Social media enables violent far-right ideologues to build self-reinforcing communities that encourage even more violence, even more extremism, in an ever-escalating cycle of mutual goading and behavioral modeling that leads to outbreaks of real-world viciousness. When your online friendships are built on a foundation of anti-semitism, individuals vie to be the most outrageously anti-semitic member of the community they can be, and when someone, like the Pittsburgh mass murderer, breaks through to peak anti-semite and actually guns down innocent Jews, he has achieved a kind of apotheosis — he knows his friends will be praising him, will be impressed by him, will consider him a role model, and even though he might be in prison for life, he can feel content that he has won the respect of his peer group. Someone like me might feel horror and disgust and contempt for him, but he doesn’t care, since I’m not one of his friends, and he despises me and my kind. My revulsion is actually a reward, as far as he is concerned. Like Anders Breivik, social condemnation by others fuels his righteousness.
One source of this problem isn’t that all social media is bad, but that it is built in such a way as to encourage these isolated communities of hate to grow — there are no moderators. The adults have all left the room. In fact, the corporate owners of these networks have consciously decided that they will not break up the little klans that form, and will actually punish anyone who tries to intrude on their vicious circle jerks with ostracization. This is glaringly obvious on Twitter and Facebook — they have “rules” and “terms of service” that allow genuine brutality to dribble through, but anyone who dares to disrupt the cycle of reinforcement is a threat to their business model. See for example how they try to silence Feminista Jones and other women who respond to misogyny. It ain’t the misogynists who get put in their place.
Fuck. You. I reported a man saying I should have my throat sliced and you fuckers said it didn't violate the TOS but when I sarcastically wrote "Kill All Men" you suspended me.
Choke on 60 feet of barbed wire.
That doesn't violate TOS, btw. You said so yourselves! https://t.co/REvaWLVNu2
— ♈️☀️~Femme~🌙♌️ (@FeministaJones) October 28, 2018
I thought this was a quick smart take on what’s going on.
I’m at #mozfest – speaking at 12:45pm. The tl;dr slide is below. Come hang out! pic.twitter.com/LPh5UwKYB8
— Renee DiResta (@noUpside) October 27, 2018
Exactly. “Our political conversations are happening on an infrastructure built for viral advertising.” And what sells in America? Sex and violence. There’s still a lot of puritanism lingering in our society, so sex gets throttled and relegated to porn — once again, the adults leave the room and responsible, serious discussion is abandoned. Violence is supported, so it thrives everywhere, even on Twitter, as long as it’s thinly veiled and has some minuscule amount of deniability. Twitter and Facebook want to be heavily used as gateways to bigotry and violence and misogyny, and they’ll just boot out the people who get too explicit in their charged recruitment of hate mobs. They get it both ways. They get to foster the viral advertising of self-reinforcing communities of racists, all in the name of free speech, and they also get to piously declaim how much they deplore violence by sometimes banning the more outrageous perpetrators, like the MAGAbomber. If they too often get around to kicking someone out after the unspeakable has been done, well, hey, they still demonstrated their commitment to both free speech and peaceful dialog at the same time, right? Win-win! See, everyone? It’s safe to advertise on our social media, we’re weeding out the bad guys who would soil your brand!
And of course, there is no real punishment for the barbarians. Kick ’em off Twitter, which is only a vocal 10% (optimistic estimate) asshole, and they can go to Gab, which is 100% pure, undiluted Nazi asshole, and they can find even more reinforcement. There are no responsible adults at all on Gab. It’s pure heaven for freeze-peachers who want the ability to engage in social interactions with zero obligations to, you know, society. So where did the Pittsburgh mass murderer flourish? On Gab, of course. And how are a significant subset of the Gab client base responding? I took a look.
A few are approving of banning the murderer, but also seem to be motivated by the fact that this is a threat to their beloved service — oh, no, we might be expected to be responsible for what we say! Others are still, unbelievably, babbling about how this is a “false flag” attack funded by a Jewish conspiracy.
