Was there a time when politics wasn't full of poison? By the end Thomas Jefferson hated George Washington so much he refused to attend his funeral.
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.
Politics may never have been pure and things today aren't as bad as they were at certain points in human history, but I am honestly surprised that people here aren't recognizing that there has been a pretty stark change in how politics have been progressing in the last decade versus the several previous decades. The polarization has increased drastically and the civility of political discourse and faith in institutions has dropped considerably.
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.
I think this is the issue; at least in the U.S. EVERYTHING is becoming more politicized no matter how inane.
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.
It's classic divide and conquer. The ultra rich have framed politics as red vs. blue, when in reality it has always been (and always will be): them vs. the rest of us.
i remember during the financial crisis thinking if only the tea party and the occupy crowd realized they were two sides to the same coin maybe something great could have happened. I feel like that dawned on the powers-that-be and the old divide and conquer technique was quickly applied; tea party turned far right, occupy turned far left and they've been fighting ever sense.
It's eerily similar to the Machiavellian approach to alliances. Something along the lines of joining forces only with those who are weaker than you but can be used to amass power against your greatest threats. In the context of the examples you provided: major party identifies small group making noise, major party aligns themselves with that group, major party exploits that group as tool against opposing major party, major party under no obligation to truly pursue agenda of absorbed group due to relative power.
I blame the media. They only ever cover the most extreme viewpoints. They wouldn't get clicks otherwise if an article was titled "Voter aren't sure what to make of the Supreme Court nominee".
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).
I would go one step further and say that I blame the medium.
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.
Media is not merely a reflection, but a perpetuator of extremes. If everyone stopped using media, there would still be extremist, but they would be so far distant we wouldn't think of them or their ideas.
Absolutely, only meant to point out that the media brings out the worst that is already in us rather than corrupting otherwise civil beings.
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.
I am saying this. There's no reason for anyone to stand for the national anthem, these days. Women should be kneeling in protest, men should be kneeling in solidarity.
then just say no. stop falling for the partisan trap and assert your right to have an opinion disconnected from a political identity (even if that opinion more-or-less falls in line with one of those parties).
It's interesting that you say this would be unthinkable a couple decades ago when it seems, on the face of it, that it's pretty similar to the Clarence Thomas confirmation process in 1991. Do you see them as distinctly different?
> 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.
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.
In most countries in the world either nowadays or in historical perspective it would be unimaginable that there would be a dialog between different cluster of powers. They'd just try to destroy each other no matter what.
I agree that politics has polarized in the last decade, but I would say the primary cause is the wave of populism in the aftermath of the financial crisis, which has overlapped with, and been amplified by, the social media explosion.
I am old enough to remember that the supreme court choose Bush as president -- that was an aweful moment (and would have been so if it was the other way around too). A conspiracy by one side to harm the other, that is politics.
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.
I think there are two real structural changes to how the political system is configured that have led to an increase in partisanship.
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.
No, but that is not the point. The point is how media change the way politics is made and ultimately shape the society. For example, I think it could be argued that mass media (newspapers, radio) heavily contributed to the totalitarian drift of the first half of the twentieth century in Europe: pervasive communication without proper balances can be effectively used to hammer slogans into people's heads.
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.
No doubt politics has always been dirty, but the existence now of a system which, by design, automates the amplification of the most obnoxious of its millions of users, has to have had some effect.
Who was the presidential candidate who traveled around by train telling everyone his opponent had died? I always laugh when people try to claim politics is only slimy and dirty now.
Many have a justified distrust of any 'reputation systems', just look how the concept is used in China. Whoever controls the system has great potential for social engineering
Never forget the Gracchi brothers. Populist reformers who were both executed by the Senate because of the threat they represented to patrician power. The older of the two was killed in an area of Rome where weapons were not permitted, by senators, while he was Tribune and technically sacrosanct.
A word on the Gracchis. The Gracchis were radical reformers by the standards of their time - they wanted to take lands from large landowners and give it back to landless peasants. Tiberius Gracchus was clubbed to death in broad daylight. Gaius committed suicide when he knew his death was inevitable.
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.
> Was there a time when politics wasn't full of poison? By the end Thomas Jefferson hated George Washington so much he refused to attend his funeral.
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.
America wasn't like this 20 years ago. Politics has always been bad, and there's times it's been even worse, but that doesn't mean it's not trending downward right now.
