Social media discourse is a lightning rod for political alignment. The right sees it as an opportunity for radicalization while simultaneously decrying it as “woke” cancel culture where conservative voices are marginalized and red-lined. So far as I can tell, the left doesn’t actually have a coherent opinion on it; some celebrate cancel culture as establishing consequences for anti-social behaviour, much in the same way a dinner guest would be asked to leave if they loudly called another guest a racial slur. Others prefer to see a democratization of social media processes so that we could collectively agree on what the rules are rather than allow corporate moderators or the mob to determine dinner party etiquette. What I’m interested in today is the centrist position: where those corporate moderators are wildly celebrated for their autocratic role in sifting out acceptable discourse.
Let’s let the company that profits off of polarization manage the stamping out of polarizing content!
There is, of course, reason to be concerned with the content of social media discourse. The coup in Myanmar is widely held to be somewhat to blame on social media. The rise of right-wing populist movements like Trumpism in America, Brexit in the UK, and Modi‘s government in India are linked to social media disinformation campaigns. Reasonable people agree: the echo chambers of increasing extremism must be stopped. The methods of doing so are obviously up for debate: solutions ranging from a socialist revolution against social media corporations to the libertarian hellscape where we all cackle with glee as the social media inferno engulfs our world. As always, the reasonable centrist sees the solution somewhere in the middle: get those corporations to ban and lockdown the uncouth!
Despite me wanting to write this for a long time, contemporary examples have manifested themselves for me. Facebook has blocked Russian state media on its platform in light of their unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, and reversed some of its previous decisions by unblocking praise for the neo-Nazi Azov military battalion – if you’re very specific in praising them for their resistance against said Russians. This is a brilliant move by Facebook because empowering far-right revolutionaries against a Russian invasion worked so well in Afghanistan! I’m not saying such censorship is right or wrong; my point is that there is legitimate criticism to be made of how the discourse is being managed, and this decision was made unilaterally by a corporation with a pretty shifty track record.
Ukraine officially incorporated this overtly Nazi militia into its military after Russia annexed Crimea. I’m not saying invading Ukraine was an appropriate way to “de-Nazi” the country, but they clearly have some work to do with their own far right elements. Nuance!
There will always be political positions you disagree with, even find abhorrent. But allowing some emperor to dictate what is allowable discourse in a particular space is just as absurd as the coffeehouse bans enforced by the Ottomans and by Charles II hoping to rein in political dissent and “false news”. But that is the demand! WhatsApp needs to regulate the discourse on its App because right now it’s too secret! Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg need to personally review every single post to make sure that reading it won’t summon Sadako out of our phone screens in seven days. To dominate the bogeyman, we need a powerful ally, and there are none more powerful than the social media overlords.
This is bad. The right cries about social media censorship all the time, and… they’re not wrong! It’s tempting to say that it doesn’t count as censorship if the government isn’t doing it, and the irony is certainly amusing when otherwise pro-business ideologues are hurt and betrayed by business decisions against their personal interest, because, to be clear, these are businesses looking out for their bottom line. They’re not “woke“; they’re capitalists. They are making decisions based on what will make them the most money, and overt hate speech isn’t as lucrative as it used to be. But corporations are quickly becoming our new feudal lords, so their iron fist restricting the online commons is just as much a cause for alarm as any government cracking down on dissent. What makes money may shift over time if far right populism continue to grow in popularity!
The next Tickle Me Elmo to sweep the nation!
Long time readers will know I’m not a free speech advocate. There is plenty of speech that is counter-intuitive to dialogue, but restricting spaces for speech is different than applying appropriate codes of conduct that lead to the most productive dialogical output. Cracking down on the the coffeehouses isn’t the solution. If we’re looking for solutions, it’s important to know what the actual problem is. The problem isn’t idiots who are too stupid to critically digest controversial opinions so they need to be protected from dangerous ideas, it’s zealotry. Social media has become a space for what amount to digital cults to flourish. I think cults are an important symbol for what’s happening because with cults, the people aren’t stupid, they just want to belong.
