certaininternetdestiny

[certaininternetdestiny]

Should we blame the echo chamber? A look into online radicalisation pipelines

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Last year I convinced myself I was part of a YouTube echo chamber –  I noticed a consistency within my recommended videos, which never strayed too far from the 3-4 categories of content I used to watch. Back then, I had just learned what the term meant – the selective exposure to media wherein people tend to favour content that reinforces their prejudices (Karlsen et al., 2017). With high-profile people like Bill Gates (Fletcher, 2020) and Obama (Bruns, 2019) acknowledging its existence, the notion became even more plausible. Since research shows that homogeneous groups breed intolerance and extreme positions (Cinelli et al., 2021), I considered the topic worth investigating. However, once I started looking into the phenomenon, I discovered there are certain ambiguities about echo chambers that made my conviction less solid.

Firstly, I was surprised to discover that my experience with being led into a radicalising pipeline on YouTube resonated with other people’s, as recounted by Paul Lewis in The Guardian (2018) or by Kevin Roose in New York Times (2019), as he wrote about watching factual videos on vaccines and gradually being led into anti-vaxx territory.

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However, Hosseinmardi and colleagues (2020) warn about treating anecdotes as evidence, as they conduct a study to find out YouTube’s radicalizing potential through the echo chamber effect. In their research spanning 4 years and investigating a subset of 309,813 panelists, they discovered that YouTube does indeed precipitate the formation of echo chambers, but not in the way it might be expected. They discovered that 11% of YouTube content is news, which, for a platform of its size, is a significant portion of content. Moreover, interest in far-right media is growing and, even though left-wing and moderate outlets outnumber right-wing channels, the latter have a stronger and more engaged user base. Yet they specify that the echo chambers aren’t algorithmically formed, but rather sought out through user preferences. In this sense, this isn’t an issue inherent to YouTube, but rather a trend at large within the media landscape of the past few years (Hosseinmardi et al., 2020).

Furthermore, a study conducted by Karlsen and colleagues (2017) debunks the concept of online echo chambers, proving that people are exposed to a diverse range of viewpoints on social platforms like Twitter or Facebook, since they don’t encourage forming in-site relationships based on political leaning. Bruns (2019) reports similar findings, even going as far as to call echo chambers a moral panic. Still, he warns of their formation on Facebook, through private groups or pages, where membership is curated.

According to Karlsen and colleagues (2017) trench warfare dynamics on the internet are more plausible than echo chambers because, even though people are presented with various political standpoints, contradiction may end up having the same effect as confirmation – it reinforces preexisting biases.

Therefore, rather than blaming technology and algorithms which are out of our control, polarisation on the internet may just fit into a larger trend within the tense contemporary socio-political scene.

[Word count: 493]

Sources:

Fletcher, R. (2020). The truth behind filter bubbles: Bursting some myths. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/truth-behind-filter-bubbles-bursting-some-myths?fbclid=IwAR0EN_nCQQRpnsiX0AyDjNSEkUHwhw0zwg10_n3rEKbgeE2pfT0hcWWkNaM  [accessed 15 December 2021]

Hosseinmardi, H., Ghasemian, A., Clauset, A., Rothschild, D.M., Mobius, M., Watts, D.J. (2020). Evaluating the scale, growth, and origins of right-wing echo chambers on YouTube. https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.12843 [accessed 15 December 2021]

Karlsen, R., Steen-Johnsen, K., Wollebæk, D., & Enjolras, B. (2017). Echo chamber and trench warfare dynamics in online debates. European Journal of Communication, 32(3), 257–273. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323117695734

Lewis, P. (2018).  'Fiction is outperforming reality': how YouTube's algorithm distorts truth. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/02/how-youtubes-algorithm-distorts-truth?fbclid=IwAR0PYtrRSACw2WifV6F173BK_eg_blnUuQhwej-wslBAxRBGaI-jKgtHm1I [accessed 15 December 2021]

Roose, K. (2019). The making of a YouTube radical. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html?mtrref=www.nytimes.com&gwh=B2258B77EBC2182051A319AAC60B6213&gwt=pay&assetType=PAYWALL [accessed 15 December 2021]

Images:

Image 1: http://davidbyrne.com/journal/the-echo-chamber

Image 2: https://society6.com/product/echo-chamber_print?c_kid=s6-8278352p4a1v45&sku=s6-8278352p4a1v45&utm_source=pinterest&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=2331&epik=dj0yJnU9enM3UGMzYUhrYm9LdV9QV2M0d2NPaGlFLTUzMFlFYXImcD0wJm49WkJxNXpxOGxrQnhzOEhnaHFGUXlaZyZ0PUFBQUFBR0c3U1FJ

[certaininternetdestiny]

What we learn in-between scrolls: knowledge retention of news on social media

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For a long time, I’ve considered social media a tool for gaining knowledge, among others. Indeed, research on traditional media already shows a positive correlation between its consumption and the viewers’ high knowledge of surveillance political knowledge, and moderate level of static political knowledge (Barabas et al., 2014). Furthermore, online news media seem to have the same effect on audiences, since they are but a digital version of traditional news (van Erkel, Van Aelst, 2021). One can thus be misled to believe that there’s no difference in terms of news found on social media. Feezell and Ortiz (2021) went as far as to hypothesize that incidental news exposure on social media could reach otherwise politically uninterested citizens.