I’m all for free speech, but there should be consequences when that speech is a threat to people’s lives. The consequences are starting to roll in, again too late to spare the 11 lives lost in Pittsburgh. Among those consequences: Paypal is denying them service. Hit them in the pocketbook.
I like that. To Gab, getting banned because you run a service that enabled a man to rage against Jews and announce that he was “going in” to commit mass murder is incomprehensibly just because
.
By the way, Twitter: why do you allow an account that is solely for recruiting new members to a Nazi forum on your service? And verify it with a blue checkmark? I know. It’s because you want their traffic.
In other good news, Gab’s hosting service is kicking them off.
Good. It’s a start. If you think you can’t encourage open discussion and free speech without allowing people to advocate for genocide, it’s about time you learned something about reality.
I was reading about this today, and whils doing so I encountered this gem:
How can someone write this after some commited violent act after expressing themselves through words is beyond me. It is as if the person who wrote that was completely incapable of thinking about what they actually say.
What would good social media look like? Is Mastodon good enough (if people were to use it)? More importantly: how could we get viral buy-in at the level of facebook/twitter? I’ve tried to shift to Google+, Mastodon, all that stuff… but all it accomplishes is to separate me from friends, family, and people I want to read.
Twitter I can see a migration path out: because they have an API, I could imagine an app that aggregates streams from mastodon and twitter. I’d be happy to help write that app! Facebook looks impossible though…
I was recently banned from commenting, posting, reacting, and using Messenger for a week bc on my post about ppl listing stereotypes about LGBTQIA ppl, I listed “gay ppl are pedophiles” and it got flagged as hate speech. Even though I am gay, the comment was obviously not aimed at anyone, the context of the post was a discussion of these type of stereotypes with the aim of brodening knowledge, and anyone can look at my wall and see consistency in my social justice advocacy. But hey, the MAGAbomber liked two explicitly vile pages that SHOULD have violated community standards, but did not. But sure, cut me off from my only social group. Not a big fucking deal.
Responsible free speech, it would be nice.
Here in Canada we decided a while ago that speech that intends to spread hatred is not protected speech under our (somewhat strange) constitution. On balance I supported and support this, but like any other legal regime it has problems of course. One being enforcement, especially with “social media” platforms. Still I prefer it to the unrestricted freedom of speech given to citizens of the USA.
Speech can kill, so it needs to be speech within fair rules. The idea that seems to be widespread down south that “freedom” means “no rules” seems extremely odd to those of us “up North”.
(“Up North” being a strange way of putting it when actually a large percentage of Canadians live to the south of the 49th parallel).
@5 Ed: Yeah, but a significant percentage of Americans live south of the 42nd parallel, so it works out.
I suspect most American political controversies look inane to other countries, where better answers were implemented long ago, except sadly the anti-immigrant hatred which seems relatively universal.
I don’t believe in free speech at all.
@6 Monad:
Well, but the vast majority of Canadians living south of 49 are still in Canada even if you count the snowbirds in Florida. I live on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, about 50 miles south of 49. But this is not the southernmost part of Canada, which is in Ontario. The southernmost tip of Ontario (and Canada) is south of the northern border of California. Also, if you want to go from Detroit to Windsor, you have to travel south.
Great post, Dr. Myers. Years from now books will be written on the corrosive and destructive effects that irresponsible social media had on America, all in the name of profit for the billionaire Zuckerbergs that Americans are currently fawning over.
Christ. “Political discussions are now happening on a platform designed for viral advertising” sent chills down my spine. I’d never heard it put that way before.
This has got to be one of the scariest examples of the law of unintended consequences I’ve ever seen. What makes it even worse is that the kind of political “discussions” the right wing likes are much more likely to go viral than the ones the left likes, for the simple reason that they are themselves closer to advertising than the “now let’s sit down and THINK about this, please” that makes up so much of the left wing.
We’re fucked. I always wondered how exactly technology would get ahead of us and lead us to destroy ourselves, but assumed it would be killbots or automated law enforcement.
