The curse of the informed: The sheer impossibility of changing your political opinion
Unless you live under a rock, it is difficult to have missed the reports on the recent violence in Kashmir, and there were tonnes of opinions floating around from across the ideological spectrum on our social media feeds. Debates broke out, people argued with ferociousness — armed with opinions and facts. People took staunch positions and defended them. If television brought conflict into our living rooms and made it a media spectacle, social media brought it to our fingertips.
But it did not matter. And it probably hardly ever will.
Not on Kashmir, Not on Modi, Not on Brexit, Not on climate change.
I argue that this (cynical) viewpoint, hinges on the three axes — technology, capitalism and fallibility of human reasoning and how these intertwine to unwittingly create a world where it is almost impossible to change your viewpoint about anything.
The democratization of news via the internet: The panacea that doesn't deliver
At the cusp of the advent of digital news, we made bold pronouncements that we will no more be shackled by the editors and gatekeepers of news organisations, often serving corporate and ideological interests. Facts will be laid out bare to analyse, opinions will breathe, citizens will argue openly and freely — a truly democratic space will emerge making us a more informed nation.
This notion was strengthened with the spread of social media, when it became really easy to disseminate ideas within your network. It brought down barriers of physical spaces to engage with people. You could debate AFSPA with a lawyer, a human rights activist, a soldier and a citizen living under AFSPA. The notion held immense promise.
Then came Facebook. And Twitter. And their need to monetize our attention (Because there are no free lunches in this world, and capitalism is the only system, however broken, that works)
It was not enough to make monetize reach. Advertisers demanded engagement. So the social media behemoths focused on engagement.
Parallely, in a bid to personalise our online worlds, we curated our experiences by following or liking specific pages of interest. The more we engaged with certain type of content, the more similar content was (and is) made visible in our feeds. Recommendation and scoring functions learnt from our social connections and our actions online, constructing a model that optimizes for engagement; the more engagement, the more traffic, clicks, likes, shares, and so forth — allowing for complete monetization of our attention.
In the era of social media curating our news feeds, we did not end up seeing different viewpoints, we ended up seeing more of the same viewpoint. The supposed democratization of news did not happen. It merely led to a polarisation of opinions.
But we are educated, informed citizens, capable of sorting fact from fiction — even if algorithms were nudging us towards our currently held viewpoints, we would encounter alternative viewpoints through online and offline sources. So my information stream is actually diverse. Right?
No and here is where the fallacy of human reasoning kicks us in the shins.
Homophily and Confirmation Bias: The delusion of our informed opinion
Homophily is a well established principle: Our inexorable tendency to connect with people who confirm rather than test our core beliefs.
Confirmation bias is is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities.
I am sure you can already see where this is headed, but lets see some empirical evidence to support this. We turn our attention to the powers of data sciences.
One of the most protracted and visible conflicts of our times is the Israel — Palestine conflict. Extremely polarizing, it has often divided nations and has enough people on both sides.
Gilad Lotan, a data scientist and an adjunct professor at NYU, constructed a tag cloud using Instagram hashtags. The larger a tag, the more times it appeared. The tighter-connected two tags are, the more times they appeared together. Tags of the same color are much more inter-linked compared to the rest of the graph. (Read the full article and the thought starter for this post here )
What does it tell us about ourselves? My contention is that a similar exercise on Indian Twitter handles conversing would create a very similar looking network graph.
The very nature of our existence — as social beings seeking validation from others (homophily) and validation from within (confirmation bias) has led to the creation of our personalized echo chambers, where our viewpoint reigns supreme.
Now please run this small sorting exercise. I am going to list down a few India based media outlets / popular FB pages. Group them into two groups in any way you deem fit. It should take you less than a minute
NDTV, Swarajyamag, Scroll.in, The Caravan, India Against Presstitutes, The Indian Express, The Frustrated Indian, Opindia
I reckon that most of us labelled one group as biased, sensationalist, fraud etc. — depending on your political and ideological leanings.
We have long bemoaned the lack of a free, fair and transparent media. But is it really possible to create one in this day and age?
The audiences game: Why it is difficult to create an unbiased media environment
The news media industry survives on two key sources of revenue: subscription and advertising. Subscription revenues have traditionally been low (and almost zero for online only news outlets). Hence, they rely on advertising — selling our attention to advertisers.
Before you jump the gun, the argument is not about political parties or corporate interests funding the media outlets (which happens across the world). The argument is more basic: about how institutionally effective audiences are built.
News audiences are build on narratives. A journalist reports a story, a certain sequence of happenings strung together to create a coherent picture of the event. The very nature of a ‘narrative’ indicates that some elements of the event will be left out. This is where judgement plays a critical role, and this is where the motivations and biases of gatekeepers pulls us down.
This plays on the side of the citizens as well. Given our confirmation biases, we want our news sources to ‘conform’ to our worldview. Sources which conform continue to find our patronage, those which do not, either fall off our radar or are marked as ‘biased’. Institutionally effective audiences — stable audiences whose attention can be monetised — are built when we keep consuming these sources — thereby causing media outlets to veer towards narratives, which are a certain version of the truth. Homophily ensures that our viewpoints are continuously getting validated.
