9/11 should have been a wake-up call. And ISIS. And Jan. 6.
A couple of head-scratching social media threads are worth your consideration this morning. Let’s begin with a thread by Eric Blair (of Deep Narrative) on Mastodon. He references a post by my friend Dave Johnson.*
Blair begins:
Fascist billionaires and MAGA Republicans criticize government.
Because their goal is to destroy the government to cut taxes on the rich.Democracy is an obstacle to their privatization and private wealth accumulation. They want to hurt all of us, destroy our society, to enrich themselves.
A bit oversimplified, perhaps. Wealth is simply a proxy for power. Dominance is their goal. But regarding attacks on Anthony Fauci:
Today Elon Musk attacked Anthony Fauci. The post got at least 600,000 likes.
Whatever this means for #TwitterMigration (should be: let’s leave!),
it also means many have been radicalized against Fauci and science and gov’t. While many of us have been carrying about our business, rightwing media has been creating vast hate for science. Vast.
“Lots of scientists and lots of people who get news from NYT and NPR and WaPo have their heads in the sand about this radicalization,” Blair continues. More on that in a moment.
The tendency to ignore this online radicalization, Blair believes, is “dangerously naive.” Fight them, he urges.
Again: “Prosecute Fauci”, *six hundred thousand* likes on twitter.
Next, a thread by Will Stancil who, in turn, keys off a Semafor post by Max Tani about the Biden White House’s dismissal of Twitter’s radicalization under Elon Musk. The administration is “totally clueless about how the digital ecosystem works,” Stancil argues.
Tani writes:
The administration does not consider Twitter a vital part of any political strategy that reaches beyond the chattering classes. One former White House official told Semafor the platform is an “afterthought” in communications and press meetings, which tend to focus first on television and traditional media and on Facebook, a declining service that still reaches a mass audience.
[…}
The disdain for Twitter inside the White House has little to do with right-wing control of the platform, and more to do with its role inside the Democratic Party: Biden’s wing sees Twitter as fuel for activist voices who push ingroup thinking, left-of-center bias, and socioeconomic bias.
When Biden ran for president in 2016, his staff’s mantra was “Twitter isn’t real life.” Now, aides point to data from The New York Times suggesting that Democrats are “more moderate, more diverse and less educated” than those on the social media platform.
The problem with that view of Twitter’s radicalization should be obvious to anyone who watched the rise of ISIS and its successful efforts to use online radicalization in its terrorist recruiting efforts.
“Twitter is at the very center of a vast informational web, stuff that circulates on here ends up on EVERY OTHER WEBSITE AND NEWS SITE” eventually, Stancil writes. Yet the Biden administration still believes the way to reach Americans is via an op-ed in USA Today. They understand the media ecosystem in terms of audience reach rather than influence. This is a mistake.
“The comparison I always use is Fox News: its actual viewership is low, much much lower than the number of people on Twitter. But its influence on politics is enormous, directing the whole GOP agenda,” Stancil adds.
People’s heads remain in the sand. The Silents’ strategy was that a problem ignored was one that would go away. There are enough problems going around that even later generations neither want nor need more. We ignored or dismissed the impacts of the right-wing echo chamber, Facebook’s algorithms, the rise of the attention economy, and foreign troll farms too. We wound up spectators to a near-successful overthrow of our government.
I don’t know how best to fight online and offline radicalization, and I’m not yet fully off Twitter. But if social media were once imagined as a global town square, it’s best to consider what kind.
Ezra Klein writes:
[W]hat matters for a polity isn’t the mere existence of a town square but the condition the townspeople are in when they arrive. Town squares can host debates. They can host craft fairs. They can host brawls. They can host lynchings. Civilization does not depend on a place to gather. It depends on what happens when people gather.
So much genius and trickery and money have gone into a mistaken metaphor. The competition to create and own the digital square may be good business, but it has led to terrible politics. Think of the hopeful imaginings that accompanied the early days of social media: We would know one another across time and space; we would share with one another across cultures and generations; we would inform one another across borders and factions. Billions of people use these services. Their scale is truly civilizational. And what have they wrought? Is the world more democratic? Is G.D.P. growth higher? Is innovation faster? Do we seem wiser? Do we seem kinder? Are we happier? Shouldn’t something, anything, have gotten noticeably better in the short decades since these services fought their way into our lives?
I think there is a reason that so little has gotten better and so much has gotten worse. It is this: The cost of so much connection and information has been the deterioration of our capacity for attention and reflection. And it is the quality of our attention and reflection that matters most.
*I have not figured out how to display Mastodon posts cleanly in WordPress (or WordPress hasn’t) so bear with me.
It’s Happy Hollandaise time! If you’d like to put a little something in the holiday stocking you can do so here…