It seems social media is full of monsters from the Id. There’s no restraint, no consequences unless you do something incredibly vile, or threaten their money.
Addendum: If twitter were serious about stopping hate speech they should have booted Tang Caligula off their service years ago.
Twitter’s view of free speech: “Say what you will about National Socialism, Dude, at least it brings in tenants.”
Absolute protection of free speech is a myth anyway. Even in the USA, which comes the closest to it, there are plenty of distortions and deficits that greatly mitigate against it.
For one, the mass incarceration of US citizens (five times the EU average) is a far greater restriction of freedom of speech than, say, the ban on the promotion of Nazi propaganda in Germany.
For another, the protection of unlimited corporate and political spending under the aegis of First Amendment rights effectively muffles the speech of the millions who do not have access to the best megaphones money can buy.
And, of course, what use is freedom of speech in a nation where voting rights are routinely and cynically curtailed, actions that are somehow deemed to be completely constitutional. Speaking out against government abuses becomes futile when lawful remedies are made impossible.
Is it just me or do all the demands for free speech involve the demand to vilify other individuals and groups?
Here’s a suggestion to make Twitter and other social media crack down on hate speech and appease the Libertarian kooks*: Instead of creating new laws about online speech, let’s get rid of an existing one. Let’s petition congress to repeal section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. For those who don’t know, section 230 of the CDA exempts online services from liability for material posted by their users. Repealing this law wouldn’t necessarily mean online services are liable for everything their users post, but it certainly would remove the blanket immunity they enjoy. Perhaps the resulting “scared sh*tless” state of social media providers would encourage regulation that establishes a compromise between total liability and complete immunity — which is what we really need.
Note that I don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance of this happening. But I can dream, eh?
*This presumes that Libertarians really believe what they claim to believe and that they’re willing to walk the walk as well as they talk the talk. I question the former and don’t believe the latter for a moment.
Heck, they don’t even have to do that, they just make a new account. Every so often I’ll follow a reply down the rabbit hole and end up in Nazi Twitter (which generally results in me wearing out the report function, for all the good it does). Many of the folks are bragging that they are on their 8th (or 15th, or 20th) Twitter account. They basically organize around hub accounts that deliberately do not violate the TOS, so when they get an account locked they just make a new one, @ one of the hub accounts who retweets them, and everyone refollows the new account.
Before Paypal and Joyent kicked them to the curb, Gab was cheering the increase in traffic due to the shooting.
I’m always reminded of this little gem when liberals advocate “responsible” suppression of “hate speech”. At the time Internet was just a bunch of geeks at DARPA thinking about fault-tolerant network that could survive a nuclear exchange, but the basic gist and human nature have not changed at all from those days.
@19
And whenever I see libertarians harping on about FREEZE PEACH, I’m reminded of this little gem. Free speech does not mean freedom from consequences. How would you feel if someone started calling you a pedophile? Should they be free of the fear of litigation for plastering posters around your neighbourhood accusing you of pedophilia? What if someone threatened to kill or rape you? What if you thought there was a serious risk of them carrying out said threat. Cause as the law currently stands that’s assault and that someone can be convicted in a court of law for that.
Also you’re defending Nazis for fuck sake. Mass-murdering, war-mongering, racist, arseholes. A group of people who are going to be the embodiment of evil for the next thousand years. Many good people from around the world died to put them down.
Heinlein gets quoted in support of fascists? How unsurprising.
Have to de-lurk here just to say that after all of the past week’s events, to put hate speech in scare quotes. Wow. Just wow…
PZ: “actually guns down innocent Jews”.
That phrasing always makes me cringe. Whether a murder victim is, or is not, ‘innocent’ does not diminish the badness of the murderer, nor make the murder less than a murder. I might be convinced, in very particular circumstances, that lack of innocence of a person dead by some species of homicide less than murder (such as so-called ‘justifiable homicide’ when, for instance, the killer is protecting someone—her- or himself, or a third party—from a violent attack; or even, maybe, certain cases of ‘negligent manslaughter’, though I can’t think of a good example) could diminish the badness of the homicide (by assumption already less than the badness of murder). But never with murder. And I can’t see any chance, at all, that the killings of the 11 Jews in the Pittsburgh synagogue weren’t all murders—premeditated, terroristically-intended, murders at that.
