Optimizing for Outrage

In today's news, Piers Morgan's outrage about the previous night's television boiled over. Mr Morgan was a regular and highly opinionated presenter on ITV's breakfast show Good Morning Britain. On this occasion, the controversy led to his departure from the show.

As it happens, just last week I was listening to a BBC Media Show podcast, recorded late last year, in which he was discussing the phenomenon of outrage with Amol Rajan and Helen Lewis.

Jasper Jackson has observed the commercial purpose of outrage.

As digital publishers have learned, the best way to get the shares, clicks and page views that make them money is to provoke an emotional response. And there are few things as good at provoking an emotional response as extreme and outrageous political views.

Writing about a woman who has sometimes been described as a professional troll, Jackson notes how she benefited from broadcasters' attempts to create an illusion of impartiality.

It is ironic that Hopkins’s career was initially helped by TV’s attempts to provide balance. Producers could rely on her to provide a counterweight to even the most committed and rational bleeding-heart liberal.

Politicians can use outrage as a way of gaining media coverage, and some of them get elected as a consequence. (I'm sure I don't need to name any examples here.)

Besides outrageous statements and performances by media stars, politicians and general rabble-rousers, there is also a tendency to publicize outrageous comments from unknown or even anonymous sources. If hundreds of people respond on social media to some event, and one of them says something completely idiotic, there is a strong possibility that this is the one that will be selected by journalists keen to make the story more interesting. In her conversation on the Media Show, Helen Lewis referred to this as nutpicking, using a term coined by Kevin Drum in 2006.

This blog is named POSIWID, which stands for Stafford Beer's maxim: The Purpose of a System Is What It Does. While we don't regard this as a universal truth, it can often be a useful heuristic. President Obaba's digital chief Michael Slaby has just published a book on the relationship between the tech giants and the public sphere, in which he argues that the outrage is deliberate.

The systems are not broken, he tells the Guardian. They are working exactly as they were designed for the benefit of their designers.

I have ordered a copy of Slaby's book, and I may have more to say when I've had a chance to read it.

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Kevin Drum, Nutpicking (Washington Monthly, 11 August 2006)

Jasper Jackson, The Economics of Outrage: Why you haven't heard the last of Katie Hopkins (New Statesman, 26 May 2017)

Amol Rajan, Why Piers Morgan Left Good Morning Britain (BBC News, 9 March 2021)

Amol Rajan, Helen Lewis and Piers Morgan, The Economics of Outrage (BBC Media Show, 14 October 2020)

David Smith, Optimising for outrage: ex-Obama digital chief urges curbs on big tech (The Guardian, 1 March 2021)

Michael Slaby, For All the People: Redeeming the Broken Promises of Modern Media and Reclaiming Our Civic Life (New York: Disruption Books, 2021)

Wikipedia: Nutpicking

Related post: Trolls are like ghosts (December 2020)

Polarizing Filters

In photography, a polarizing filter can manage your reflections and darken your skies: this may be a good metaphor for what happens in media and communications. While filtering and polarization were (and remain) well-known phenomena within traditional media, there are enhanced mechanisms on the Internet, whose effects are still not fully understood.

The term filter bubble was introduced by Eli Pariser around 2010, drawing on earlier work by Nicholas Negroponte and Cass Sunstein, to refer to a phenomenon previously known as echo chamber or information cocoon. If you get all your news from a single partisan source - for example, a single newspaper or TV channel - you could easily get a one-sided view of what is going on in the world. In the USA, the CNN audience doesn't overlap very much with the Fox News audience. Barack Obama is one of many who have expressed concerns about the consequences of this for American democracy.

The concept is easy enough to challenge if you take it too literally.

The images of chambers and bubbles conjures up hermetically sealed spaces where only politically like-minded participants connect and only ideologically orthodox information circulates, but this seems highly improbable. ... We cluster but we do not segregate. Bruns pp 95-96

Or if you imagine that filter bubbles are a technologically determined problem associated exclusively with the Internet. As Ignas Kalpokas notes in his review of Bruns, 

It is easy to slide into a form of fundamentalism, particularly when researching something as pervasive as social media, by simply assuming that the architecture and policies of the dominant platforms determine everything. ... Once we attribute causation to technology, we can comfortably and conveniently avoid responsibility for any societal ills and the ensuing necessity to put some effort towards ameliorating them. Kalpokas

However, the problem identified by Sunstein twenty years ago was not just about filters and fragmentation, but also about group polarization - the fact that there are internal and external forces that push individuals and groups to adopt ever more extreme positions. This is akin to Bateson's notion of schismogenesis. Axel Bruns stresses the importance of this.