It has been proven that a base-level knowledge of political events is required for citizens’ political involvement, and that the consumption of news results in more factual political knowledge (van Erkel, Van Aelst, 2021). Moreover, citizens across the world are increasingly getting their news from social media, with about 36% of people from twelve democracies naming Facebook as a primary source of news (Newman et al., 2018). It is thus imperative to question whether social media are efficient in providing users with adequate political knowledge.

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Looking into incidental news exposure on social media, Feezell and Ortiz (2021) conducted two experiments in which they subtly introduced both hard and soft news into the social media diet of a cohort of 210 students. By testing the participants’ knowledge before and after the experiments, they concluded that there was no increase in political knowledge resulted from incidental exposure. However, the individuals’ self-perceived political knowledge increased amongst the ones with low political interest (Feezell, Ortiz, 2021).

Inquiring the same topic, van Erkel and Van Aelst (2021) presented similar findings. They also gave three possible explanations for the phenomenon: the creation of filter bubbles, which give people a narrow understanding of topics; information overload, which is specific to social media and results in psychological strain and an inability to process information; and the illusion of knowledge that makes one not investigate further (van Erkel and Van Aelst, 2021).

Research showed no proof for the “filter bubble” explanation, but presented partial evidence for information overload, stating that it mostly happens for social media users who combine traditional news sources with sources shared on their feed (van Erkel and Van Aelst, 2021). The third explanation is yet to be looked into.

Therefore, even though social media platforms are a gateway from presenting people with an amalgam of news, it is now clear that just scrolling through headlines doesn’t guarantee attentive readership and information retention. Considering that more and more netizens rely on these platforms for their news, especially as discussed in my previous post on doomscrolling, explanations for the phenomenon should be further investigated.

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Sources:

Barabas, J., Jerit, J., Pollock, W., & Rainey, C. (2014). The question(s) of political knowledge. American Political Science Review, 108(4), 840–855. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055414000392

Feezell, J. T., & Ortiz, B. (2021). ‘I saw it on Facebook’: an experimental analysis of political learning through social media. Information Communication and Society, 24(9), 1283–1302. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2019.1697340

Newman, N., Fletcher, R., Kalogeropoulos, A., Levy, D.A.L., & Nielsen, R.K. (2018). Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2018. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

van Erkel, P. F. A., & Van Aelst, P. (2020). Why Don’t We Learn from Social Media? Studying Effects of and Mechanisms behind Social Media News Use on General Surveillance Political Knowledge. Political Communication, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1784328 Images:

Image 1: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-laptop-near-plant-927629/

Image 2: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-woman-using-an-imac-computer-4185957/

[certaininternetdestiny]

The (un)appeal of meme campaigns

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At this point in time, most people with internet access should be acquainted with memes. They are visual media that communicate ideas through snappy text superimposed to images, usually considered funny (Kulkarni, 2017). In the overall democratizing context of the internet, memes are not only a platform for people of all backgrounds to express their viewpoint, but they also create communities based on the level of meme literacy of the members (Nissenbaum, Shifman, 2017). In online political discourses, memes have become a popular tool to disseminate opinions and information, from many points of view, even extremist or marginal ones (Nissenbaum, Shifman, 2017). In politics, humour and satire are nothing new. Depending on the context, they can either be a coping mechanism (Kulkarni, 2017), or a way to discredit the opposing faction in a way that denotes superiority and wit (Pearce, Hajizada, 2014). However, especially after Russia’s interference with the US presidential election in 2016 through an influx of partisan memes, recent times have seen a rise in a different trend: politicians using memes as part of their campaign strategy (Flynn, 2019).

At first glance, this can be explained by the mass-appeal of memes – they act as an efficient tool to engage audiences who don’t have an explicit interest in politics (Pearce, Hajizada, 2014). Memes also help in connecting with younger demographics (Tenove, 2019) and their viral nature and cheap production value result in fruitful advertisement (Murse, 2019).

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Despite the positives, internet natives seem to resist their allure. With the exception of a few successful examples, such as Obama’s integration of memes in his campaign strategy in 2012 (Rochelle, 2019), the co-option of memes has come across as distasteful and disingenuous. An infamous example of unsuccessful use of memes in political discourse is Hillary Clinton’s tone-deaf tweet “How does your student loan make you feel? Tell us in in 3 emojis or less.” (2015) or her attempt at appealing to the youth by appropriating Pokemon Go in-game culture when posting the following meme with the caption “Pokemon Go to the polls.” (2016):

[Image 3] However, memes have been sneaking into political discourse for a while now, but when they’re posted by regular internet users, they don’t seem to attract the same amount of scrutiny.

