What If Arguing With Strangers On The Internet Could Change Their Political Views? It Changed Mine

Imagine a world before social media (pre-2005). It looked a lot like this.

That’s right, chat rooms, MSN messenger and forums, baby. And the forum thing in particular had its time around the early 2000s. I found my forum accidentally and unexpectedly while searching for a beauty product review. I was 14 because they start us young. Vogue Australia had a forum which came up first in the search. I didn’t think much of it but I browsed for a bit and forgot about it. Then the next day I signed up, and left my first comment. And that was it. I quickly became completely obsessed.

The Vogue Forums were infamous in their time. I don’t know how it spiralled into the huge community of “Voguettes” that it eventually became, or why it held so much power for a subsection of random young Australian women at the time. Maybe because there was nothing else for that particular niche. It was weird because it probably instilled in me an unhealthy idea of what normal women spent on fashion and accessories, but it was fun to just be there.

There were so many exploding moments of solidarity that young women really needed in those post 90s body image failure years. It felt like an insiders’ club, and if anyone tried to get in and write about it, it never quite worked. Nobody outside of it really got what it was about or what was happening, because it wasn’t about them. It was about who was already in on the inside. You just had to sign up and get with it pretty fast.

But the most remarkable thing is that I actually cared more about the other sections like the Current Affairs and Politics one. It became a hivemind for some of the most heated, most intense debate I’ve ever known. I bloody loved it. I cut my teeth on those forums. I was only 14 when I found it, and 16 when I felt I had become a notorious mob lord of the political part of the forums. It wasn’t just that it could be anonymous. It was more that you got to decide who you wanted to be in the world, online and privy to the opinions of strangers.

You knew there were the die hard beauty and fashion girls you revered (long live @mriaow never forget), but mostly you just tried to navigate your favourite forums with ease and adroit dexterity, while desperately trying to remain true to who you were. It was easier to do then. There was less backlash. If you said something controversial, who would really know or care? How would it affect your life? I never had that sickening feeling that so much was at stake, the way I did with Twitter years later, when the drama had a way of spilling over into your actual life and then career, in more threatening and menacing ways.

But here’s the thing that I haven’t acknowledged in the 15 years that have passed since I first found my way to discovering Opinions™. I think about it every now and again and I’ve told a few people but I try not to dwell on it because it makes me feel awkward and uncomfortable.

I had some fairly intense religious right wing views at the time. And they conflicted with my views on foreign policy and human rights. They conflicted with everything. But I had them. There were two issues I remember being a source of contention: abortion and gay marriage. At 15, I was pro-life and I didn’t “believe” in gay marriage, as if belief has ever had anything to do with it, as my even younger cousin at the time would routinely point out whenever someone said they didn’t believe in something with a moralistic tinge to it.

It still shocks me to this day, but it’s not all that crazy when you think about it. I was opinionated on so many issues. When I held a belief, I took it all the way, as far as it would go with the limited amount of research that can be expected from a teenager, coupled with whatever world views I had been raised with. But I didn’t do a lot of research on those issues. I actually didn’t know anything about them.

I didn’t just subscribe to one ideology and apply it to everything, the way people assume still happens today with the Left and Right political binaries. My views were quite extreme on completely different ends of the spectrum. And I could argue them and justify them, but always to a point. I always hit a wall on something, would stumble and have to re-think things. Because that’s what open minded people usually do. Even teenagers. But the main thing is that I had never been properly challenged in a complex and robust way, from people with diverse backgrounds and radically different ideas. It would always only ever go to a certain point, before I would run out of answers.

I was raised in a migrant Catholic household, in two different but similar Australian migrant communities who played a huge role in my life. I went to a private all-girls Catholic school and hung out with girls who, although incredibly intelligent, usually preferred to talk about their appearance, pop culture or general life issues that mattered to teenage girls. Nobody went into the issues that conflicted with our upbringing or our schooling or issues that didn’t directly affect us. Sometimes we talked about politics, but only certain, pressing issues that were hard to ignore in the media in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

Most people stayed away from issues that would cause heated arguments, or things they didn’t know enough about to have an informed opinion you felt confident saying out loud. And sometimes we hadn’t really learnt enough to form an opinion. Surprisingly, talking about the bigger issues that affected women were the hardest. We were still trying to figure out what the hell was happening to our bodies. We didn’t have time for theory, even though we lay down on the proverbial train tracks every day with the patriarchy train coming straight for us. We made our lives as simple and as digestible as possible for the time and the context, because we were sheltered by our blissful ignorance.

