How Twitter poisoned politics
prospectmagazine.co.uk
prospectmagazine.co.uk
And that's just 242-year history of America, you can go back to Rome, Greece or Ancient Egypt and see thousands of years of vitriol inside any large human collective.
Modern tools could do a better job, sure. Twitter, FB, YouTube and the rest could use some kind of reputation systems, which at least provide a gradient of user interaction instead of just blacklisting.
But politics have never been pure, it's a myth. Don't blame communication platforms (although again, they can do better), blame the humans that use them.
No. Reason made this short video about the political attacks from the election of 1800
But there are times where it is better/worse than others.
Short answer: Nope.
A couple years ago I read "Freedom for the Thoughts That We Hate." Aside from the history of the 1st Amendment, my #1 takeaway was: "politics has always been ugly and dirty."
That said, I think what's difference now is more and more people are less and less aware of history, as well as the fact that the MSM has finally figured out how to make money in the internet age (i.e., a "news" cycle based on controversy).
Editorial: Say what you want about Trump (I'm not a fan either) but even at his worst he's no where near as dangerous as Dick Cheney. To believe otherwise is only a sign of not understanding Cheney's nastiness.
Even if you compare DJT to BHO, BHO was no saint either (e.g., Wall Street was "pardoned" but Snowden was a Most Wanted). However, the MSM's narrative of BHO was one that over-glorified the upside and completely ignored the darkside. Unfortunately, playing to that manufactured extreme contrast today is good for profits in the DJT era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_for_the_Thought_That_W...
Outlets that parrot press releases and the narrative dictated to them via back channels.
Outlets where asking questions, analysis and looking beyond the common narrative is frowned upon.
Outlets that shamelessly relabel editorial / op-ed as news and/or journalism.
Outlets that self-anoint themselves as "trusted."
Outlets that say they are "world news" or "international news" and then focus 95% of their coverage on the USA.
Outlets that use non-vetted tweets as content / sources.
Outlets that refuse to police other outlets because they are afraid of "retaliation" from other outlets.
Outlets that employ the BuzzFeed mindset and tactics as a means to "journalism excellence."
Your definition seems closer to “low-quality” or “biased”. As in “The low-quality, biased media only talks about the good sides of Barack Obama”. Is that what you meant?
More and more people that other people are listening to are less and less aware of history. The internet has given a platform to many more voices. Some of those new voices have worthwhile things to say. And others are coming from places that are rather disconnected from reality. Before, the only place those people got heard was at the corner bar. Now the whole world can hear them.
For example, after the Civil War in the U.S., politics got extremely bad due to the large numbers of voters who were veterans and were receiving money from the government. Things got less nasty after those people died.
The idea is that nowadays in the U.S., there are several ways large numbers of voters get money from the government: welfare, government employment, and government contractor employment. Speaking generally, the Democrats tend to have more voters on welfare and directly employed by the government, while the Republicans tend to have more voters in government contractor jobs. So, each party has policies that give more money to their constituents, which results in bitter political fighting.
I know I'm being hand-wavy but that's the general idea. Here are some links that support this idea:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/07/12/the-politics...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/upshot/how-we-became-bitt...
(Also, politics after the civil war was brutal because Reconstruction was necessarily the destruction and re-building of a culture at gunpoint, that of the slave owners. Their resentment is still a poisonous factor in current US politics, Charlottesville passim)
20 years ago was 1998, the year Clinton was impeached - the politics were just as slimy 20 years ago, the reality of it was just not as readily at our fingertips as it is today.
I can't imagine that, if the Democrats win the election next month, if they vote to impeach Trump, that any of them will cry about it, ever. I can't imagine that the Republicans shed any tears over voting to impeach Clinton, either.
If something that Trump did that was good was considered revenue, and something he did that was bad was considered costs, you're saying that it has all been costs? Or do you mean that in your view his profits = revenue - costs has been negative? I'm sure you can go around the country and DC and find plenty of people who think Trump has earned revenue, so to speak, even if they think he's a net negative.
Anyway, the points are all subjective, so no-one can balance the books but each individual voter.
I think we are now in a similar situation: we have an entirely new media and we haven't had time yet to adjust to it and to find its rules and limits. And I think this is very dangerous.
In most cases, reversing several decades of stability and progress would have been considered a very troubling development.