The problem, in short, is polarisation, not fragmentation, and such polarisation is not the result of our use of online and social media platforms. Bruns p 105

I agree with his first point, but I want to qualify his second point. While the internet is certainly not the only cause of political polarization, its influence cannot be completely discounted. The techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has identified a specific mechanism on the Internet that appears to have a polarizing effect similar to that predicted by Sunstein - the recommendation algorithms on social media designed to keep users engaged for as long as possible, showing them progressively more outrageous and extreme content if that's what it takes. She argues that this is built into the business model of the tech giants. 

This is consistent with something Des Freedman noted in 2012,

The digital sphere is not a parallel economy but one that accentuates the tensions between the creativity and collaboration of a generative system and the hierarchies and polarisation prioritised by a system that rests, above all else, on the pursuit of profit. Curran Fenton Freedman p 92 my emphasis

In the same volume, Natalie Fenton noted Sunstein's argument that group polarisation is likely to become more extreme with time (p 168).

Many of the comments under Dr Tufekci's CBC interview are from what one might call nudge denialists - people who point out how easy it is to switch off the auto-play function on YouTube, and who claim never to be influenced by recommendations from the tech giants. Yeah, right. But that's not the point. Nobody said you can nudge all of the people all of the time. But the tech giants are certainly capable of nudging some of the people some of the time, at massive scale.

As a former computer programmer herself, Tufekci is able to explain the extraordinary power of the recommendation algorithms deployed by the tech giants. The tech giants choose to develop and use these algorithms in the pursuit of profit; and legislators and regulators around the world may or may not choose to permit or control this. So this deployment is not a matter of technological determinism but is subject to social and political choice. I wonder who is best placed to nudge governments to do the right thing?

 

Update

A few days after I posted the above, further details emerged about Facebook's approach to polarization, including a detailed exposé by @KarenHao (click on her name for Twitter discussion), which in turn appears to have prompted an internal Facebook meeting on Polarization and our Products reported by Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman.

Another Update

John Naughton's latest article has alerted me to a quantitative study of internet usage and polarization, published in 2017, which appears to show that the effects of political polarization are most marked in those demographic groups with comparatively less internet use.

While this evidence provides a warning not to overstate the Internet Causes Polarization thesis, it doesn't fully refute it either. A plausible explanation of these findings is that those who are less familiar with the workings of the Internet may be more vulnerable to its effects. I look forward to seeing further empirical studies.

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Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, Greater Internet use is not associated with faster growth in political polarization among US demographic groups (PNAS, 114/40, 3 October 2017) HT John Naughton, Is online advertising about to crash, just like the property market did in 2008? (The Guardian, 27 March 2021)

Axel Bruns, Are Filter Bubbles Real? (Polity Press, 2019)

James Curran, Natalie Fenton and Des Freedman, Misunderstanding the Internet (1st edition, Routledge 2012). Note that some of this material didn't make it into the 2016 second edition.

Karen Hao, How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation (MIT Technology Review, 11 March 2021)

Ignas Kalpokas, Book Review: Are Filter Bubbles Real? by Axel Bruns (LSE Blogs, 17 January 2020)

Ryan Mac, Facebook: Polarization and Our Products (Twitter, 11 March 2021)

Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman, Facebook is good for America actually, says Facebook executive (Buzzfeed News, 12 March 2021)

Thomas Nagel, Information Cocoons (London Review of Books, 5 July 2001)

Eli Pariser, Did Facebook's big new study kill my filter bubble thesis? (Medium/Backchannel, 7 May 2015)

Cass Sunstein, The Law of Group Polarization (John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics Working Paper No. 91, 1999)

Zeynep Tufekci, YouTube, the Great Radicalizer (New York Times, 10 March 2018). Is YouTube Radicalizing You? (CBC via YouTube, 22 April 2018)

 

Wikipedia: Echo Chamber (Media), Filter Bubble, Schismogenesis,

Related posts: Social Networks and Received Opinion (July 2010), The Pursuit of Truth (December 2016), Polarization (November 2018), Technological Determinism (December 2020), Optimizing for Outrage (March 2021), Bias or Balance (March 2021)

Trolls are like ghosts

On the one hand, trolling messages contribute no meaningful content, being merely tediously predictable responses to certain situations. But on the other hand they are designed to provoke a certain effect - to harass and intimidate.

@adriandaub makes the interesting suggestion that trolls are like ghosts (WTCT p96). Or perhaps automatons.

An aggrieved white guy who has set up an alert for when Sarah Jeong tweets and then huddles over his phone to make some claim about racism and Roseanne using jagged grammar and vertiginous logic is functionally indistinguishable from a bot having been set up to do the same thing.

