Are you curating your feed or is something else?
A medical professional at a friend’s party recently asked if I’d had any contact with a mutual acquaintance. No, not since before the pandemic. But I’d been horrified a year or so earlier when I glanced at her Facebook page and found a stream of anti-vax and “do your research” style postings. He knew. It’s why he asked. He’d run into her at the gym. She told him she’d not received the Covid shots and had lost friends over it. And she’d been a medical professional as well.
What happened? Perhaps the isolation during the pandemic. Perhaps too much time exposed to an algorithmically generated diet of such stuff. David French this morning cautions about the dangers of creating our own curated bubble realities.
Conspiracy theories have been with us forever. Rachel Maddow’s “Prequel” recounts tales of Depression-era Americans convinced that Jews and communists had taken over the government. They stockpiled canned good and weapons for when the Jews came marching down the street to make slaves of them. They planned an insurrection to put in place a strongman who’d bring fascist order.
If the parallels to today are eerie, Maddow means them to be. What’s different today, French suggests, is the sheer ubiquity of such alternate realities. They are no longer the hobby interests of a few cranks, but redefine their world views (New York Times, gifted):
There is a fundamental difference between, on the one hand, someone who lives in the real world but also has questions about the moon landing, and on the other, a person who believes the Covid vaccine is responsible for a vast number of American deaths and Jan. 6 was an inside job and the American elite is trying to replace the electorate with new immigrant voters and the 2020 election was rigged and Donald Trump is God’s divine choice to save America.
Such individuals don’t simply believe in a conspiracy theory, or theories. They live in a “bespoke reality.” That brilliant term comes from my friend Renée DiResta, the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, and it refers to the effects of what DiResta calls a “Cambrian explosion of bubble realities,” communities “that operate with their own norms, media, trusted authorities and frameworks of facts.”
Online algorithms are more than happy to customize our rabbit holes:
Combine vast choice with algorithmic sorting, and we now possess a remarkable ability to become arguably the most comprehensively, voluntarily and cooperatively misinformed generation of people ever to walk the earth. The terms “voluntarily” and “cooperatively” are key. We don’t live in North Korea, Russia or the People’s Republic of China. We’re drunk on freedom by comparison. We’re misinformed not because the government is systematically lying or suppressing the truth. We’re misinformed because we like the misinformation we receive and are eager for more.
DiResta’s “bespoke realities” customize a “choose-your-own-adventure epistemology” for us. Whatever you’d like to believe, “some news outlet somewhere has written the story you want to believe, some influencer is touting the diet you want to live by or demonizing the group you also hate.”
“If you don’t buy into a conspiracy theory, that means you’re part of the conspiracy,” one former Twitter user posted Thursday. “And lack of evidence for the conspiracy is proof that the conspiracy is WORKING,” replied Lindsay Beyerstein. And I note regularly, what conspiracists lack in quality evidence they make up for with quantity.
The internet will furnish all the quantity any budding conspiracist could want.
What’s important, says French, is to remain self-aware and not get too far down any one rabbit hole, especially for those of us steeped in political news.
Understanding this dynamic helps us better understand one of the most interesting and troubling studies of our modern political moment. In June 2019, the group More in Common released a study demonstrating that Americans are wrong about their political opponents in a particularly destructive way: They believe them to be more extreme than they really are. Moreover, those who consume political media were more wrong about their political opponents than those who consumed no media at all. Those who follow the news “most of the time” were roughly three times as wrong about their opponents as those who follow the news “hardly at all.”
None of us are immune, including him, French admits. Read more from credible people with whom you disagree, French advises. “That means reading the best and smartest people I can find who disagree with me. These practices help both challenge me and humanize my opponents.” (I’m reading David French. Does that count?)
Because right now, dehumanization is all the rage.