Social media makes it easier to see mob behavior

A suggestive argument that has appeal. From Twitter isn't real by Noah Millman.

I must admit to being marginally perplexed by the constant excoriation of Twitter. It's a tool. Use it like a tool. If you are upset by content you see from those you are following, then unfollow them. It seems to me most the criticism of Twitter is really a reflection of poor cognition or self-discipline of the Twitter critic.

I long resisted joining Twitter and when I finally did so, I did it in a deliberative fashion. I first followed all my print sources - all the newspapers I read, magazines, etc., all the reporters I recognize. That experience was indeed dismaying. The volume of sludge, the repetition, the hot-house atmosphere of group think, the constant making of dubious arguments - that wasn't good at all.

I then leavened it by following authors, artists, art institutions, academics, historians, philosophers, economists, science news sources, etc. I basically raised the cognitive quality and that helped a lot, but there was still the stench of cognitive pollution.

I next began a fairly ruthless pruning of news organizations. That raised the quality of my Twitter feed yet further. I then began unfollowing anyone who made more than three stupid, insulting, or toxic comments in a short time frame, even if they were individuals I otherwise found quite admirable.

That was the tipping point. I blundered my way into the social media version of William Morris's adage:

If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

There are still issues with Twitter, especially how they seemingly arbitrarily play with their algorithms. Since I follow a number of foreign sources, there are occasions when, even though they are a small number of my follows, my feed is filled primarily with Swedish or German or French or even Spanish. Another issue is that clearly some of the sources I follow are effectively shadow banned because I never see their tweets in my time line and have to go to their page to see them. Some of the problems are on the part of Twitter (shadow-banning for example) and some are almost certainly the unexpected effect of an algorithmic change.

But by and large I find Twitter entertaining and useful, and occasionally beautiful and inspiring.

Millman is making a different observation.

What if Twitter isn't real?

By that, I don't just mean Russian bots talking to other Russian bots, liberal satirists fooling gullible conservatives, and cynical opinion-mongers conjuring panics out of nothing. There's clearly a lot of literally fake news on Twitter, and it's a problem.

Notwithstanding these flaws — or perhaps because of them — Twitter is still taken seriously as a medium. It's supposed to be extraordinarily powerful and influential, able to make and break reputations at unprecedented speed.

But what if it isn't? What if Twitter is mostly a closed ecosystem, relevant only to and within itself? What if its ability to shape the real world is, as they say, greatly exaggerated?

Millman is making the argument that irrespective of the quality of Twitter, that the attention and claims made against it are way out of proportion to its observable effect. Strategically and at a process level, Twitter doesn't make much difference and therefore whether it is shadow-banning or is stew of hateful tweeters or any other accusation is kind of irrelevant. If it doesn't affect anything, then we don't need to worry about it.

Bolstering his argument further, it is worth noting that only 20% of Americans have a Twitter account.

I think there is real merit to Millman's position and I believe it is closely related to the argument I make about mainstream media. Most of our mainstream media are college educated, frequently from very selective institutions, they earn a lot of money (the best of them), live in half a dozen cities but concentrated in NYC and Washington, D.C., are overwhelmingly Democrat, subscribe to many of the tenants of critical theory, postmodernism, and social justice theory, live in tony neighborhoods in those cities, socialize primarily with other mainstream media and the Mandarin Class. The mainstream media, in my view, are approaching a closed ecosystem which is blissfully unaware of how divergent their lives, experiences and beliefs are from those of 95% of Americans.

The mainstream media is not inherently evil or necessarily bad but they are a oligopoly enterprise (something like five organizations control the great bulk of media outlets), critically dependent on a favorable regulatory structure, and inescapably bound to the interests and concerns of the Mandarin Class rather than the needs of their consumers or those of the average citizen.

And while 80% of Americans are not on Twitter, it would not be surprising to discover that 80% of the mainstream media are on Twitter. Twitter isn't important in the real world, to the 80% who don't use it, but it is an important element in the world of the mainstream media portion of the Mandarin Class. If this picture is true then it makes sense that Twitter is both not real (the great majority don't use it AND it doesn't affect outcomes) and that at the same time it would garner much attention from the Mandarin Class because it is an integral part of the lives of the Mandarin Class.

