The whole warp and woof of human existence is background noise until an individual is thrust into a convicting narrative – or has one thrust onto them. Reality for many is incomprehensible and so must be narrowed into a one-or-another-just-so story. These alternate realities are pouring out from social media and being asserted – sometimes quite violently, in the fleshy spaces of material life.
17 October 2021 (Milos, Greece) – This past Friday Sir David Amess became the second British MP to have been killed in the line of duty in just five years. He was fatally stabbed while holding a “constituency surgery”. These are drop-in events at which an MP’s constituents could come and raise their concerns. Usually every Friday or Saturday, MPs like Amess hold these sessions at libraries, church halls and constituency offices. They have none of the fortress-like protection that surrounds parliament; it is where they are most vulnerable to those who would do them harm.
Yet parliamentarians did not abandon them even after Jo Cox MP was brutally murdered by a far-right terrorist in her Yorkshire constituency in 2016. In 2010, Stephen Timms, another MP, survived a serious stabbing at another such meeting, and in 2000, a parliamentary aide, Andy Pennington, was killed in similar circumstances while trying to protect MP Nigel Jones from a machete attack.
And what makes it worse is Amess warned in a book published less than a year ago that attacks on members of Parliament had spoiled “the great British tradition” of voters meeting politicians, adding that a deadly assault “could happen to any of us.”
I watched the coverage of the Amess murder via several media outlets and the statement that moved me the most was this one:
“I’ve been an MP 20 years, and during that period I see a lot of more nasty people around than ever before, and they are willing to say and do things on social media in a way that I would never have thought possible in this country. And we all have to be really aware and keep our wits about us.
The abuse we get on social media, by emails, even letters sent to my office (anonymously) … I mean we get it all the time. But we brush it off because we’ve got a job to do. And we tell the police, the police have got other things to do, it’s not always followed up. And I think probably this has all got to change, we have got to take this a bit more seriously in future.
I mean, I’ve had my office arsoned, my car was smashed up … someone even tried to get into my house and injure me but I managed to stop them”.
In the five years since Jo Cox was assassinated, the Metropolitan police report that the number of threats against MPs has been spiking, with female MPs and those of color particularly targeted. The Muslim mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has 24-hour police protection as a result of the volume of death threats he receives because of his skin color and faith. According to the Guardian newspaper it is almost at the level of the protection for the Queen.
The suspect in the Amess murder, named by police sources as Ali Harbi Ali, 25, is a British national of Somali heritage, who is believed to have been referred to the Prevent Programme (part of a strategy that seeks to stop people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism both in the UK and overseas) but he was not on MI5’s database of persons of interest. We know little about the circumstances surrounding the fatal attack on Amess but police are treating it as a terrorist incident. This morning several web sites noted the potential motivation was linked to Islamist extremism that Harbi accessed via social media.
Echos of the Jo Cox murder. Thomas Mair, the far-right terrorist jailed for life for the Jo Cox murder, was “a racist and a terrorist in the making” according to the police, his home stuffed with far-right books and Nazi memorabilia and his mind brimming with a belief that white people were facing an existential threat as shown on his almost daily interactions with far-right social media sites.
Yes, books have been written … and will continue to be written … about this stuff but I have a few thoughts I will share, notes from a longer piece to be published in The Point magazine later this year.
There is a more profound tension, a deeper crisis facing democracies in the UK and America and elsewhere. It is a fundamentally epistemic crisis: about the control and promulgation of information, and how that information comes to shape a worldview, and how those worldviews come to bear on the world itself. And for those that know their U.S. history (not the packaged bullshit we were taught in school), it’s just one front in a war of epistemologies that has been raging since at least the inception of the U.S. Its history is not “Divine” but made in the spirit of raw exploitation that would motivate all of America’s history.
And social media serves that raw exploitation. As I have noted in previous posts, truth is flat. There is no “we”. Without any shared understanding of what constitutes the character or essence or value of a thing, foundational threats to that thing are incomprehensible. How are people expected to head off threats when they can’t even agree on its shape? The whole warp and woof of human existence is background noise until an individual is thrust into a convicting narrative … or has one thrust upon them. Reality for many is incomprehensible and so must be narrowed into a one-or-another-just-so story. These alternate realities are pouring out from social media and being asserted – sometimes quite violently, in the fleshy spaces of material life. Enter Harbi and Mair.
Charlie Savage, who won a Pulitzer for his reportage on Bush II’s expansion of Presidential executive authority (that every President since him has greatly expanded) had written a piece on his blog some years ago to explain (well, predict) how social media would evolve, the epistemic threat posed by the internet itself:
“When we gave almost everyone a dial-up modem that pretty much provided instant access to all the information accumulated in the course of human history, the orderliness of that history was jeopardized. There were as many narratives as counter-narratives. And so we hoped some order could be reimposed by, for example, hammering out meaningful, intentional connections. But it did not happen that way. ‘Meaning’ could be discerned any way you wished, manufactured any way you wished. This is how social media will evolve”.
Last December Scientific American released a special, extra-bulky “TRUTH VS. LIES” issue. It was a pain-in-the-ass to read on-line (I am a tactile guy) so I ordered the paper version and marked it up to my heart’s content. Many of its analyses were devoted to social media, online echo chambers, and how the internet’s promise of what data researcher Walter Quattrociocchi calls “collective intelligence” actually produced – well, the opposite of that. Practically speaking, an infinitude of information is useless. It can even be deleterious. In 1996, British psychologist David Lewis diagnosed Information Fatigue Syndrome, or IFS, a malady that emerges from the sheer glut of information we’re exposed to, and which results in a “paralysis of analysis.”