I’ve never understood why self-styled libertarians—who, ostensibly, ought to be stridently opposed to authoritarianism—see no problem with authoritarianism so long as it results in outcomes of which they approve.
And as far as Heinlein is concerned, I’ve always appreciated Isaac Asimov’s thoughts on the matter:
Shorter version of #24: “Fuck you, I’ve got mine.”
The motto of the libertarian party.
There should be consequences for speech. But, I don’t think any speech should be banned. Better would be somehow letting the monsterous assholes identify themselves. They are out there whether we hear them or not, and I want to know who they are. I am pretty sure there are some in my community, and I would feel better if they wore their beliefs on there sleeve. As a friend of mine once said many years ago about a nazi parade through a Jewish neighborhood in Illinois: “Let them march and say whatever they want; but, if they try to act on their words, kill them.” A problem I see is we don’t have enough Progressives such as the Southern Poverty Law Center keeping track and willing to be prepared and proactive in preventing or defending against violence. Rather than banning the monsters, we should attend their meetings and rallies to identify and “out” them. Our Asshole-In-Chief has done us a (stopped-clock) favor by encouraging his racist/misogynist/bigotted supporters to show themsleves for who they always have been.
I like the sentiment of this blog post. I really do. I just don’t see a feasible way to avoid this problem. You push ’em off Twitter and they go to Gab. You deep-six Gab and they find some other place to hang out. Eventually they end up on the dark web and nobody can track their behavior. At least when they’re on actual normal web sites their posts are a matter of public record and social media histories can be searched by law enforcement agencies when stopping and/or solving crimes. Add in onion routing and that becomes very difficult. The barn door was left open and the horses are gone. There is no way to get them back in now, not without all sorts of laws that have no political will to pass (and even if they did, do we trust the US government to regulate the internet?). Without a great firewall, and an army of people and/or an AI tracking what everyone says and does online, communities of hate will gather and they will persist when threatened (nothing causes people to band together more than being directly attacked).
No, the solution here, if there is one, needs a bit more social engineering behind it. The problem, as I see it, is that people are getting hung up on the narcissism of small differences (because the genomic difference between a black human, a Jewish human and a white human are quite insignificant). Identitarian politics have been allowed to thrive because people have been shoehorned by society to claim their identities. In some cases, there were good reasons for that push, but it has led to people being unable to empathize with people who “aren’t like them.”
My idea won’t happen anytime soon (especially in the USA)…but I’m thinking the solution would be to ban all intentional and unintentional reproduction between two people either within or not within a relationship. Anyone who gets pregnant by a chosen mate would not be allowed to keep their baby (if they chose not to abort), and all newborn children would be genetically screened to ensure a couple didn’t cheat. People who want children would either register to receive a randomly selected sample of (pre-screened for major 100% genetics-caused conditions) semen, or adopt a child of someone else’s conceived illegally (also at random, you get who you get); both situations would create a legit paper trail that would also help to locate couples who wanted “white” child, for example (and if the genetics of the sperm donor were known, as would be possible, it would be obvious if the resulting child wasn’t related to him). Thus, all babies would be genetically related to only their mother, at most (of course, all semen samples and adopted-out children would come with thorough family histories of various diseases and conditions that are known to be at least partly caused by environmental conditions, so the family can know what to look out for). Nobody would know if their kid was Jewish or not because there is no way to know who the father was. And if you ended up with a half-Latino or Asian or whatever kid, you knew that could happen going in. A happy side effect of this is that racists wouldn’t become parents, hating the system and its requirements, and thus very few innocent children would be indoctrinated with racist ideologies.