Somewhere I read that the idea proposed that the more money flows from the government to voters, the more mud slinging happens.
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:
This would imply there's some correlation between countries with large state sectors and political vitriol and dissonance, which absolutely does not appear to be the case.
(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.
All right, lets go back just a bit further - to Watergate. The House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Nixon. One member called his wife, said that they had voted to impeach, and then started crying. This was one of the Representatives who voted in favor of impeachment, crying (I believe) because it was a tragedy for the country as a whole that it had come to this.
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.
No one in Washington would cry about Trump being impeached because Trump has done literally nothing with the Presidency that would earn respect from anyone. Even his own party sees him as little but a seat-filler who's only useful because he picks appointees along party lines.
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.
To continue your analogy, the revenue that Trump has made to date has been by selling the furniture. It's like a new Google CEO came in and sold the datacenters and said "look at the revenue!"
It was slimy as fuck, but it wasn't this bad. Someone like Trump could never have been taken seriously 20 years ago; a lot had to change to get us to this point. There's ample and varied evidence that American partisanship has skyrocketed in the last quarter-century (for example: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/05/takeaways-on...).
20 years ago, Clinton tells a lie about his personal life and gets impeached; today, Trump lies about things which have actual life-or-death consequences for US citizens, and that's just ordinary political background noise and you're crazy if you get upset by such a minor thing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Well... the lie about his personal life was under oath, and about sexual behavior in the office during a lawsuit about sexual harassment. I think Clinton was a pretty good president, mostly, but this seems like impeachable behavior to me.
> "Was there a time when politics wasn't full of poison?"
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.
> I think what's difference now is more and more people are less and less aware of history...
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.
I'm not going to disagree. But perhaps it's a chicken v egg situation? That is, people would be wiser about who / what they listened to __if__ they were more aware of context. What is at play is confirmation bias gone wild. Start with a false / flawed idea and there are plenty of ways to reinforce that.
I see. How do you define “mainstream media”? Outlets with a very large audience? In the sense that large media outlets covered Barack Obama one way, and small media outlets another?
Are you sure you understand what the word “mainstream” means? A recent dictionary defines mainstream as “representing the prevalent attitudes, values, and practices of a society or group”. You don’t seem to use that meaning of the word at all.
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?
> "Was there a time when politics wasn't full of poison?"
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.
well, my definition is admittedly a little bit of an extrapolation from the greek root (city affairs), but it's common in writings about government and power. that's because you can't govern a group of people without the exertion of power (making people do things they may otherwise not do, like throwing trash on the ground as a benign example).
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".
The lesson isn't "this should be normal" or "don't worry about it", but that the underlying dynamics -- political, social, economic, media -- are so damned consistent. The dynamics are systemic. Which means it's quite helpful to see where and when the dager signs are reappearing.
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.
Bolsonaro was stabbed in Brazil just months ago. Congressional Republicans had someone come to their baseball game and shoot at them. There have been all those assassinations involving Russia, as well. There was that relative of NK dictator Kim's that was poisoned. And that's just recent news, if I actually researched it we'd have a long list. You don't have to go that far back to remember things like President Reagan being shot.
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:
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.
You think the examples are all before the 60s? There were some very prominent political assassinations during the 60s, Watergate happened during the 70s, etc.
I posted above, but I see no reason to limit things to the USA and I see no reason to limit assassinations to only the successful ones. Just because politicians have better security and actually thwart more assassination attempts, that doesn't mean that the underlying willingness to murder people over politics has gone anywhere.
There are plenty of close calls to show that the schemes were serious: Bolsonaro was stabbed, Reagan was shot, etc.
During the time of Alexandria they 'hated' each other so much they burned everything down and we had 1000 years dark ages. I hope humanity will not be that stupid again.
Part of me wonders if it's possible that there's just something about the nature of the internet that induces instability in otherwise-ordinary people. I think about photosensitive epilepsy and how it was a more-or-less benign feature of the human brain until technological progress caused flashing lights to be absolutely everywhere. I worry that I can't discount the possibility that some heretofore latent feature of human thinking is incompatible (in a physiological sense, not just a psychological sense) with being perpetually plugged into the internet. I know enough people that have gone from "totally outwardly normal" to "detached-from-reality, Hillary Clinton is a lizard person" (this isn't an exaggeration, yes, people I know in real life appear to sincerely think this) and I'm struggling to think of what else could contribute to such seeming mass psychosis. It's more than just propaganda, it's people deliberately abandoning critical thinking.
