Stop clicking “Hide Post”
How blocking posts suppresses ideological diversity on social media
I have a problem. It’s a problem that’s been creeping up on me slowly, in the back of my mind, like that weird pelvic eczema you refuse to acknowledge. Sooner or later you’re just going to have to get it checked out, dude.
Written out, news events of the past month could be construed as a chapter out of the Book of Revelation: Planned Parenthood supposedly selling the body parts of children, needless killings of unarmed African-Americans, refugee deaths, countries closing their borders, and the meteoric rise of an incredibly well-spoken, charismatic-yet-modest demagogue.
At the root of my problem are these events (take your pick) and the legions of people who take their opinions regarding them to Walls and Feeds and Blogs in an incontinent fury. It doesn’t matter which side of the ideological spectrum one falls on; if the linear thought process of the majority of the public were a train, it would have two stops — now boarding for Something I Heard and The Facebook News Feed, where this train terminates. Some examples of posts that I disagree with:
My response to these posts comes in one of two forms. The initial reaction is profoundly guttural and emotional, like I am being stirred inside by the giant metal spoon of justice to say something, anything, about privilege, ignorance, or biased sources. It’s the temptation to succumb to the angry Facebook comment, the lowest-common-denominator of Internet discourse.
The second form is a faltering in my fingers, hovered over the keyboard. Suddenly, I feel that I don’t know enough about the topic to respond at all. I realize that I probably sound like an idiot, and my post in all likelihood is doing the opposite of what I ultimately hope it will do — change way someone else thinks. Instead, I choose the safer option: clicking the “Hide Post” button and going on with my day.
As much as it hurts me to say it, this is the wrong approach. For your own good, you should actively fight the urge to click the little blue “Hide” button. Why? It would make sense, at least on a surface level, that the capacity to ignore racist, sexist and other potentially harmful posts would be a positive thing. The problem is Facebook’s process of curation.
Veritasium’s Derek Muller explains it better than I can, but basically Facebook’s post filter works like the clique of cool kids in high school, secretly deciding who and who isn’t relevant in the hierarchy of social standing. Based on several criteria, Facebook sorts all of the posts from people you follow, pages you’ve liked, and content posted by friends by what it thinks is “most engaging.” As you scroll through your Newsfeed, there is by default a large number of posts that are omitted.
Now we add in the option to completely remove a specific selection of these posts in addition to the stuff Facebook has unilaterally decided we don’t care about. Beginning to see the problem?
In his video, Muller focuses on Facebook’s post-pinching policy and it’s impact on personal branding; content producers are being forced to pay if they want to reach more people. My argument is simpler: removing any voice from the conversation definitionally kills dialogue.
The more we hide posts like those above, the less we are exposed to values and points of view that stand in contrast to our own. The point is not that we have to like or agree with any of these individuals. The point is that without a constant stream of views from the other side, we are allowing ourselves to listen to only one side of the conversation. As critical thinking, globalized individuals, this is more ignorant and irresponsible than any view that could be spouted on social media. As Muller puts it:
“Friends and family and pages that you don’t actively engage with will disappear over time. This usually means that people you disagree with will vanish, leaving you with a Newsfeed that’s effectively an echo-chamber of self-affirming views, the things that you already think and believe.”
Imagine that this ideological train we are riding is entirely occupied by people with whom we share a general worldview. The train across the platform — traveling the opposite direction — is full of folks with a different, opposite point of view. To make matters worse, both trains are traveling at top speed, and our compartment windows are those strange, blocky, opaque windows popular in the basement bathrooms of the elderly. We stare across the platform in the middle, criticizing and refuting every decision made by those people in the other train. When every so often the trains stop and we are presented with the opportunity to meet and discuss our opposing views on the platform between the locomotives — social media — our ideas and values will be inevitably skewed by what we thought we saw as our worlds rapidly passed by one another. The platform is what allows us to meet and discourse with the occupants of the other ideological train.
By clicking the Hide button or any of it’s many variants, we are effectively lighting the fuse of the dynamite rigged to the platform. The fuse is long, but if both sides continue to ignore it the platform will eventually explode — and we’ll find that the next time we step out to have a conversation there may be people willing, but unable, to listen.
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