There are plenty of close calls to show that the schemes were serious: Bolsonaro was stabbed, Reagan was shot, etc.
For me, the watershed moment was reading the opening paragraphs of A.H.M. Joness, Augustus. The politicaal divides and platforms of 40 BCE look exactly like those of the 1960s (when Jones waas writing0 or 2010s, when I read his words.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6i2h0e/ahm_jon...
I suppose you might say those are just attempts, but that's more a reflection of better security details. The underlying willingness of people to murder others over politics is still evident from the attempts.
Regarding civil wars, I would think you'd know about Syria at least. Wikipedia gives me 17 civil wars since 2000. We could roughly triple that if you want me to cut off anything from the 60s or before:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civil_wars
If the only political assassination you're aware of is JFK and the only civil war is the US civil war, which is the only way I can come up with those cutoff dates, then I submit that you might want to look at more world news.
A prime example is that the US is on the verge of confirming a man on to the supposedly apolitical Supreme Court that says under oath that his political opponents have created a vast conspiracy to bring him personally down. If that man is telling the truth, that is an awful moment in political history. If that man is lying, that is an awful moment in political history. It doesn't matter which side of that issue you are on, but something is happening here that would be unthinkable a couple decades ago.
You are also EXPECTED to have a binary opinion on all these issues with no room for differing opinions.
Look at the NFL protests during the anthem. Kneel and you are a bleeding heart liberal that hates the cops. Stand and you are a red hat conservative promoting police brutality and the Private Prison Complex.
Every day there's a new outrage that somehow splits up the community down party lines.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/13/tea-party-bill...
I've overheard a few conversations of my coworkers (yes, anecdote) about the whole Kavanaugh debate and pretty much every one of them was pretty common sense (e.g. not sure if I believe her, but Kavanugh certainly sounds like he isn't an angel).
Here's a great interactive explanation of how this works: https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb
To speak even more generally, humans make tools that amplify our impact. Some of those tools make us better at being terrible, some make us better at being clever, some do both.
TV and visual information mediums are very effective at promoting emotions, but make it very difficult to convey rational arguments and thoughts. Notice how easily you can be distracted by the appearance of the messenger and not pay attention to the message itself.
There is a very good book on this called "Amusing ourselves to death", by Neil Postman. He wrote this in 1985 and he was far ahead of his time.
Nobody is saying this
Robert Bork, the man Nixon promised a Supreme Court seat to for assisting with the Saturday Night Massacre, was fairly close to making it to the supreme court. He blamed "ultraliberals, radicals and leftists" and their dangerous tactics for his vote failing. Hardly unthinkable.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/23/a-stu...
As for civility, you can argue that but in my mind that civility ended with the candidacy of Trump. I hold the belief that civility is overrated though, I would much rather have them be honest than civil.
It takes a mass tragedy to unite people. Look at what happened to GWB's approval after 9/11!
I worry it will take another war or mass terror attack to get us out of this divide we are in.
If only I were Ozymandias planning a fake Alien attack on New York to bring everyone together...
no. politics, by definition, is the exertion of power, and that is "poisonous", in the sense that someone will not like it, and will, if possible, resist and potentially counter-attack.
it's an interesting mental exercise to consider whether or not all unhappiness stems from the application of power.
so you don't necessarily need a separate word or phrase for the observance of political parties and other governmental actors as they exert power--that's just "watching politics".
Great historical references as well. The Founding Fathers, though incredible people, were extremely partisan.
First: Gerrymandering [1] - as districts have become more and more solid for either party it naturally results in candidates with a less centrist view. A couple decades ago the candidates being elected often to win voters from both sides to get elected. Now that we have many more situations where it's 80%+ party dominance in a district we get more extreme people representing us.
Second: Demographic shifts in apportionment [2]. We sort of take for granted that we have a fixed number (435) of representatives spread across the states and 2 senators per state. But this wasn't always the case, originally it was 1 representative per 30,000. If we followed this through to today we'd have 10,000 representatives. This plus the growing urban vs rural divide (which was the reason we halted the growth in representatives anyway) all contribute to the greater divide.
I point this out because structural issues like this are fixable in a way that throwing up our hands and saying: "politics always has been bad" does not.
1- https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2017/07/06/a-pr...
2 - https://www.census.gov/population/apportionment/about/histor...