There is a technique I have used for years when planning a major transformation at an enterprise. When doing such a thing, it is important to know who are the critical stakeholder groups affected, what are their respective views on the proposed change, to what degree do those different stakeholder groups communicate with one another and in what fashion? Knowing these things drives your transformation communication strategy, allows you to create an alliance of stakeholder groups, and allows you to understand what aspects of the transformation are more likely to generate opposition than others.

But to do all this, you need to understand the different channels of communication (if they exist at all) between the different stakeholder groups. Who talks with whom, what emails are shared, what newsletters are forwarded, etc. Communication channels are notoriously difficult to map, especially in non-hierarchical organizations, informal organizations, organizations which are formally separate from one another, etc.

One technique I have used is what I call channel testing. It probably has a formal name but I have never come across a good description of it as an explicit tool. Channel testing is a technique to use when you want to discover or confirm what information is flowing where. It consists of creating a package of communication - a new idea, a catchphrase, a ridiculous claim, an unusual acronym - and then deeding that distinct communication package into a particular channel such as an individual person, a newsletter, a business unit, etc.

It is important that the communication package be both distinctive but not draw attention to itself. Distinctive enough that it would not arise under normal communication circumstances and not draw attention to itself so that the test becomes the object of attention itself.

A classic example of channel testing occurred in WWII. Americans suspected that Japan was planning a campaign against Midway Island. American Naval Intelligence had a reasonably good grasp of the Japanese book cipher system but did not know the particular signal for "Midway". From frequency analysis, they inferred that the code AF was "Midway" but needed to confirm that that was the case.

The Navy used their secure undersea cable to instruct Midway to transmit a particular communication package via a non-secure radio signal to Hawaii. The non-secure radio signal was used for routine operational communication and would not raise any suspicions among Japanese Naval Intelligence. In early Spring of 1942, Midway radioed Pearl Harbor their routine operational report including the note that they were having trouble with their desalination plant and that it had broken down.

Shortly afterwards American Naval Intelligence picked up a Japanese signal containing the information that AF might be short of water. By this stratagem of channel testing, the Navy was able to confirm that Midway was indeed AF.

Much less formally, one can channel test the impact of Twitter, and the Mandarin Class mainstream media more generally. If there is a high cross-communication between the groups, one would expect that the issues of concern to mainstream media which they hash out on Twitter to crossover into the concerns of the general public.

It is a crude test but easily done.

Nearly all the fads and issues which are of existential concern to the MSM fail to gain traction or concern among citizens (see Gallup polling.) Global warming, Transgender rights, the wall, the Russians, inequality, etc. all get yards of column space and yet barely register with the public.

Another channel test is the Trump Derangement Syndrome of the past twenty-four months which has been a fascinating illustration of just how closed a cognitive system exists in the mainstream media. MSM has been wall-to-wall nonstop criticism ranging from the occasionally well justified to ungrounded hysteria and emotional spleen. Despite the encompassing, relentless and sustained negative media coverage (92% if I recall correctly), Trump's popularity ratings remain unchanged, indeed have been rising slowly.

If there is huge change in input (MSM negative attacks) and no change in outcome (public opinion) that suggests to me that the MSM are operating as a closed loop isolated system that has limited connection or affect on a large part of the population.

Millman makes a second important point.

Consider the case of comedian Kevin Hart, who was briefly tapped to host the Academy Awards. As soon as the announcement was made, the denizens of Twitter went to work unearthing bits from his comedy (of which his Twitter feed is surely an extension) that were less than complimentary toward gay men, to say the least. Within two days, Hart had stepped aside, claiming he didn't want to be a distraction from the awards ceremony. But the distraction hasn't abated. Instead, Hart's friends and colleagues are coming to his defense by pointing out that other ostensibly woke comedians engaged in similar sorts of humor and continue to do so.

