In which I blame Facebook

In which I blame Facebook for the decline and fall of civil discourse, reasonable disagreement, and the whole democratic process

(Good times!)

So: I voted for Bernie this primary. My wife voted Hillary. We're both pretty low-key about it, we both like both candidates and their policies in general, we're not super partisan, we'll both vote for whichever one wins – at the end of the day I don't really think there'd be a huge difference between a Sanders or a Clinton presidency.

(If your eyes just went wide at that, hang in there, because that's what I'm here to talk about.)

We both use Facebook, just like you. We have, unsurprisingly, a large amount of overlap in our friends list. Neither one of us posts much about politics (in fact I'm not sure she ever has at all.) But the algorithm that selects what to include on our respective feeds has picked up on our mild political leanings and we are seeing completely different news about each candidate – seriously, it's like our feeds are bulletins from alternate universes. We’ll be sitting at the table and one of us will say hey did you see that thing on Facebook about the thing, and the other will be like uh no I saw the thing on Facebook about the exact opposite of that thing. Weird.

For example, compare this:

Bernie Sanders Wins the Nevada Caucus After All: “We caught the Hillary campaign cheating, we caught the Nevada Democratic Party secretary cheating”

to this:

Serial cheater Bernie Sanders tried to retroactively steal Nevada from Hillary Clinton today

(This isn’t the best possible example – these are just what happened to be at hand this morning. The idea of combing through both of our feed histories looking for the perfectly balanced pair of articles disagreeing about the same topic is just too depressing to contemplate; the point is that my wife’s and my relatively mild disagreement on political priorities has led us to be exposed to wildly conflicting “news” on the subject.)

So, sure, fine, partisan news sources exist. That’s not news, it’s not even new, and if that were all there was to this then I’d be doing something a lot more fun with my morning than typing all this out. What is new, I think, is that we are being exposed to this news in the context of the relatively convincing simulation of normal human interaction that is Facebook. It feels like a conversation between friends – you’re just talking to and sharing things with people you know, after all – and it is very easy to forget that the Algorithm is sitting in between us editing what we hear, picking and choosing what it thinks we want and discarding the rest.

And what we want, of course, is things that we agree with. This is well known, and pretty obvious: of course you’re going to be more likely to hit that thumbs up on the stuff that makes you happy, and less likely to do so on the stuff that doesn’t. So the Algorithm decides to show you more of the stuff you agree with, and less of the stuff you don’t, and pretty soon those people you’re friends with but maybe disagree with about politics or religion or whatever don’t seem to be on Facebook very much anymore. They are, of course. You’re just not seeing them, because the Algorithm has filtered each of you into separate echo chambers.

But it’s worse than that! Because not only are you in an echo chamber, the things you see in that echo chamber get more and more extreme. Partly this is just because echo chamber: people are going to feel more free to state things more strongly than they might if they were in the presence of friends who disagreed. But partly it’s because of the Algorithm, again: any equivocation or moderation, any “I agree with this part but not with that part,” is going to be less likely to bubble up to the top of anybody’s news feed, because more people will feel conflicted about hitting that like button on something they even partially disagree with. So the more ideologically pure a statement is, the more likely people are to see it. At least the people who already share that ideology.

The Algorithm promotes extremism. And so far I’ve only been talking about the stuff actual people say to each other: I haven’t really even mentioned the organizations and the content farms that have noticed this, too, and feed on it and contribute to it, whether for their own partisan purposes or just to grab onto their fraction of a penny per clickthrough. Not sure it’s worth doing a full exegesis on that end of things, it’s probably enough to say that that ends up promoting extremism too, for all the same reasons, and to the same end. Extremism leads to more extreme extremism. It’s concentric vicious cycles all the way down.

And I don’t know about you, but it kind of feels like extremism is a lot of what’s wrong with the world today. You know.

We treat Facebook like it’s part of the infrastructure at this point – I mean, it’s baked right into the operating system – and it’s really easy to forget that it’s not a trustworthy communication tool. That what you say may or may not be heard by the people you think you’re saying it to. Instagram went algorithmic not long ago. Twitter keeps trying, then backing down in the face of user outrage – just like Facebook did the first five or six times they introduced it. So it’s only a matter of time before they go too. So more and more often, in more and more places, you’re not talking to people: you’re talking to some software, which will decide whether or not it’s going to pass that message along.

Not for nefarious reasons. Just because that’s what you want. Nobody did this on purpose, we’re doing it to ourselves.

This is the part where I’m supposed to propose a solution, some way to fix it or at least make things less terrible. I don’t have one.

“Be less partisan,” I could wag my finger and say. Consider the possibility that you’re wrong. Read things you agree with more skeptically. Try to assume the person you disagree with isn’t completely stupid. Don’t bother sharing that news article: nobody who might be convinced by it to change their minds will ever even see that it’s there. Equivocate!

None of these are very good slogans. But it’s the best I got right now.