WTCT p94

Although he complains that practitioners of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) take the notion of programming literally (WTCT pp 144-5), the automatic response described by Professor Daub seems to involve a form of conditioning that might be regarded as functionally indistinguishable from programming. (As a computer scientist myself, it is not for me to argue with a professor of literature whether it is the practitioners of NLP or its critics who take the notion of programming literally.)

As I think I've stated elsewhere, I regard NLP as a syncretic collection of interesting ideas (strongly influenced by Bateson and others) and dubious snakeoil. Although the snakeoil elements are generally regarded as pseudoscience, I wouldn't want to lose the ideas. Daub mentions two important ones, which Bandler and Grinder didn't invent but did much to popularize - reframing and feedback.

In communication there are no mistakes - everything is feedback

WTCT p 145

Many years ago, I invoked a similar idea (the meaning of a communication is its effect) in a discussion on the signal/noise ratio with the blogger Ernie the Attorney, who had complained that What we have here is a failure to communicate.

In his chapter on Communication, drawing on earlier theorists including John Durham Peters, Daub argues not only that communication often falls short of its potential, but sometimes occupies a space of preordained, deliberately engineered disappointment (WTCT p 89). It's as if the troll actively wants to be misunderstood.

Or even to cease to be a subject. Daub mentions Sontag's interpretation of Freud: human aggression frequently flows from an unconscious desire to become inanimate (WTCT p95).

As I pointed out in an earlier post (November 2018), many of the speech acts that pollute the internet are not propositions but other rhetorical gestures. And even if the trolling message appears to be coded as a proposition, the metacommunication is otherwise. In his 2019 article for Logic Magazine, Peters notes that the aim of trolling is to goad someone else into getting upset, an act known as triggering, and describes the outgoing US president as an absolute master at metacommunicative messing. And of course framing/reframing.

Furthermore, the troll's targets often include the medium itself, as the cultural theorist Mark Fisher once observed.

The elementary Troll gesture is the disavowal of cyberspace itself. In a typical gesture of flailing impotence that nevertheless has effects — of energy-drain and demoralisation — the Troll spends a great deal of time on the web saying how debased, how unsophisticated, the web is.

Andrew Iliadis explains the information theory of Gilbert Simondon in terms that can be linked to the notion of reframing: 

Information is that that which, depending on the way that it comes into contact with another abstraction of itself, unlocks or clicks into another form of reality.

Reality, fiction functioning as truth, or just lulz?

To be a game, the participants have to agree on the frame that this is play. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson once made this point brilliantly. Hazing rituals, he said, were governed by the frame is this play? Trolls like to claim the prerogative to define an interaction as play when their conduct makes that frame completely unclear.

Peters 2019

 

The play's the thing, someone once suggested, wherein to catch the conscience of the King. But what if the king has no conscience, no soul?

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Rachel Barney [Aristotle], On Trolling (Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2 (2):193-195, 2016)

Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2020) 

Mark Fisher, Fans, Vampires, Trolls, Masters (k-punk, 12 June 2009) 

Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston: Northeastern Press, 1974)

Andrew Iliadis, A New Individuation: Deleuze's Simondon Connection (MediaTropes Vol IV, No 1, 2013)

John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air (Chicago University Press, 1999) 

John Durham Peters, U-Mad (Logic Issue 6, 1 January 2019)

Susan Sontag, Fascinating Fascism (New York Review of Books, 6 February 1975)

Related posts: Failure to Communicate (July 2004), Good Ideas from Flaky Sources (December 2009), Ethical Communication in a Digital Age (November 2018), Can predictions create their own reality (August 2021)

Vice Signalling

The term virtue signalling originally referred to ways of making one's qualities visible - physical strength, economic wealth, moral character - in a way that would be hard to fake.

In 2015, James Bartholomew introduced an inverted and sarcastic usage of the term, referring to the common practice of paying lip service to a (supposedly virtuous) moral or political position, or expressing 'faux outrage' at something or other, and this usage was quickly picked up by other journalists. Of course this phenomenon has existed for centuries, but social media provides new channels for expressing and amplifying superficially held opinions.

Given this usage of the term virtue signalling, it was probably inevitable that people would also start talking about vice signalling, to refer to people saying outrageous things purely for effect.

For example, @PaulGoodmanCH accuses Arron Banks of vice signalling when he mounts an unfounded attack on Brendan Cox, the widower of the murdered MP Jo Cox. According to Goodman, Banks doesn't even believe what he is saying, he is merely saying it to gain more followers.

Again, there is nothing new about being deliberately outrageous in order to court controversy. In recent years, the tactic has been used with great effect by far right and alt-right politicians and entertainers, who strut around going "look at me, being dreadfully politically incorrect, aren't I awful?".