When politics goes bad, it goes really bad.
What's interesting is that when studying the fall of the Republic, it makes sense to start with these guys. Roman politics had always been high stakes and cut throat, but this was when it took a turn for the violent. Starting 130BC, it started going downhill. In the next few decades, this violence gradually became regular civil war, especially after military reforms that meant that poor people could sign up to be soldiers.
By around 60BC, a politician would run up massive debts to get elected, try to make it as much money during the 1 year consulship and then try to rob whichever province they became governor of. If they lost the election, they had no hope of paying back the debts, unless they launched a civil war, overthrew the state and seized power. Catiline was one such person.
Things got worse after that. The sham of democracy remained, even after Augustus cemented power.
Point being, the Republic took nearly a century to die, it didn't happen overnight. The degrading of politics was a gradual process. Previously unthinkable acts are normalised. Good people who are disgusted with the state of politics leave, and the horrible people remain, leading a race to the bottom.
Don't forget the little old Hamilton-Burr incident in Weehawken. It's so odd to read journalists whining about poisoned politics. If you go back in history, there hasn't been a period where we didn't have political contention. And a lot of that was fueled by newspapers ( many times owned by politicians themselves ). One of the reasons for the Hamilton-Burr duel was because of hate Hamilton's newspaper ( NY Post ) wrote about Burr.
> Twitter, FB, YouTube and the rest could use some kind of reputation systems, which at least provide a gradient of user interaction instead of just blacklisting.
They should let it be a open uncensored platform to ideas and opinions. If anything limit the journalists, newspapers, etc. Twitter and the rest of social media used to be fun ( even if was offensive ). It became toxic when so many journalists/media types started getting involved.
Take twitter. Who is responsible for a significant amount the toxicity? The journalists and celebrities with the blue check mark.
It's fueled from both directions. In a tweet you don't really have context or body language or any of the other signals to tell you how someone means their message to be taken, so it's a lot easier to unintentionally offend. And then because you don't have to face the consequences of digitally "throwing a punch" a lot of people just fire off a nasty tweet without really caring.
I guess I see it as not surprising. Civilization is fragile, and the institutions that hold it up take generations to build. All of it is basically a thin veneer over our animal selves that helps us individually and collectively function as a higher level creature than we really are.
The internet fundamentally changes most things about communication and therefore human interaction and therefore the institutions of civilization itself. And really, looking back at the original internet ethos, that was kind of the point. So it shouldn't be surprising that something we use to "disrupt" civilization is in fact disruptive to civilization.
Not everyone goes nuts behind the wheel of a car either. But the thing is when the potential mob is the entire national or world population it doesn't take a very large percentage of the mob going "road rage" to turn the thing violent, you know what I mean?
It's like the whole "yelling fire in a crowded theater" problem.
This, in many cases, allows for better and more rational discussions. On the other hand, when people do directly address on the internet behind the veil of anonymity, the lack of social pressures also removes disincentives to act like hooligans.
It's different form of communication and has its advantages and disadvantages.
And you know how it is with these things, when you see anything you wrote get retweeted a ton or liked a ton, it gives you that kind of thrill. So the angry voice gets a bunch of positive reinforcement.
The answer you're looking for is Dunbar's Number [1] and it's been an issue since the agricultural revolution. Humans simply struggle to cooperate with, care about, and even understand people outside of a small group. Human societies have developed governments and legal codes in response. It's not a perfect system, though, and the Internet has begun to reveal the cracks in the mortar.
Prior to the Internet, groups of people tended to segregate themselves geographically. This allowed independent cultures, governments, and legal systems to develop. The Internet has broken down those barriers and revealed the contradiction to all of us.
The internet has created the biggest connection of people the world has ever seen. It's no surprise that among the many who use it, there are a bunch that lack critical thinking, and tend to just subscribe to whatever group roughly matches their ideology. It's not long before theories like Hillary Clinton being a lizard can start to gain traction.
Millions of dollars of advertising money have gone into making them think that - and into reducing their desire to do critical thinking.
https://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/super-pac-scams-11458...
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/why-conservatives-suddenl...
https://www.vox.com/2015/10/23/9603028/conservative-marketin...
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con (2012!)
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2018/04/scam-pacs-misleadin...
.. and that doesn't even require involving questions of foreign intelligence agencies and "psyops".