Did the Academy do the right thing? If the "right thing" is to never give a platform to anyone who's ever said anything like Hart said, then the mistake was to ever have reached out to Hart in the first place. Backing down swiftly just makes it look like they didn't do their homework, and further erodes trust in their judgment; it's not like those homophobic jokes were any kind of secret, after all.

From the Academy's perspective, though, the "right thing" was probably just to avoid negative publicity that would weaken ratings for the event. But by that metric it's quite possible that they made the wrong call. I suspect there are more Kevin Hart fans who normally don't watch the awards who would tune in to see him than there are die-hard Oscar watchers who would tune out in protest of his presence. Moreover, it's easy to imagine folks in the Academy's PR department pulling their hair out now about the problem of how to replace Hart. If the next host isn't black, will Hart fans accuse the Academy of holding him to a racist double standard? But how will another black comedian feel about stepping into the spot over Hart's corpse?

So I have to wonder: What would have happened if the Academy had done nothing — or nearly nothing? What if they followed a PR strategy that presumed that, in the Twitter era, the baseline level of negative publicity is always going to be higher than it used to be — and that the presumption should be that the publicity has few real consequences in monetary terms. Firing off an angry tweet is the second-easiest thing in the world to do, the only thing easier being liking someone else's angry tweet. If that's all that's happening, then what's happening really isn't real.

We are still in the early days of social media. We are still figuring out both its capabilities and its constraints. We still are figuring out how to deal with it from a regulatory perspective, it's economics, privacy, security, etc. It is an unknown phenomenon where we are learning as we go. And one of the things we are learning is the capacity for destructive mobbing behavior.

Social media is forcing us to recognize that there are many people who are only loosely constrained by acceptable social norms. Very small numbers of highly motivated individuals can create the appearance of a mob and then direct the destructive power of the mob against targets. While there is evil in this phenomenon, there are also aspects of moral behavior, social norms, psychology and affiliative networks which we still basically do not understand, though we are beginning to learn.

Interestingly, the Founding Fathers were deeply concerned about the tyranny of the majority and mob effects and structured the Constitution in a fashion to constrain those phenomenon. I have not seen anyone attempt a treatment of the lessons learned from the Founding Fathers and the mob effects in social media. Could be quite interesting.

I think Social Media is also forcing a slow dawning of awareness of the toxicity of critical theory/postmodernism/social justice theory and its incompatibility with civil discourse and reasoned argument. To date, the social justice social media mob bares its fangs and corporations yield, whatever the issue. Yet every enterprise which has capitulated to the howling social justice social media mob later learns to its expense that the howling social justice social media mob are not their customers and are not representative of their customer's values and interests.

This dynamic has led to the observation of Get Woke, Go Broke.

From Brands Heed Social Media. They’re Advised Not to Forget Word of Mouth by Janet Morrissey.

The study, which looked at 170 brands, found that companies often wrongly saw social media as an accurate and sufficient guide for tracking consumer sentiment. Often, though, that social conversation might be much different from what people are saying in private conversations with friends and family, the study said.

“The danger is you can make some pretty big mistakes if you assume the conversations happening online are also happening offline,” said Brad Fay, chief research officer at Engagement Labs and a co-author of the study. “Very often, they’re heading in different directions.”

The most negative and most outrageous comments often get the most traction on social media. And sometimes, people post comments about a topic just to get a reaction or to reflect an “image” or appear “cool” to their social media followers, when their actual views may be the opposite.

Social media is a valuable tool for detecting early signs of trouble. “It’s a wake-up call, a warning that something is afoot and there is a negative force there,” said Elissa Moses, chief executive of neuroscience and behavioral science for Ipsos, a market research company. But a brand then needs to dig deeper to see if offline chatter matches it and if not, why not.

GE, Yeti, Dick's, Sports Illustrated, NFL, Gawker, Evergreen College, Eminem, CNN, Hollywood, Teen Vogue, ESPN, University of Missouri, Miss America Pageant, Oberlin College, Rolling Stone, the list goes on of institutions which tried to appease the social media/social justice mob and ended up paying a high price for that failure of leadership.

I wonder if social media mobs might not be bringing renewed attention to the value of leadership, personal morality, and strong institutional cultures as bulwarks against mob action.