And there is a natural complementarity between the popular notion of virtue signalling and this notion of vice signalling - thus @sam_kriss defends viciousness and polemic in a good cause.

The vice signallers draw much of their energy from the knee-jerk disapproval of the virtue signallers. The political power of vice signalling is demonstrated by the extraordinary amount of broadcast airtime that is given to people like Nigel Farage, and (of course) the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States.

But vice signalling is essentially an opposition tactic. So what happens when the vice signallers gain power? @BDSixsmith imagines a dialectic process of vice being translated into virtue.

"That which seemed transgressive must appear conscientious. This is challenging for revolutionary movements if their identities were based on being oppositional, and helps to explain the internecine conflicts that tear them apart. If one’s ambitions transcend nihilistic mischief-making one must have beliefs because one thinks them principled, not merely as other people think them perverted."

Perhaps thinking along similar lines, many people expected Mr Trump's style to change when he reached the White House. But @PeterBeinart argues that the president’s personal attacks are not a distraction from his policy goals, they are his policy goals.

The problem is that virtue signalling, in the sense popularized by Bartholomew, is also an opposition tactic. In his excellent piece on making Twitter safe for politics, @mrianleslie warns us to beware what he calls the "moral surge", the pleasure of asserting one's moral integrity in public. Virtue signallers can safely deplore the grubby compromises of practical politics, confident they will never be called upon to make any decisions with real consequences. They were the ones who refused to vote for Clinton because she wasn't virtuous enough. And look what they got instead.

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James Bartholomew, The awful rise of 'virtue signalling' (Spectator, 18 April 2015)
I invented 'virtue signalling'. Now it's taking over the world (Spectator, 10 October 2015)

Peter Beinart, Trump's Grudges Are His Agenda (The Atlantic, 30 June 2017)

Paul Goodman, Vice Signalling (Conservative Home, 22 December 2016)

Ian Leslie, Unfight Club (Medium, 14 July 2017)

Ben Sixsmith, What is Vice Signalling? (14 April 2016)

Wikipedia: Virtue Signalling


updated 15 July 2017

Dove World Outrage Center

A tiny church in Florida is punching above its weight by threatening to burn copies of the Qur'an on 11 September. The pastor appears to have no knowledge of what the Qur'an actually says, but has convinced himself and his followers that the Qur'an is "full of lies" [BBC News 8 September 2010].

This threat has attracted wide publicity, and has been condemned by American and other Western leaders including

• Tony Blair, former British prime minister
• Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State
• Robert Gates, US Secretary of Defense
• Eric Holder, US Attorney General
• Ban Ki-Moon, UN Secretary General 
• Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former archbishop of Washington
• Peter MacKay, Canadian Defence Minister
• General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Afghanistan
• Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO Secretary General 

Even key figures of the American right such as Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin have criticized the plan. But in a world where traditional leadership can be defied and disrespected by tiny groups of trouble-makers, mere verbal condemnation (expressing one's outrage on Twitter) hardly seems adequate.

There is a general problem with protesting against extremism of all kinds, which is that such protests are often counter-productive, merely alienating the extremists and reinforcing their beliefs. But what is the alternative? In this case, there is an obvious remedy: I hope that Christian leaders, especially in America, have the courage to organize mass readings of the holy books of other religions, including the Qur'an, in order to demonstrate that their faith is compatible with many of the truths contained in these religions.

Meanwhile, people are sending books for the bonfire. Some of these books may be genuine copies of the Qur'an, but I expect that a few tricksters will be sending in disguised copies of the Bible and the American Constitution to be burned as well. Ha!

Papa Ratzi 3

When Pope Benedict XVI was elected, few people expected that this elderly German scholar would be able to handle the complex political pressures of the modern world with the same compassion and charisma as his predecessor. In my post Papa Ratzi, I quoted Timothy Garton Ash, who predicted that "the new Pope will hasten the decline of the old continent's formative faith" (Guardian April 21st, 2005).

Last week, in the middle of an otherwise dry and intellectually demanding lecture about Faith and Reason at the University of Regensberg, the Pope threw in a quotation about the Prophet Mohammad (peace be upon him) from a 14th century Byzantine emperor. [BBC News, Wikipedia]

Robin Wilton read the whole lecture closely, to find out what did the pope actually say. He concludes that the lecture as a whole represents a fairly reasonable and tolerant position about Islam, and implies that it is the outrage that is unreasonable.

But what I don't quite understand is why the Pope chose to include the offending quotation at all, since it doesn't seem to add any logical weight to his argument. Lecturers often include quotations in order to produce some effect - to amuse or stimulate or shock the audience. We don't know what effect the Pope intended on this occasion, but we know very well what effect this quotation has had.