So this was the context. There was no social media to fall back on, or place to share ideas freely, no Twitter to peruse and be challenged daily, no opinion pieces that went viral to challenge our ideas. We had the classrooms, the playground and our computers at night. And so it fell to our computers to somehow find the answers, even if we weren’t actively looking for them.

The thing about the Current Affairs thread on the Vogue Forums is that I discovered my voice and the power I had in there. I knew a lot about Middle Eastern politics and Palestinian issues, and people respected that, and knew they could learn a lot from that. Without even mentioning it, they intrinsically knew that my background informed my views, because I spoke with confidence, authority and intimate knowledge of the culture that informed those views. And because I was passionate as all hell.

It’s because people showed me respect when it came to expressing my fairly intense views on those issues, that it made for a less hostile place overall, even though it could easily descend into insults and mania and the occasional threats of being banned by a mod (The Vogue Fashion Police, I’m not joking) or having a thread deleted. The general vibe was one of challenging each other and being as open to new ideas as possible, even when it was difficult.

I vaguely recall the threads that changed me completely. Everyone was arguing about abortion in one and there were just as many pro-lifers and pro-choicers. And for me, this was the first time I’d even heard of pro-choicers. I’d never seen their arguments before or knew they had a name to go by. I had never thought about the issues in this way. It was remarkable to watch it unfold, one comment at a time. But I didn’t just see these arguments and go, oh okay cool, my opinion has been forever changed. I had to first express my opinions, I had to put them out there, even if it meant offering myself up for ridicule, which in hindsight seems brave, but actually it was just what you had to do to grow and evolve into the person you would eventually become.

The thing is though, in today’s world, I have no idea how that would have gone down. Most likely I would have been in the minority in some extreme Left vestibule, and then completely decimated on Twitter. I think this is why I cringed so hard when that young conservative commentator Caleb Bond got slammed on Twitter. I still to this day really like him and felt so uncomfortable by the commentary around what he “represented” as a young conservative with a big profile, rather than just what he was saying. Because for fuck’s sake, he was only 16 and nobody was trying to figure out where he was coming from, except for Vice Australia who did a pretty good of it in this piece The Strange World of An Australian Teenage Conservative Political Commentator. Slamming people without understanding them is exactly how people stay forever in their corner and become embittered by the world.

The point I’m trying to make is this: the people (I always assumed they were all women but they could have been anyone, it was pretty much anonymous) who responded to me in that thread were patient with me. They were understanding. They knew that the things I brought up were ingrained ideas that were hard to shake off when you haven’t been exposed to a wide range of ideas, when you come from certain religions, cultures or upbringings. They would explain their position in a way that was tailored for me, as though they really thought it through ie. “Ree (part of my screen name, which was also my real life nickname but they didn’t know that) I see you in other threads talking about women’s rights and feminism — here is how this issue is linked to that”. And my tiny mind would explode. Because I literally had never thought of it in those terms. And it was so difficult to concede defeat when you’ve dug your heels in on an argument, but it was also so liberating to do so when you know you’ve been wrong for a long time.

I make it sound a bit like a utopia for online interaction and there’s no doubt in my mind that I’m looking back with rose coloured glasses. I know it would have been frustrating too, for both sides, that it sometimes got nasty and angry and impatient. But that’s not what stuck with me after all these years. And even when it was negative, it didn’t turn me off or push me away or make me give up and stick to my beliefs. I still persevered, I became more open to change the more I participated.

And so it went on like this until I watched my views gradually morph over time. Actually sometimes it was an instant change. I remember one of the users was so shocked when I did that. We’re so used to not being listened to. We’re so used to thinking these debates are futile. We’re sometimes so incredibly stuck in our world we have no idea how to get out of it.

It seems so simple in hindsight, but it’s not. I could be fairly easily persuaded when I didn’t know enough about an issue or when I resisted an idea so much but couldn’t figure out why. I had to ask myself deep questions when that happened. Why am I so uncomfortable with something like abortion? And the answer I realised was that I had no access to this world or point of reference. My world was quite simple, quaint almost: get married, have children, try and have a career somewhere in there. But I was a woman in a culture that had been transported to this country in the 1950s and they resisted change out of fear. They didn’t want to lose their culture and they saw the more traditional aspects as part of that culture. So I had to do the difficult work of challenging those views myself. Why did it make me uncomfortable? Because it was asking me to inhabit a world I would never need to inhabit. I don’t need a choice about abortion because I’m never going to be in a position where that dilemma affects me (or so I reasoned at the time).