I'd just call it "road rage." There's some research into this and my high-level understanding is that when people feel "safe inside their armor" - whether that's the metal of the car or the semi-anonymity of the internet, their animal instincts come out.
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.
Huh, that's interesting because introspection tells me it's the opposite for me. When I'm in my safe zone is when I can comfortably be rational and calm almost all the time. If I ever said something rash or that I didn't mean it would probably be when someone engages me and makes me feel uncomfortable in real life, never over the internet.
Yeah I mean people are all different. I know what you mean about feeling calmer behind the keyboard, something about seeing what I'm about to say often makes me tone it down or rephrase it.
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.
It's complicated I think. Behind the keyboard, there generally aren't the same social pressures (due to anonymity and often others aren't directing their thoughts at you as an individual, but rather as a group) and time constraints to organize thoughts that come with oral communication.
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.
It is what you are saying, and exacerbated by the huge gap in power and control between elites/politicians and the average person. You have CEOs and politicians making decisions that ruin people's lives. With Twitter, people are suddenly put at the same level where they can speak back to power, directly and angrily.
Yes, angrily. It's a channel that somewhat rewards anger, too, since the nasty tweet probably has a whole bunch of other people who "kind of wanted to say that" who will retweet and like, since it lets them get in on the screed without feeling fully guilty of saying it themselves.
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.
Another equally valid frame is that you have a system designed by those same CEO's that explicitly encourages people to be as pissed off as possible, all the time, so their rage can be cynically farmed for clicks and ads.
Absolutely this too. There's a lot of money to be made from making people angry (see cable news). I don't know anyone who makes money calming the crowd down. Is there such thing as a social media mob therapist? :)
This. How many times have you said casually "I'm going to kill ...?" Probably a lot, but now with Twitter it's a death threat. I post under real name to protect against that internet anonymity psychology.
I worry that I can't discount the possibility that some heretofore latent feature of human thinking is incompatible (in a physiological sense, not just a psychological sense) with being perpetually plugged into the internet.
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.
Human beings are susceptible to "group think". If a large group of people are saying something, we're more likely to believe it, which means we are more likely to parrot it, which means the group of people that subscribe to that thought grows. It's a recursive cycle.
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.
I think anonymity is a major contributing factor. Here's a data point:
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.
Twitter is the collective thoughts of humanity when we're on our boring train commute, at home in our underwear at 2:00 am alone in our apartments, trying to waste time at work, in line at the supermarket, and in myriad other situations that put us at our most misanthropic, isolated, bitter, and sad. Twitter generally is a toxic cesspit, and the only reason to go on there is because whatever is going on in your life is worse than that.
I think the internet creates instability at least partially because 1. Anonymity/distance lets people say things they would never dare say in person and 2. Most people naturally perceive others' internet comments as if they were said in person.
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 think the internet just makes craziness possible on a much larger scale. It's much easier for manipulators to spread false information to a large number of people. Previously it wasn't that easy to enrage millions of people.
From the moment that news outlets started reporting on things said on Twitter years ago, I assumed this would happen.
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 engagement of user responses seems to have no bearing on whether a news article will embed them. I cannot count the times I have seen some CNN, Business Insider, etc. article talking about the latest Twitter 'controversy', and the tweets they link to have a handful (zero-to-five) of retweets and stars.
Yep, so many mountains made out of molehills when the media reports on Twitter (or any other social media site). Now one guy saying something is apparently seen as a 'trend'.
It also doesn't help that no one seems to 'verify' anything anymore, especially when social media 'sources' are concerned. So, so many hoaxes make their way into the 'media' thanks to Twitter and Reddit that it's kind of ridiculous.
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.
This almost makes me wonder if "Verified" accounts is a step in the wrong direction.
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.
This almost makes me wonder if "Verified" accounts is a step in the wrong direction.
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.
Politics has always reflected poorly on humanity, but the existence of Twitter, Facebook, etc. these days have basically brought Usenet to the masses. Not good Usenet either- bad Usenet, after it was overrun by spammers and trolls.
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.
It’s worse than the bad usenet because social media curated the content you engage with into a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop.
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.
I'm glad the article mentioned Twitter's engagement algorithm — I don't think enough attention is being paid to it.
