Truth in
the Time of Social Media
We are at
war against news without facts. Information that appeals to our emotions only
ends up polarizing us. People use facts to cling to what we already believe. I'm
paraphrasing the Scottish poet and literary critic Andrew Lang, who used the
same argument for how people use statistics to support their way of
interpreting a situation.
Andrew took
credit for this quote in 1937. What hasn't changed since then is how people
prefer stories and opinions to facts, and how powerfully stories travel across
information networks, both technical and personal. What has changed is the
speed at which information spreads, our ability to connect with like-minded
people like never before, and our ability to share and snowball stories through
communities and networks.
Make sense
Stories give
meaning to facts. How we hear stories is influenced by our beliefs, our value
systems, and our life experiences, and we accept excerpts that match what we
want to hear more readily than what don't. We all seek reassurance about our
view of being. Social media platforms understand this. We are more likely to
consume and engage with content presented to us that supports our way of
thinking. Algorithms study our online behavior and give us more of what we want
to see—either content uploaded or shared by people in our networks, or through
sponsored and paid content that aligns with our thinking. The more time we
spend on these platforms, the more they are able to monetize our attention.
In 2016,
Twitter shed its cool kid image and introduced an “algorithmic timeline.
Instead of seeing every tweet from every person we follow in chronological
order, with the most recent at the top, we now see more tweets from the people
we interact with the most and the next or most popular tweets from others we
follow. It ensures that the most popular tweets are seen far more than before,
allowing them to spread on an unprecedented scale. That's all well and good
until we see a compromise. We can't see more of some kinds of tweets without
seeing less of others. We are insulated from viewpoints that may contradict our
own. They are no longer social networks, but personalized real-time news
services without human editors.
A kind of
isolation
Danah Boyd,
a principal researcher at Microsoft, says: "We've built an information
ecosystem where information can fly through social networks: It's not 'fake
news' at stake: it's 'the growing capacity of those committed to some form of
isolationism and hate.' -driven tribalism that has been around for a very long
time.
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