Facebook is dividing us
Facebook is quietly becoming the most immensely polarising force in society. A medium that soothes us with what we want to hear and riles up with what we don’t. That’s unlikely to turn out to be a good thing.
In the days when the Leftie newspaper sat side by side with the Rightie we couldn’t avoid but see some of the other side of the argument. It was quite literally on the other side. We couldn’t avoid the fact that at the very least, one smart editor thinks something that we don’t.
When news came to us endorsed by no-one more than the journalist and editor we couldn’t be certain that our friends would agree with it. We were forced to question ourselves and to debate it before plunging out into society with that opinion held strong in front of us. We feared looking silly and so we were to some degree cautious and questioning.
Now that so much news comes ready-packaged with likes and comments we hardly even stop to question it. We’re are, by-design, shown the things that an algorithm thinks we’ll read, like and share again. Our news is designed to look like what we want to see, to hear like what we want to listen to. It comes selectively, pre-endorsed by the friends who happened to agree with it. It must be right. Maybe we had other friends who disagreed. We’ll never know though because they never even saw it. Those who disagree are quietly shown the digital door out. Their news isn’t silenced just published into a different part of the residency, one we will never visit.
News we don’t want to read and which we don’t want to click on never appears in our feed. We believe that our viewpoint is right because Facebook shows us what we believe is right and then tells us the other people who also agree with it. The news we don’t like goes into other newsfeeds, is read by other people shared by them and assumed equally right by them too.
That doesn’t mean that it’s people whose viewpoints we don’t respect though. It doesn’t mean that those aren’t the people who would make us stop and question. But stopping and questioning generates lower engagement, fewer click-throughs, likes and shares than reading and discussing.
That’s great for engagement and repeat views but is very unlikely to be good for society. Whether you’re pro-Brexit or anti-Brexit, pro-Trump or anti-Trump you’ll see the viewpoint you agree with. The soundbites you want to hear, the facts you want to read. And all that serves to do is to reinforce our default position and push us deeper into our own beliefs.
I think very little of Donald Trump and so I tend to read the things that tell me he’s a moron. I tend to like the memes that ridicule him, to share the soundbites that minimise him. But you don’t get to be the Republican nominee by being a moron. You get there by giving the people what they want to hear. You get there by hitting the chords that resonate with a nation. Whatever you may think of the man, the issues that he’s standing on are definitively those that Americans care about. That’s not what my newsfeed shows me though, it shows me soundbites and memes of Trump’s stupidity. Entertaining but polarising.
I don’t want friends who will tell me what I want to hear . I don’t want to be polarised. I want to be right not righteous. And when someone disagrees with me I don’t want to be the first person they meet who challenges them. I want them to be challenged long before that. I don’t want to live in a sycophantic society where we are all algorithmically soothed by auto-selected, yes-men every day. I want us to be pushed to understand the other viewpoint and the other man.
Social media was, in theory the dawn of truly open media, uncontrolled by government or politicos. It was truly representative media. A media that would show you the true story, straight from the horse’s mouth. But representative of which horse? The irony of truly free and open speech is that we risk hearing only our own echoes, bounced off the wall and amplified by likes and lols from those who happen to share our same cave.
Society needs correction and balance. People need to hear the other side of the argument in order to form their own. I don’t know how you address that and I don’t possibly know how Facebook creates a balance or whether that balance can be good for its balance sheet. But social media as it stands today is a quietly, dangerously divisive force among us. Because whether or not you want to be challenged you want those you disagree with to be challenged. And that challenge is proving increasingly challenging.
Addendum
On discussing this with a friend of mine who works at Facebook he said that this was an oft-discussed topic inside the company and that they’d done research on exactly this topic which has been published in Science. I haven’t yet read it thoroughly enough to really process the data but here for your interest is the study: https://research.facebook.com/blog/exposure-to-diverse-information-on-facebook/
