenging. Understandably, social media companies are loath to admit outside scrutiny of their network structures. In part, platforms avoid transparency because transparency offers less immediately tangible benefits but several potential drawbacks, including negative press coverage or criticisms in academic research. In part, this is because of that foundational business incentive that keeps the flocks in motion: if my system produces more engagement than yours, I make more money. And, on the regulatory front, there is the simple reality that tough-on-tech language about revoking legal protections or breaking up businesses grabs attention; far fewer people get amped up over transparency.
Second, we must move beyond thinking of platform content moderation policies as “the solution” and prioritize rethinking design. Policy establishes guardrails and provides justification to disrupt certain information cascades, but does so reactively and, presently, based on the message substance. Although policy shapes propagation, it does so by serving as a limiter on certain topics or types of rhetoric. Design, by contrast, has the potential to shape propagation through curation, nudges or friction.
Welcome to Hell, Elon - Nilay Patel - The Verge
This short piece highlights some of the coming issues that Musk is going to have to deal with, now that he has successfully taken over Twitter, ‘just to own the libs.’
The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to incentivize good stuff, disincentivize bad stuff, and delete the really bad stuff. Do you know why YouTube videos are all eight to 10 minutes long? Because that’s how long a video has to be to qualify for a second ad slot in the middle. That’s content moderation, baby — YouTube wants a certain kind of video, and it created incentives to get it. That’s the business you’re in now. The longer you fight it or pretend that you can sell something else, the more Twitter will drag you into the deepest possible muck of defending indefensible speech. And if you turn on a dime and accept that growth requires aggressive content moderation and pushing back against government speech regulations around the country and world, well, we’ll see how your fans react to that.
Anyhow, welcome to hell. This was your idea.
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