Our society has a perverse fixation with parentage, geneology, purity, etc. Do people really have the right to be genetically related to both of the people who are their legal guardians until the age of 18? And do adult males really have the right to have a child who is related to them? It’s not a solution I can see implemented any time soon, but it’s kind of like the anti-Final Solution – people would begin to see that racial purity is simply non-existent, because there is no robust definition of “pure”. Another side-effect of this would be that within 2-3 generations, people would not be able to have the convenient scapegoat of “the Blacks” or “the Jews”. Problems would have to be blamed on other things (perhaps even their actual, complex roots) since so many white people would be raising babies who didn’t look white, and so many black people would be raising babies that weren’t as melanin-rich as their parents. There might be a brief advantage enjoyed by children whose parents were both white, and if they had a child who was also white (by chance), that advantage might transfer down a generation, but within 2-3 generations, everyone would have an “impure” geneline. And within a couple hundred years, there would be no more white or black people. There would just be people.
@VolcanoMan, your first parargaph is nothing else than a perfect sollution fallacy. Banning nazis might not be perfect sollution to nazi problem, but it makes it more difficult for them to spread their bullshit around.
Your “idea” is so awfully stupid and morally reprehensible, that I do not even know how to begin to reconstruct it.
What I can do in the least is to point out that it is logistically much more difficult and would require a lot more trust in the government doing things right than it would to require for them to regulate internet, thus you are contradicting yourself by deeming a doable thing as unfeasible and then proposing an alternative that is much more difficult.
Obviously it’s not feasible. I said it couldn’t happen in present-day America. Also, I’m totally in favor of banning nazis from social media platforms. But this isn’t an “internet” problem. The internet is maybe exacerbating it, although I am wary to be a “technology is driving people to do terrible things” type of person. I think people do terrible things perfectly fine without technology. It’s also not exclusively a gun problem, although America’s love of firearms is DEFINITELY making things worse.
But you say my idea is morally reprehensible, and I have to ask why you feel that way? This isn’t some sort of rhetorical device or whatever. I truly don’t get it. Why do people have a right to children who are genetically related to them? My solution may be clunky (there may be more elegant ways to do this) but it does address the fundamental point – people fetishize their genetic ancestry. Racists take this to what seems to be the logical extreme, but it’s only logical if you concede two points – firstly that genetic lineage is an important quality, something to be proud of, and secondly, that different small sub-populations of humans, starting in different places and with different resources, produced offspring (to the nth degree) who are different ENOUGH that some are superior and some inferior when looking at traits we value today. Both points are absurd. There is far more diversity within so-called “racial” groups than there is between them, and a legacy of discrimination (both overt hatred of “the other” and societal) has led to the differences in outcome we see today. A white couple, with white peoples’ advantages who adopt a black child will be able to give them more advantages leading to more likely success in the world than if that black child was adopted by black parents who, through no fault of their own, do not share those advantages (all else being equal, and with the understanding that the child’s skin color will obviously come with its own set of disadvantages that will be seen no matter who raises them). This is surely less true today than it was 50 years ago, but it’s still true, and it pisses me off.
But I don’t see any way for us mildly intelligent apes to get over our illogical and illiberal views with respect to identity being linked to anything other than upbringing unless there is a fundamental disconnect that lays bare the fact that the genetic limitations we all have (and they exist) are somehow inextricably linked to skin color…or biological sex, for that matter. Even smart people have fallen into the trap of scientific racism (though they usually use other words to refer to themselves). But unbiased science has clearly shown race to be an elusive concept. Why should qualities we value (intelligence, creativity, motivation), ON AVERAGE, vary by skin color? If you take a large enough sample of people of a given skin color, and a similar-sized sample of people of all skin colors and compare them on a test designed to be culturally neutral that measures a parameter like intelligence, there really should be no significant difference (i.e. beyond the errors inherent in human psychological research), because there is no evidence that the genes that make people better or worse at reason, at critical thinking, at problem solving are any way related to the genes that code for melanin production. If such evidence existed, the racists would have surely brought it up by now. So the only relevant difference must be environmental.