But the arguments put forward challenged that: and this is what it boiled down to: even if *you* personally never need to worry about this, what about those who do? What about radical empathy, the likes of which you’ve shown for others in other, even-harder-to-empathise-with, issues? What about that? I had to re-think what I believed entirely. I believed in defending the rights of all humans no matter what. So the roadblocks that propped up every now and again in that journey (year 12 HSC module what uppppp) were important. So yes I agree with you uRegan13847 on that point, but the reason I can’t fully agree with you is because *insert point here that I have never questioned before and always believed to be true.* And sometimes, eventually, you get to a point of mutual understanding.

And these glorious anonymous internet avatars always had an answer. They knew what they were talking about. Their ideas were based in facts, and the only time facts ceased to matter, is when one side never cared for them to begin with. You also have to take out the emotion in it. Generally mainstream social media makes it hard to do that. It’s just reactionary rage all day every day. But something I have learned from Reddit is that, similar to the forums, they are able to take out the emotion (well some of them anyway), stick to the facts and really challenge views as far as they’ll go. And that is an incredible thing.

They say that we are at risk today of existing in gated communities and echo chambers, where the newsfeed is so tailored to you and your views, that you’re not as exposed to radically different ideas. It’s a lot harder to have the kind of life-altering debates that were so pivotal in challenging my formative views. And I think that’s true to a large extent. But all that really means is we have to do more to make sure that doesn’t happen. We have to expand our circles, our ideas, our research, the people we interact with. We should interact more and have civil conversations.

It’s something to keep in mind when everything boils to a point where you are frustrated, angry and exhausted from what seems to be meaningless debate. The recent news that almost half of Australians have voted in a poll to say they agree on banning Muslims from Australia is one of those moments. Where do you even begin? How do you begin to navigate that territory, as a minority and as a progressive.

We need to step outside of ourselves for a moment and think about why this is happening. Why is that news shocking to us? Why didn’t we see the rise in conservative and intolerant views based in bigotry and illogic? We got to this point for a reason, and it’s likely to get worse before it gets better. Undeniably we have huge structural problems in this country around racism and even more insidious forms of racism in everyday life. News like this isn’t just a random hypothetical ideological debate online for some — it affects their every day existence.

But now we need to think a little differently. We need to employ radical empathy. Take the time to get to know and understand what we believe, why we believe it, and what could possibly drive someone to go in a completely different direction. Because we need to have a better conversation and a stronger approach. It’s not enough to resort to name calling and to get angry. That’s how they stubbornly dig their heels in and stay there. There is a problem in Australia and in the world and we need to address it urgently.

I will say this one thing though: there gets a point where it doesn’t matter how patient you are and how much time you take to better argue your points. You can only be so understanding, so benefit-of-the-doubt-giving, before you’re just wasting your time. I don’t think the answer is for well-meaning, tolerant and welcoming Muslims to invite the people spearheading hate campaigns that aim to ruin their life, over for a cup of tea. It’s not necessary. You do that enough already, all day every day, metaphorically speaking when you advocate for tolerance, for love and for understanding. You don’t need to prove your humanity here. It means nothing to someone who hates you illogically. You have to try a different route, one that isn’t filled with traffic from a giant turd-filled truck over turning. You won’t appeal to people on such an extreme side of the fence with gestures. You have to find out from what deep guttural, fearful, insulted place is this coming from? And whatever you do, know that you are not responsible for it.

There will always be people who you can’t change, that’s inevitable. I’m instead talking more about the larger middle ground who only recently moved from their position on the fence into a new and estranged territory more to one side. Why did they do that? And what can we be done to appeal to them? It’s also important to recognise the role that systems play in influencing populations. What is the general discourse in the media, both mainstream and alternative? What rhetoric is the government peddling? What laws are they enacting which further entrench and legitimise these views? Is the issue purely a moralistic abstract one, or is it rooted in economic woes? Everything you do should be aimed at the systems, because without dismantling these issues from the root, it won’t matter how many former ideological enemies you become BFF withs.

I was progressive in so many ways but for whatever reason I stubbornly held onto some outdated views and believed those views were part of me. I lived in a bubble, a hazy fog. I didn’t have access to radical ways of thinking. But as soon as people pointed out when it didn’t make sense, when it was incompatible with my general belief system, the bubble burst. Finding my people, my community and my tribe is what got me out, it’s what always gets us out, if we’re lucky to find it and follow it. To this day I know that it had a lot to do with the power of community. If community can spawn from the loins of the most unlikely of places (uh, like the inner sanctum of the most exclusive beauty and fashion world) and still triumph and create some small semblance of change, then I…believe….ha! that we can do that anywhere.

This article by Sheree Joseph was originally published at The Vocal.