Social Media – The Rude Revolution Part 2

– David Margan

As I wrote last month, the social media communications revolution has hit us at light speed and has changed the way we communicate.

As human communications are a critical aspect of who we are and how we relate to each other this change is significant and we have had little opportunity to reflect on its consequences .

Printing – and the ability to read – changed the world. But it took time ... now revolution is just clicking or a swipe.

The benefits are amazing but there appears to be a rising cost.

Life is complex and rich with nuance but none of that can be expressed in 140 characters or in the absence of the sender’s face and its myriad of expressions.

Fights start faster than in a soccer game between Croatia and Serbia.

Offence is everywhere, the weak become tough in cyber and the cowards, bullies.

A survey last year found that forty per cent of American adults had experienced online abuse, with almost half of them receiving severe forms of harassment, including physical threats and stalking. Seventy per cent of women described online harassment as a “major problem”.

The internet offered unparalleled promise of cooperation and communication between all of humanity. However, instead of embracing a massive extension of our social circles online, we seem to be reverting to tribalism and conflict. In 2012 an in-depth study showed that given the choice of a positive or negative post the majority of users went to the negative stuff. In fact, the algorithms that drive social media architecture are designed to encourage the negative and the argument. They get responses and traffic and therefore profits. Each outraged or emotional word in a tweet increases the likelihood of it being retweeted by 20%.

“Content that triggers outrage and that expresses

outrage is much more likely to be shared,” says Yale’s Crockett Lab director, Molly Crockett, “What we’ve created online is an ecosystem that selects for the most outrageous content, paired with a platform where it’s easier than ever before to express outrage.”

While we generally conduct our real-life interactions with strangers politely and respectfully, online we can be horrible.

Is there any way we can relearn the cooperation that enabled us to find common ground and thrive as a civilisation?

Unlike hunter-gatherer societies, which rely on cooperation to survive and have rules for sharing food, for example, social media practice, as yet, has no effective code of practice.

It offers physical distance, relative anonymity and little reputational or punitive risk for bad behaviour.

If you’re mean, no-one you know is going to see. This is compounded by the positive feedback such as ‘likes’, as a result, the platforms help people form habits of expressing outrage. “And a habit is something that’s done without regard to its consequences,” Crockett points out.

“You might think that there is a minority of sociopaths online, which we call trolls, who are doing all this harm,” says Cristian DanescuNiculescu-Mizil at Cornell University’s Department of Information Science. “What we actually find in our work is that ordinary people, just like you and me, can engage in such antisocial behaviour. For a specific period of time, you can actually become a troll. And that’s surprising.”

It’s worth remembering that we’ve had thousands of years to hone our person-to-person interactions, but only 20 years of social media, DanescuNiculescu-Mizil says.

“Online we discuss things only through text. I think we shouldn’t be surprised that we’re having so much difficulty in finding the right way to discuss and cooperate online,” says Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. It’s a reflection of human inadequacies now unfettered by traditional social mores and it all has consequences for human communication, difficult at the best of times, but now unreflective, ill-considered and finally weaponised to distort, disturb and disrupt.

Our society is only now considering its management and consequences ... well after the genie has left the bottle. We have a problem and don’t know how to fix it.

In response to the rising tide of insult and misinformation we may also get an overreaction by lobby groups demanding corrective intervention from government. More fuel for the freedom of speech debate.

We’ve called on the avowed libertarian giants of digital platforms to take responsibility for their output and control what’s posted. However, they are reluctant to take on the responsibility of being the arbiters of free speech and good conduct.

In a world where for a myriad of reasons personal responsibility is being eroded, we want someone else to fix the problem.

Every organisation has to now face this buzzing behemoth of chat.

Recently the Full Bench of the Federal Court overturned a Fair Work Commission finding that BP had cause to dismiss an employee who had posted a comment on his Facebook about ongoing workplace negotiations by uploading a meme of Bruno Ganz portraying Adolf Hitler doing his block in the bunker, replacing the German with criticism of BP’s negotiation tactics.

The worker was reinstated and the meme was funny but what a nightmare of wasted time and money.