It's time to undo social media

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Whitney Phillips

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Political discourse has been linked to public aptitude. The mass protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd are at the forefront of this overlap: white supremacy is a disaster of public fitness. Climate denial and vaccine activism also threaten the lives and protection of citizens around the world. With Covid-19, the line between political discourse and public fitness has eroded even more painfully. The elements of science, for many, have been reduced to questions of opinion, or even to a natural conspiracy. In such cases, the mask is not just a mask; are symbols of oppression. Anthony Fauci is not only the country’s leading infectious disease specialist; is a component of a deep state clique that seeks to undermine Trump’s management from within. The virus itself does not tear a component of our neighborhoods, forcing cities like Houston to use an emergency morgue space; is a hoax, or anything Democrats are exploiting to diminish their chances of elections. The inability to isolate fundamental facts of public fitness from reactionary propaganda threatens people’s lives. And, like everything in this God-abandoned pandemic, things are getting worse.

While it might be tempting to blame others who refuse to wear masks, politicians who prefer to talk about individual rights than public health, or the president who prefers to tweet about beans, our current crisis is much deeper than any individual or group. . Array The structures and assumptions we take for granted are in themselves components of the problem. Calls to inform the police provide a useful analogue. Until we fundamentally reinvent what law enforcement means and does, a lasting replacement will not be possible; all the injustice embedded in the formula will continue to emerge from this formula. You can also say anything about social media: until we fundamentally reinvent our data eco formula and our respective roles within it, we will continue to repeat the same patterns over and over again, not as a formula error, not as a feature of the formula, but as the formula itself.

One force we must confront is the attention economy, an incentive structure designed to reward the most uncompromising, polarized, clickable minority. (Ironically, this minority is very often part of the white majority; see breathless, disproportionate coverage of white nationalists and supremacists following the 2016 election.) The resulting tyranny of the loudest presents an algorithmically-warped view of what’s happening in the rest of the United States.

The debate around the mask is a classic example. Trending articles and videos that go viral don’t show most Americans who wear masks perfectly; who do it without having a tantrum at Costco. There are certainly other people who can’t help but have tantrums at Costco; has its own kind of functional art. It is also true that many Republican politicians have disobeyed CDC rules on masks or refused to factor the guarantees for masks; Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is even suing the city of Atlanta to prevent him from executing a court order. All of this is undeniably dangerous; In a global pandemic, it does not take a very high percentage of the population to put everyone at risk, with disastrous consequences for black and Latino communities, making the rebellion of the mask (in fact, any Covid-related rebellion) a threat to civil rights and public health. However, it is not the case that, across the country, everyone is screaming over the mask. Most people keep quiet and use them.

If we rely on a common sense consensus on masks, we would not only affirm our religion in humanity. (Even if I really did that: I’d spend hours on a YouTube channel committed to other people’s teams being reasonable.) It would also undermine the economy of care in two ways.

First, I’d minimize the incentive to be an idiot. If you don’t praise users with clicks and like it for antagonistic behaviors, they have less explanation for why they continue to do so. It’s a dynamic as old as trolldom. As long as anything generates capital, whether economic or social, there is no explanation why to stop. In fact, your livelihood may depend on your support and make things worse next time.

Second, putting most of the smart religion into intelligent religion causes a short circuit in the amplification comment loops that normalize the damage. I made this argument in April in reaction to the anti-quarantine protests: when a marginal movement is described as a classic movement, it has a curious tendency to precisely that. In the case of masks, spreading the arguments of the antimasks, or even condemning them, is in danger of spreading those arguments to more people who could be sympathetic. At the very least, blur the challenge: if so many other people are fighting for masks, does that mean there’s something to fight here?

Another structural cause of our information problems is incorporated into undeniable tactics to solve them. One of the non-unusual maxims is the assumption that drawing attention to injuries will help mitigate them; this is infrequently referred to as the “sunlight disinfectant” media model. All we want to do is show that something wrong is happening, that Karen is back there, and let the idea market, this wonderful Costco in the sky, take care of the rest. People will use their critical thinking skills to compare being Karen and not Karen, and the result will be less Karens. The challenge is that the maximum number of people who are likely to come to this conclusion are those who already agree. Sharing videos of scary masks, or other content with anti-masks, amplifies their messages, but it brings us back to all the tactics in which the economy of attention incites the tyranny of the strongest. Such a formula is not only smart for Karens; it was built for Karens.

Fact checking is another concept that sounds smart on paper, but it’s quite complicated in practice. Many take into consideration the dissemination of false or misleading data such as the case of other people who do not have all the facts. If we only said the facts louder, we could avoid the incorrect data flow. In fact, other people who see the mask as an infringement of their rights, who think that the risk of the virus has been exaggerated or that Anthony Fauci is truly Bill Gates wearing a mask of George Soros, do not reach those conclusions because ‘ with regard to low data frictions. They’re rich in data. However, this data is filtered through what Ryan Milner and I call deep memetic frameworks: devices that create meaning that show how other people see the global and the tactics in which they respond to it.

So what is the most productive way forward? How can we avoid bringing an already terrible scenario to an even worse place? The answer is a basic structural change. We want to reinvent what our networks can and deserve to be. We’ll have to put justice before the profits. We want to get social media out of the way. Individuals can’t do it alone, of course. Even hounds are limited in the effects they can have personally; everyone is a dollar sign for someone in the most sensible of the chain. However, by identifying the systems in which we are all incorporated and contemplating how these systems are basically a component of our problems, we can make possible choices — about the things we publish, with whom we share them, how we decide to frame them — that, at the very least, actively resist data dysfunction, which will grease their wheels.

Photographs: Duncan Andison / Getty Images; Brendan O’Sullivan / Getty Images; Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times / Getty Images

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It’s time to undo social media

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