This paralysis is easily exploited, politically and socially. Life’s bewildering complications meant people would just flood to basic, “moral” feelings. Over recent months it has given us Trump’s Big Lie, the January 6 Capitol insurrection, plus the protests and counter-narratives that cropped up in response to the coronavirus pandemic and the killing of George Floyd. In the UK, it brought life under Boris Johnson: “Whatever you remember, it never happened like that”. And worse. Those alternate realities have been pouring out from social media and given us Harbi and Mair.
NOTE: I do recognise for the marginalized and dispossessed the truth has always been a moving target. Consider for a moment the plight of a Black man who has been falsely accused of a crime because of the color of his skin. Or in America the Indigenous American groups whose treaty with the federal government have been broken. Or the woman who spends years trying to convince the authorities she was raped. These people and millions more have inhabited a realm in which alternative facts weren’t extraordinary or unexpected but simply an inevitable component of their engagement with reality. This needs a separate post.
Still, it’s trite to blame our current epistemic messiness on the internet itself. It would be like finding someone bludgeoned to death by a hammer and then hauling the hammer before a court of its peers. Partisanship and polarization have always defined American public life, and in recent years British life. But I am no scholar on British social life and politics so perhaps it’s been longer.
But one thing remains clear. In all that I have read about network propaganda, manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in American politics, social media and the blogosphere were “grafted” onto an asymmetric structure of media outlets, political elite practices, and media consumption and trust patterns. Technology accelerated a longer-running institutional instability. Paranoiacs and conspiracists need no longer be recruited by wingnut preachers peddling pamphlets on street corners. Instead, they can be recruited via the same social media sites they use to share photos of their holiday. Those standard-bearers of epistemic authority who we (leaned on?) – politicians, scientists, the media – have been in many corners supplanted by memes spread algorithmically. A healthy distrust of authority and accreditation mutates into a reflexive antagonism. In the current pandemic a nation’s top scientists are held in contempt – simply because they are the nation’s top scientists.
I’d like to write more about this tumble down the rabbit hole of social media but it’s Sunday and my tribe wants to go out and play. So just a few concluding thoughts, as bullet points because today I am a lazy sod. Plus a few concluding points:
• America has as many disparate, stitched-together realities as there are zip codes. I’ll hazard a guess the UK is the same.
• In the realm of bots, fakes, contrived gossip, curated information, and narrowband propaganda it is becoming increasingly difficult to find the truth in the swathes of ‘likes’, ‘retweets’, and ‘shares’ that, together, purportedly comprise the material evidence upon which we rely to comprehend the world and make decisions to change the way things are. Little wonder that confusion and outrage now reign.
• As I have contended on more than one occasion, while the amount of data to which we are subjected is increasing exponentially, clarity of meaning has given way to distortion and ambiguity. As a consequence, our capacity to make sense of the data available to us has flat-lined. This allows proselytizing, self-righteous minds and celebrity shock-jocks to dominate media channels – their networks used to broadcast fictions, invent truths, and warp public awareness.
• Many of us are lazy sods. We do not want to think, to examine. We need to function as skilled, informed, and professional reference librarians. As my regular readers know, I hate this faux social environment that rewards simplicity and shortness, and punishes complexity and depth and nuance. I simply detest it. But frankly I do not know how you prevent the brutal manifestation of people like Harbi and Mair. Though I have a suggestion below.
Social media had humble beginnings. The phenomenon is less than twenty years old. MySpace was the first large-scale social medium to reach one million users in 2004. It connected people and allowed them to share photos. But fast forward to 2021 and Facebook has reached 2.9 billion users, while YouTube has over 1.9 billion.
Georgia Hollewell and Nicholas Longpré (both of the University of Roehampton, London) have a book coming out based on a long piece they wrote for Sage Journals. In that piece they examine social media, radicalization and the Internet. They note that September 11th was a turning point in the understanding of terrorism and radicalization. The Internet has provided an instrumental change regarding how radicals and terrorists communicate and spread their propaganda, proving a cause of concern for counterterrorism units. Over the last 10 years many radical and far-right sites have built a growing endorsement and positive attitude toward political violence and terrorism.
Social media regulation? Me thinks the proverbial horse has left the barn. The social media companies have put us in the middle of a huge and explosive lab experiment where we see the toxic combination of digital technology, unmoderated content, lies and hate. We now have the answer to what happens when these features and large profits are blended together in a connected world. The result not only has been unproductive for civil discourse, but also that it represents a danger to democratic systems and effective problem-solving.
Unless ….
FACT: Social media companies are media, not technology
Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress “I consider us to be a technology company because the primary thing we do is have engineers who write code and build product and services for other people.” That software code, however, makes editorial decisions about which information to choose to route to which people. That is a media decision. Social media companies make money by selling access to its users just like ABC, CNN, or The New York Times.
When these companies hire thousands of human reviewers this is not “code protection”. Asking humans to inspect the data constantly generated by algorithms is not “code protection” – though my guess is it’s like watching a tsunami through a straw. Yes, the amazing power of computers created this situation, and algorithms make decisions about which incoming content to select and to whom it is sent. The machines are making a protected editorial decision. Unlike the editorial decisions of traditional media whose editorial decisions are publicly announced in print or on screen and uniformly seen by everyone, the platforms’ determinations are secret: neither publicly announced nor uniformly available. The algorithmic editorial decision is only accidentally discoverable as to the source of the information and even that it is being distributed.
Expecting social media companies to exercise responsibility over their practices is not a First Amendment issue. It is not government control or choice over the flow of information. It is rather the responsible exercise of free speech. Long ago it was determined that the lie that shouted “FIRE!” in a crowded theater was not free speech. We must now determine what is the equivalent of “FIRE!” in the crowded digital theater.