If you think that the photo on the left has more people in it than the one on the right, you probably believe that more people voted for Trump than for Biden in the 2020 election. What’s one more alternative fact? It’s not that Trumpists can’t count, it’s that believing Trump’s lies has been imbued into their communal identity. Saying the photo on the right has more people is not a factual refutation, it becomes an ad hominem attack.
The difference between a community and a cult is an ability to question sources, whether the ideology is seen as a fundamental value and a part of who you are versus a passion or interest, and the amount of exposure a member has to the world outside of that group. It is perfectly within the realm of possibility to maintain a social media presence and adhere to the right side of that balance. Most people do it, and there is actually evidence that greater internet use is not completely driving modern political polarization. When social media cults do appear though, are they any different than cults in the analog world?
If we see the discourse problem of social media as potential breeding grounds for cults, then trying to overpower them through force is more likely to lead to Waco-style consequences rather than cross-partisan healing. If they’re cults, then they need de-programming solutions. Far-right social media enclaves are like toxic relationships, and a sense of belonging is obtained from hazing-style abuse. A lot of the reason the right is so angry despite not actually having any real political demands is because they’re constantly being told that the world hates them and thinks they’re stupid. That’s gas-lighting 101, but it sure works to keep recruits dependent. That’s why “basket of deplorables” caught on as a rallying cry for Trumpists because it vindicated the narrative of spiteful isolation that the radicalization process inured. Remember when Steve Bannon was telling a crowd to embrace being called a racist as a badge of honour? The worse the behaviour, the more isolated you are from the rest of society, the more embedded into the fold of the far right you become. Anything telling you otherwise is fake news.
Bear with me
As a quick aside, despite frequent “both sides” rhetoric from usually right-wing speakers, the issue of polarization is a right-wing issue. The left has been basically the same for like, over a hundred years, and even spine-chilling philosophies like defunding the police have been around since 1974. Traditional conservatives today are being defenestrated from their own parties because they’re not bootlicking fascism hard enough. Today’s right-wing is off the political spectrum. Please note my distinction between conservatives and the right-wing, as conservatives are basically today’s centrists that I’m castigating for wanting social media elites to regulate our social sphere. To be clear, cultist tendencies can and do arise on the left, but the specific issue of polarization is emphatically a right-wing issue and the increasing extremity of right-wing cults is the alarm bell I’m reacting to.
Anyway, back to it!
The solution to cults isn’t to barricade them out of their bunkers to scurry to another dark corner, it’s to open the world up to them. Give them a broader community to belong to. This is where my apologism for social media ends, because their algorithms sow divisiveness to ensure cults can never connect to ideologies outside of their own. Taiwan released a social media platform where the algorithm linked people through commonality rather than outrage, and it led to genuine solutions to otherwise intransigent problems. Immerse in hobbies or volunteer activities where there is exposure to other people different from oneself! Follow a variety of news outlets with different bents at their source, and don’t rely on social media to determine what you are presented with! When diverse groups of people connect, it pulls us out of our zealotry.
If Christian Bale isn’t personally delivering you your news, you’re probably being radicalized.
Whether social media pulls us into a cult or not, it’s easy to agree that the current manifestation of how we engage on the internet is broken. It doesn’t have to be this way. Spaces to communicate dissent are necessary; society is far from perfect and there are powerful interests hoping to keep it that way. Spaces to disagree don’t have to be toxic or held hostage by disinformation.
Social media corporations profit by engagement, and it’s easy to get rich off passionate emotions. It’s not the platforms, it’s the platform owners. Capitalists have turned communities into cults because that’s the most efficient way to get a return on their capital. I don’t want capitalists fixated on profits to solve polarization because their solution will always be what profits them the most.
If we want a better social media, we need to determine and hold accountable the processes that produce our social media feeds. My guess is most people would agree to a methodology that fosters connection over divisiveness, that encourages people to disconnect from the digital rather than continuously pull “engagement”, so maybe people should be the ones who say how our public sphere is managed. I guess I’m one of those lefties who advocates for a socialist democratization of social media platforms. Who could have guessed!
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