It takes a conscious effort to desensitize yourself to the raw bluntness found in heated online discussions, and many people never get to that point. So controversial topics frequently lead to nasty positive feedback loops that would have never occured in a face to face conversation.
I worked at JPL between 1988 and 2000. Somewhere during that time period -- I don't recall exactly when -- the IT people set up an internal Usenet newsgroup that could be posted to anonymously. The idea was that it would be a forum for people to candidly discuss issues that needed to be addressed by management.
Almost immediately it degenerated into a Lord-of-the-Flies style melee of the sort that is all too familiar today, but which was new and shocking back in the days before the WWW was really a thing. And this was not just random people off the street. These were all JPL employees, of which there were about 7000 back in the day.
It went on for several months until IT decided to disallow anonymous posting, and all the acrimony immediately ceased.
With enough bots, you gain the ability to create any narrative you want. Create story, then create the image that you want the supporters of one side to have, followed by the image for the other side. Use bots and retweets to amplify.
You gain the power to define what's happening culturally if the news reports actually take Twitter trends as what's happening culturally. Create a villian, politicize the villain, popularize / demonize websites, etc.
An entire Twitter event can be orchestrated to amplify the irrational into a position believed to be popular/main stream.
The only recourse is to treat Twitter just like any other message board...and ignore it.
The cynic in me says this will never happen for the same reason Twitter even made it into the mainstream in the first place: star power.
As long as celebs roost on twitter, the press not be will be right behind to gather the fallen feathers.
Imagine a twitter where you actually have no way of knowing whether an account is "real" or not. Perhaps people then would take it far less seriously, and the only safe approach for a celebrity to take would be to say "we don't use Twitter" via other channels.
Well, then again, that would be Twitter shooting itself in the foot.
I've had similar thoughts. My account is "verified", because it was pretty easy to get that blue tick mark. Make my tweets open, and...that was pretty much it. Just wait around a while for the review process.
Unknown if that process is more difficult or involved nowadays, but when I did it? I just asked and they gave.
In the past there was at least some attempt to check the facts behind a story, now it's all a matter of 'let's throw everything at the wall and see what sticks'. I've seen literal fake news sites have stories make their way into print media outlets, half the internet go insane over a blurry photo of a piece of paper and sites take random trolls at their word like its gospel.
The standards for proof in the gaming/tech/entertainment/celebrity worlds have basically hit rock bottom already, and the standards for more mainstream sources are steadily heading that way.
There’s a truism that the people who talk the most have the least to say. In the 90s you could witness newsgroups slowly get taken over by such people. They went from places where people interacted and communicated to places that were no more than sources of disinformation and flamewars. Modern social media is like post apocalyptic Usenet, except it’s occupied by the general population, not just scammers and mentally ill CS majors. I think that’s really messed up and can’t possibly be good for anyone.
Eg, my twitter feed shows me tweets of similar themes to those that I recently engage with. The more I engage the more that theme dominates my feed.
So it’s easy to see that someone who engages with tweets of any partisan political commentary can easily get pulled deeper and deeper into that murk with an echo chamber that filters out the opposing viewpoints.
Besides politics the same can happen with conspiracy theories and religious zealotry.
With a different algorithm Twitter could be a remarkably different experience. The current one has a strong bias toward engagement & velocity. It amplifies anger, outrage, and bad faith arguments over less "engaging" content.
If Twitter let off the engagement pedal a bit and re-factored the algorithm, our political climate might be less hostile overnight.
These companies have long claimed their algorithms are politically unbiased. That's not true. While I don't believe they lean left or right, they certainly have a strong bias towards extremism. Extremism keeps you engaged, which maximizes the time you spend in their apps.
Imagine if Twitter instead decided to bias their algorithm towards positivity
Except Twitter can be used to accumulate and wield power just the same. There are clearly bots on the platform trying to push certain narratives and bury others.
==Twitter has admitted that more than 50,000 Russia-linked accounts used its service to post automated material about the 2016 US election== [1]
How is that better?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/19/twitter-a...
Mind you this in a no-stakes free to play game and the phenomenon seems common. Sometimes I think our culture is not ready for a substantial part of our communication not to be face to face.
It sounds like your company needs to fire these toxic individuals ASAP before the company gets taken to the cleaners in a lawsuit for allowing this to go on.