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
Media criticism of Twitter is suspect. If the Weinstein case in the US has demonstrated anything, it is that news is itself a currency that can be traded, hoarded and deployed to accumulate and wield power. Twitter is one of several welcome checks and balances against that practice, with hopefully more to follow.
==news is itself a currency that can be traded, hoarded and deployed to accumulate and wield power. Twitter is one of several welcome checks and balances against that practice, with hopefully more to follow.==
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]
It's not only Twitter or politics. I've been playing some Heroes of the Storm as team building with my company and when we are not a full team the toxicity can get intense, with some people going far beyond just in match flaming to harassing with death and rape threats in direct messages long after the match is over.
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.
> some people going far beyond just in match flaming to harassing with death and rape threats in direct messages long after the match is over.
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.
I can’t remember who originally said this, but the problem with Twitter is that you think you’re engaging in jokey banter with your mates but random strangers are reading each tweet without context in absolute seriousness and judging you
Makes sense. Then again, I think the more general explanation here is that social media removes the 'multiple faces' people put on for different situations. In real life, no one acts the same way towards their family, their friends, their colleagues, their boss, the police/government, random people on the street, etc. They say different things to different people based on whats socially acceptable in that situation.
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.
Twitter is like trying to watch a football game where all 40,000 members of the audience have a microphone and each think they should be the announcer.
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.
I doubt that Twitter has improved politics, but I can remember them being pretty poisonous well before that. I also found a couple of sentences in the article a little bit apart:
"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."
Twitter should start placing a visual marker on Tweets that have been posted via their API. Maybe a yellow exclamation mark around the same location as the blue check mark (which is for verified accounts).
How many people/resources does twitter have on staff specifically dedicated to coddling the POTUS?
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?
I am of the opinion that in a couple of decades we will look back at all these social networks and find that they caused a lot of problems, in social and personal levels.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, even Linkedin, do they really bring more benefits than detriments? I personally don't think so.
Thanks - interesting read. I always took “the medium is the message” a little differently than that author does. To me, I felt like McCluhan was saying that it almost doesn’t matter what the message is — the medium itself is the message, and it’s a message that is consistent regardless of the information being conveyed through it. It’s why Trump is so effective at Twitter — it’s not what he says so much as he is tapped into the medium better than almost anyone else.
I just wish it wasn't full of bots... facebook is my only actual way to put a thumb on political opinions across the spectrum I have access to (friends in SF, Texas, South Carolina, Wisconsin, and then internationally).
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.
> facebook is my only actual way to put a thumb on political opinions across the spectrum
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.
The only people I talk to on Facebook are my real life friends. Why wouldn't their posts be the truth in their heart?
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.
How about we take a look at the relationship of the size of an original tweet and click-bait headlines? Twitter wasn't the beginning, it was just a massive next step on click-bait to get eyeballs on ads. It has evolved to the point of punditry and playing to "your" audience and being actually false. Hey, at least "Headless Body found in Topless Bar" was accurate.
Whatever is broken is an opportunity to create something better. Problems wont cause a retreat to three TV networks. It wasn't long ago that we had Myspace, Friendster, and Geocities.
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.
How does this mentality address the issue that Twitter and Facebook have evolved into what they are based largely on the capital incentives to grow as quickly as possible, be as opaque as possible, and gather as much consumer data as possible?
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?
While I agree generally with what you're saying "We're screwed indefinitely until the incentives change", I like to remind myself that IBM was once one of the most dominating companies in the world. Yea, IBM (and my parents were children during this time). All companies come and go, literally all of them. In a few decades we (i.e., our descendants) will be looking back thinking how funny it is that we (i.e., us) ever got sucked into this so viciously.
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.
Instead of crapping all over one platform or another, or thinking politics is full of cheats and con men, what are we doing to promote ideas that aren't my half will chant at your half.
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.
The cost of communication has fallen much faster (quantity of discourse) than the cost of education (quality of discourse). I don't just mean monetary cost: time, effort, and attention required to communicate is much less than the amount of those three required to keep yourself informed.
Twitter is great for publishing information updates. It's terrible for having a conversation or reasoned debate. Almost all of the built-in incentives are the exact opposite of what you'd want if you were creating a place for conversation and debate.
As far as I can tell, it's only three paragraphs with no actual substance. I wasn't able to get the cached version of it, so here's a dump:
> 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.
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.