On Inflating The Threat Posed By Social Media

It has been a big week for the preachers of the social media apocalypse. During her speech on Monday to the He Whenua Taurikura hui on Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism, PM Jacinda Ardern told us that the country’s security agencies have just released a draft National Security Long Term Insights briefing.

Apparently, the “perceptions” survey contained in that briefing indicated that 4 out 5 New Zealanders fear their lives will soon be touched by a number of different threats. “The top 5 threats of most concern to New Zealanders over the next 12 months,” Ardern explained, “are natural disaster, mis-information, hacking, another major health epidemic and organised crime.”

Right. Supposedly, 87% of us feel concerned about the threat or natural disasters and 81% of us are worried about the next health epidemic – but almost as many Kiwis (80% of us) are worried about the combo of mis- and dis-information, hacking, and transnational organised crime. Seemingly, mis-information is almost up there with climate change on the worry index. Shouldn’t we all be worried about that?

Here's the thing: increasingly, social media is being depicted as society’s main source of false information and the conspiratorial thinking that – allegedly – is eroding public faith in our democratic institutions.

Hmm. Surely that horse bolted quite some time ago. IMO, the moral panic on this issue is a bit misplaced. The QAnon true believers, the ardent anti-vaxxers and the Great Replacement racists taken together still constitute only a small minority of New Zealanders. Only a tiny minority within that small minority are likely to pose a physical threat, despite some media commentators claiming excitedly that the drivers of violent extremism are “running rampant on social media and in peoples’ minds” . Thankfully, the micro-minority of white race supremacists who do pose a genuine risk to anyone else are now reportedly on the radar of Rebecca Kitteridge and the SIS, an organisation that finally seems to have stopped looking for Muslim terrorists under every toadstool.

IMO, online mis-information is not responsible for either the rise in right wing populism or the erosion of faith in our democratic institutions. It would be more accurate to regard the rise of right wing populism as a response to the destruction of jobs and community wellbeing by the policies of economic orthodoxy. The online extremism of concern is a response to those failures, and is not the main cause of social disillusion. Getting all hot and bothered about the dreadful stuff on social media – and some of it is dreadful – is a diversion. It is a diversion that assumes we can somehow clean up social media without addressing the mainstream policies that continue to feed populist anger.

Put it this way: Perhaps we should be less worried about the “dis-information” lurking in the dark corners of the internet and more worried about the dis-information and catastrophising that’s front and centre of our nightly news bulletins. Because we don’t seem to have any social mechanisms for coping with that dreadful stuff.

For example: For months, one of our major political parties has been depicting government spending as being out of control. It isn’t, not by any OECD standard. Moreover, the bulk of that spending has been (a) to counter the Covid epidemic and (b) to address the huge social deficits in health, housing, child poverty, essential infrastructure, defence, crime prevention, prisoner rehabilitation etc etc. That’s even before we get to this country’s low wages and inadequate benefit levels. The same major political party is claiming that a bit of thriftiness can see to all of that while still enabling more of the state’s revenue to be diverted upwards to the least needy members of society.

Such messages are -IMO – as factually flawed and are, if anything, far more socially corrosive than any QAnon screed. Yet media conventions enable those messages to be repeated almost every night on mass media, virtually without challenge. Meanwhile social media content continues to be (mis) identified as an overwhelmingly pressing problem, and as the info-news equivalent of climate change. Newsflash: It isn’t.

In fact, the research evidence to support the sweeping claims being made about social media’s alleged superpowers of persuasion is surprisingly sketchy. If anything, what research there is indicates that social media is only a secondary means of dissemination, through which the initial fear, anger and uncertainty generated by mainstream media coverage gets re-interpreted, and passed on.

What I’d like to explore in this column is how a consensus came into being that social media is the prime culprit responsible for the loss of public faith in our institutions, and for the decline in social equanimity. Yes, I’m about to peddle a conspiracy theory online, about why a conspiracy exists to inflate the importance of social media conspiracies.

Owner Operatives

Tik Tok excepted, the main social media outlets are owned by the US tech giants. Within the US, the chief driver for the political dis-information said to be undermining the values of Western democracy continues to be Fox News, still owned by Rupert Murdoch. For decades– from Britain to the US to Australia - Murdoch media titles have sown fear and anger about social divisions, and driven the rise of the political populism that has now come home to roost on social media.

Over the past 30 years, the Murdoch empire has been the mainstream media’s chief cheerleader for free market economic reforms, and for the anointing of the political leaders deemed to be suitable to advance that project. Without skipping a beat, Murdoch titles also now pose as the populist champion of the people who feel angry and betrayed by the failure of those reforms. [On a Mini-Me level, David Seymour has executed the same trick: the Act Party advocates for more neo-liberal economic reforms while angling for votes from the angry victims of such policies.]

Maybe then, we should be less worried about the prospect of Donald Trump being given back his Twitter feed by Eion Musk, and feel more concerned that the Murdoch empire has moved on from Trump and virtually endorsed Florida governor Ron De Santis as the next President of the United States.

That development is consistent with this column’s thesis that it is the mainstream media that creates the major structural shifts in political perceptions, while social media (in the main) merely reacts to them. If so, why then do all of the major players – the public, the politicians, the traditional media, and the social media companies themselves - keep on promoting the myth that social media is the all-powerful wellspring of conspiracy thinking?