Social media sites are like if everyone in the world could hear everything you said, without the necessary context to understand why you said it. They've unintentionally exposed the fact everyone has skeletons in the closet and that all kinds of disturbing things are said/done outside of the public view.
You turn the TV volume off, but members of the media have been perusing the seats for a interesting cherry-picked "announcer". Finding one, they parrot it to the rest of the world and that guy's opinion shows up on your phone anyway.
Cached version, no login required
"A majority of UK voters still do not have a Twitter account."
"By 2012, the number of Brits with (more or less active) Twitter accounts had overtaken the number of people who regularly bought a newspaper."
Hard times for the newspapers, I guess.
Given that twitter has achieved a defacto ligitimized status as a mouthpiece of US policy - how should it be viewed/regulated/handled differently, if any?
Also - what efforts is twitter taking to use the fact that POTUS has compulsive tweeting issues to sell the service to less sophisticated power systems in the world.
Are people in other countries, namely more developing countries, encouraged by twitter to use twitter as an official messaging system for their political machinations?
I mean, the philippines is one of the most connected-via-mobile developing nations, with a large population in the US and a very western society -- is twitter attempting to be an official platform in the philippines? I would expect so.
What about other nations?
Then, when they are a defacto standard medium for power structures communicating to their populations, then what standards is twitter held to? What implications does/will this have?
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, even Linkedin, do they really bring more benefits than detriments? I personally don't think so.
And before #MeToo, there was "Me too!" :-)
Maybe the world is just a better place when almost all of us keep our mouths shut almost all of the time.
Despite subscribing to one of those bot blocklists, it's still incessant. There's just so many bots. It's become a mild hobby of mine to hop on the latest "Twitter Moment" about politics just to refresh my public blocklist.
I... uhh... think that is arguably just about as biased as twitter.
Maybe go talk to people, you know, outside? A dark bar if outsides not your thing? If you feel someones online statements are the truth in their heart, I am afraid we are at an impasse.
Why are you presuming I don't talk to people at bars? Just last night I had the opportunity to talk to some of the flood of young conservatives shipped into the city for fleet week, at a bar.
The next 20 years will see a fascinating evolution in this space. Nobody should think that competition is over, or that these platforms have won. These issues should feel very exciting to folks in technology.
Twitter still refuses to publicly state how many of its users are bots largely because it knows the financial implications for doing so.
Facebook has released the bare minimum amount of information related to Russian interference, despite reports that its still ongoing.
What does competition look like against these companies when the financial incentives encourage more consumer data gathering, not less?
I agree with the parent comment in that - Google and Facebook and the like have exposed some serious problems, that they can't fix (as they are financially incentivized not to fix them), so someone, someday will come along and eat their lunch? Who what when where and why? Your guess is as good as mine.
We have a lot of power in tech to make things better, but we often pass it on, and let those who want to exploit it take advantage of our passiveness.
> At 3.12pm on 20th November 2014, Emily Thornberry hit tweet. The Labour MP for Islington South and Finsbury, then serving as Shadow Attorney General, posted a photograph of a house in Kent, decked with three flags bearing the St George’s Cross. Her caption? “Image from #Rochester.” At 6.15pm she tweeted again, apologising for “any offence caused by the three flag picture,” adding that “people should fly the England flag with pride!” By 10.30pm she had resigned from the front bench.
> The political autopsy lasted days, focusing largely on the question of whether Thornberry had opened a window on to metropolitan Labour’s cultural alienation from—and perhaps even contempt for—working-class voters in small towns. But looking back, the significance of that episode is not as a snapshot of political turbulence, but as a development in the process that turns turbulence into news. What stands out is the medium, not the message. In autumn 2014, Twitter was already a recreational habit for Britain’s political class. But “Image from #Rochester” marked a watershed moment for the social media website. Without the super-accelerated online frenzy, there was no story.
> Four years later, the Twitterstorm is not only routine, it is the qualifying benchmark for newsworthy controversy. Anyone who doesn’t squander hours every day on the platform might be baffled as to why its name occurs with such frequency in news bulletins. A majority of UK voters still do not have a Twitter account. Yet the site’s impact in Westminster and on the way politics works is real and exceptional, not because of how many people use it, but because of who they are—politicians, their devotees and the journalists supposed to be holding them to account.