Then the question becomes, how do you MAKE people see this reality? Because while most people don’t subscribe to the overt beliefs that a moron like Cliven Bundy has (just to give a random example of a guy who thinks whites are biologically destined to rule over blacks), I would say a majority of white people in the US look at the differences in outcome between people of different skin colors and wonder if that’s just the way we all were made, if affirmative action and such are a lost cause because white people will naturally perform better at most things. Science is not the way to go – people get into their little tribes and no matter how rational or logical your arguments, they won’t budge. Shutting down the racist talk on the internet doesn’t solve the problem, it just makes it invisible until synagogues are shot up and black churches bombed (things that happened before the internet too). And the conspiracy theorists among the right-wing loons will look at our efforts to silence them as an admission that we’ve given up on arguments (even though there is really no arguing with them!) – that they are 100% right and we are some left-wing (maybe Jewish) cabal intent on hiding the truth because it goes against our own ideology.
So I proposed a partial end to genetic legacy. Mothers would still be able to be related to their offspring. Perhaps America would become a matrilineal society in a desperate attempt to preserve some sort of racist hierarchy. But I doubt that would happen because (let’s be honest here) most of the people with the problem here, the racists among us, they’re men. And if those racist men decide that their family’s racial purity is more important than having kids who are not related to them, I say great. Let their bogus ideas die out with them. Racism is spread from father to son, and I think it would be a mercy to spare some innocent kids learning those despicable ideas, even if it means they don’t get to exist. And for those non-racists among us, this would give them a chance to practise what they preach, to prove that they think all people have the potential to be great, and to work towards providing upbringings to children of varied racial backgrounds that allow them all to reach that greatness. And when we start to see people lose those ingrained prejudices, when most people can get through an Implicit Bias Test without showing bias, we’llstart to see equal representation of people of all skin colors in the most prestigious positions, winners of Nobel Prizes, presidents of banks and universities, the actors we watch on television and in the movies. Skin color would become a non-factor, something you don’t even think to mention when describing someone because it DOESN’T MATTER. Culture would still persist in the absence of the racist notions that befoul it today, I predict. But it would be different…a lot more of your identity would be tied to the customs of the place you’re born and the communities to whom your parents (1 biological, 1 non-biological) themselves belong, and a lot less would be tied to your ancestors (because you wouldn’t know who half of them are). You would see white-looking kids participating in Latino customs, and South Asian-looking kids eating lutefisk before a session in the sauna. And I think eventually the idea of a culture tied to some group of people who used to be a community on some piece of land will die out – people will eat whatever cuisines they enjoy, listen to whatever music they like, etc. That’s the way things are going anyway. We’re getting to the point where a Turkish person’s favorite food is sushi and a German person’s favorite food is Turkish. I think this kind of cultural unity is just the next part of our evolution as a community of thinking, conscious beings. You can enjoy borscht and pierogi without your father’s father’s father having been born in Ukraine! Is there anything valuable in knowing your entire ancestry (assuming of course that knowledge of whatever diseases and conditions you might be genetically predisposed to get is preserved in my proposed system)?
It’s a radical and impractical solution, but it gets to the root of the problem. It’s also a system I would gladly partake in – I see no reason why any child of mine should be related to me, and I would absolutely love and care for a child fathered by anonymous sperm donation equally to one my own sperm created. It is totally bizarre to me that so many people are attached to this parochial notion. Still, to be absolutely clear: I obviously know this type of solution wouldn’t happen in present-day America. But I fear the racist ideas of today are being taught to children with white skin right now who will go out into a world that presents itself as providing equality, and see the differences in outcome as pre-ordained…because it’s easier to believe this than to believe that you are part of a system that efficiently denies opportunities to those who deserve them based on their skin color alone, and that grants opportunities to those who DON’T deserve them based on skin color. Believing the latter would force the individual to wonder if some of their own success was undeserved, and that…that’s a hard obstacle to overcome.
I don’t think your “solution” is feasible in any way, but let me just point out that your example doesn’t work:
Except, of course, Jewish-ness is determined by the mother …
Incidentally, the
is a direct consequence of evolution. You might have heard of that …