Front of House

For clues, let's start with Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has an obvious commercial interest in promoting the myth of Facebook’s ability to mould our thinking, via the allegedly irresistible power of social media’s magic algorithms. As Techdirt’s Mike Masnick says

After all, if Facebook is so powerful, shouldn’t you be advertising on it, Mr. Toilet Paper Maker? If Facebook can help get Trump elected because of some memes posted by idiots, just think how much beer and nachos it can sell as well. Literally, Facebook has a vested interest in having people believe that disinformation works on its platform, because that’s literally something the company can profit from. But… is it actually true? Are most Americans actually gullible suckers who will fall for any piece of made up nonsense that gives them a dopamine hit?

The answer to that last question being… There may not be as many gullible suckers as you might think. During the pandemic, it was taken for granted that the internet had been the main purveyor of anti-mask and anti-vaxx sentiments. Certainly, there was that stuff online, along with a lot of pandering to prejudice. Yet it was less widely reported that the height of the pandemic did not seem to cause a mass exodus from mainstream news to the darker realms of Facebook and Youtube. Quite the reverse, as this research indicates.

We find that in 2020, online news consumption increased. Trustworthy news outlets benefited the most from the increase in web traffic. In the UK trustworthy news outlets also benefited the most from the increase in Facebook engagement, but in other countries both trustworthy and untrustworthy news outlets benefited from the increase in Facebook engagement. Overall, untrustworthy news outlets captured 2.3% of web traffic and 14.0% of Facebook engagement, while news outlets regularly publishing false content accounted for 1.4% of web traffic and 6.8% of Facebook engagement.

The conclusion being:

People largely turned to trustworthy news outlets during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.

OK. So if Facebook is mainly a parasite feeding off mainstream media, while also serving as a vehicle for driving even more people towards traditional news outlets, why isn’t the mainstream media making more of its sterling role as the public’s Old Reliable? Well, just as it helps Zuckerberg to sell ads by promoting the myth of social media’s omnipotence, it serves the traditional media almost as well to depict the Internet as a cesspool of deadly waste that you can’t really trust, by comparison.

Traditional media gets to promote its own self-designated role as the gatekeepers of truth by promoting social media as the peddlers of stuff so potent it can turn Uncle Bob into a conspiracy nut overnight, and – even worse – lure weird Cousin Ralph into acting out violently in public.

Yet miraculously, those same all powerful memes and online sharings can be safely withstood by the majority of citizens. Especially if they have been fore-armed with the editorials, think pieces and reportage contained in the likes of the Economist and the NZ Herald… Rely on us, the mainstream media has been saying, because otherwise there’s some potent stuff circulating out there that will turn your mind to cream cheese, via algorithms more potent than heroin.

Nor is there much evidence to support the widely held belief that the majority of people are being trapped in social media “echo chambers” of the like-minded. That’s a simplistic view of a wider social tendency. Online, and in their consumption of traditional media, and in their conversations with friends, people will tend to gravitate to people who hold viewpoints with which they agree. The only point of difference with social media is that this ingroup vs outgroup hostility between various social factions has been made visible, onscreen. Masnick again :

In our offline lives, there is a lot of hostility as well, but that happens behind closed doors, in private. It happens in bars where we cannot hear what is going on. But we’re exposed to all that when we enter the online realm.

And moreover:

The people who are sharing misinformation are not ignorant. They are used to navigating social media and the internet. They know more about politics than the average person. But where they’re really different from the average is they have much more negative feelings towards members of the other party. And that’s really what’s predicting, not only their sharing of fake news, but also their sharing of real news. They want to derogate people that they don’t like, and they are actively searching for information they can use for that purpose.

My point being… It isn’t social media that is causing people to be more hostile. It would be more accurate to say that assholes online will probably be assholes offline, too. To repeat: social media may confront us with hostility, but in most cases, it didn’t create it. Or, as this research article puts it:

Why are online discussions about politics more hostile than offline discussions? A popular answer argues that human psychology is tailored for face-to-face interaction and people’s behaviour therefore changes for the worse in impersonal online discussions… Instead, [we found that] hostile political discussions are the result of status-driven individuals who are drawn to politics and are equally hostile both online and offline. Finally, we offer initial evidence that online discussions feel more hostile, in part, because the behaviour of such individuals is more visible online than offline.

Finally… I’d still argue that social media has more of a beneficial and democratising influence than a negative one. It enables people who were formerly invisible within social debates to have their views rendered visible within a public arena: and visible both to themselves, and to others. Often, these views will not be expressed in ways and with the footnotes that some educated folk would prefer. Too bad. Obviously, saying so doesn’t validate hateful prejudice, or invalidate the Golden Rule of not doing harm to others online. Or anywhere else.

Without being starry-eyed about some of the vile things that exist online, I’d still argue that overall, the freedom of the internet has been more liberating than oppressive or degrading. I’d also argue that the people who aim to impose legally enforceable “quality” and “political balance” rules to online content pose a far bigger threat to democracy than the crackpots and charlatans who dwell on the fringes of online discourse.

Footnote One: In line with the above, much of the mainstream media has developed an appetite for playing up the potential worst case scenarios of government policy, for ratings rewards. This has gone beyond the traditional Fourth Estate role of critiquing policy in order to better inform the public. Raining on the government’s p.r. parade can be what good journalism – and effective radicalism – is all about. What I’m talking about is a lazier and more dangerous process.

I’m talking about reportage that plays on existing levels of fear and outrage and doesn’t bother itself overly much with providing context, or history, or any other evaluation at all of the issue in question. Instead, the trademark style is to catastrophise the news in order to elicit an emotional response to it. (“Let us know what you think. Text us on…)

The ideological effect is to inflame the public against the very notion of government competence. In doing so, this significantly assists the shrink-the-government project of the centre-right.

Music playlist

And for the weekend, here’s a slightly remixed version of yesterday’s music playlist. More Taylor Swift.

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