Building on Bordieu’s concept of cultural capital (1993), Nissenbaum and Shifman (2017) explain that memes have become identifiers of a shared culture on the internet. The group decides and constructs their own jargon and image lexicon. Thus, meme literacy becomes a way of gatekeeping, and wrong use signals impostors (Nissenbaum, Shifman, 2017). From this perspective, it becomes clear why there is distaste towards the co-opting of memes by politicians: as seen in the Hillary Clinton example, their context, design, and language are foreign to the general meme culture, and also incongruous with her image, whereas in Obama’s case, his overall public persona matches the way his campaign integrated memes.

Therefore, in the highly solidified digital subcultures, trying to relate and appeal to their members as an outsider, especially one with ulterior motives, can backfire, shifting the lens from the politicians’ memes to the politicians as memes.

[Word count: 517] Sources:

Bordieu, P. (1993). Sociology in Question. London: SAGE

Flynn, K. (2019). The 2020 meme election: How memes became a mainstream tool in politics. https://digiday.com/marketing/meme-election-memes-became-mainstream-tool-politics/ [accessed 12 December 2021]

Kulkarni, A. (2017). Internet meme and political discourse: A study on the impact of internet meme as a tool in communicating political satire. Journal of Content, Community and Communication, 6, 13–17. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3501366

Murse, T. (2019). How Social Media Has Changed Politics. 10 Ways Twitter and Facebook Have Altered Campaigns. https://www.thoughtco.com/how-social-media-has-changed-politics-3367534[accessed 12 December 2021]

Nissenbaum, A., & Shifman, L. (2017). Internet memes as contested cultural capital: The case of 4chan’s /b/ board. New Media and Society, 19(4), 483–501. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815609313

Pearce, K., & Hajizada, A. (2014). No laughing matter humor as a means of dissent in the digital Era: The case of Authoritarian Azerbaijan. Demokratizatsiya, 22(1), 67–85.

Rochelle, M. (2019). So Listen: Should politicians participate in memes? https://www.thepostathens.com/article/2019/04/political-memes-republican-democrat-ted%20-cruz-zodiac-killer?fbclid=IwAR0cgzQ85tRdbCmtkqfQAVh8W6X4IERN5vz83i2jDUzU4rRkq4jZbkrZSCc [accessed 12 December 2021]

Tenove, C. (2019). The meme-ification of politics: Politicians & their ‘lit’ memes. https://theconversation.com/the-meme-ification-of-politics-politicians-and-their-lit-memes-110017 [accessed 12 December 2021]

Images:

Image 1: https://www.mediaite.com/online/rep-steve-stockman-ruins-doge-for-the-rest-of-us/

Image 2: https://emojitimeline.com/hillary-clintons-emoji-tweet/

Image 3: https://www.insider.com/hillary-clinton-wants-people-to-pokemon-go-to-the-polls-2016-7

[certaininternetdestiny]

Doomscrolling or how the pandemic has impacted our media consumption patterns

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My most vivid memory of the beginning of the pandemic is sharing a cubicle with an overly-anxious co-worker who couldn’t help but read out every horrific piece of news about the virus she would stumble upon on her social media feed, every scroll accompanied by audible gasps. What I wasn’t aware of back then was that her behaviour was common enough to merit its own name – “doomscrolling”, or the act of compulsively consuming negative news which deeply impacts the reader’s wellbeing (Ytre-Arne & Moe, 2021).

Although the term gained popularity in 2020 (BBC, 2021), the behaviour it represents is nothing new. It’s akin to the fascination for morbid news, or what an interviewee referred to as the “can’t-look-away-from-a-car-crash mentality” in an article posted by the BBC about the phenomenon (2021). However, in the face of the unforeseen circumstances of 2020, and facilitated by social media affordances which make endless streams of content readily available, doomscrolling has become a habit for a lot of internet users (Ytre-Arne & Moe, 2021). This article will explore why people engage in doomscrolling, and the impact it has on the general public.

Ytre-Arne and Moe (2021) explain this pattern of news consumption as the need to stay informed in the face of uncertainty, making people believe they could monitor the situation by being in a constant state of alert. McKay approaches the topic from an evolutionarily perspective, and sees doomscrolling as a coping mechanism which, through the simulation of fear, prepares us for negative scenarios (BBC, 2021). Additionally, in a study on the impact of doomscrolling on people with pre-existing PTSD and depression, the exacerbated use of social media is described as a “maladaptive coping strategy” which aids in diminishing anguish (Price et. al. 2021, p.6).

[Image 2] In their survey of 6233 German citizens on Covid-19 news consumption patterns between March and April 2020, Bendau and colleagues (2021) concluded that the news use duration on average at that time was 2.40h, with a frequency of 7.23 times per day. Their research revealed a positive link between Covid-related news consumption and perceived symptoms of anxiety and depression, with social media users scoring the highest rates of both Covid-related and general anxiety and depression, compared to people browsing official sources, radio, television, newspapers, and news portals. They offer a possible explanation: a combination of the emotive language typically used on social media, the endless stream of news, and the community aspect of commenting, exposing users’ to others’ panics (Bendau et. al., 2021). Although it only samples German citizens, this survey corroborates the findings of another study by Gao and colleagues (2020) which finds similar associations in a sample of 4872 Chinese participants.

The correlation between negative mental health effects and doomscrolling is still under investigation, but it has so far revealed alarming trends. Almost two years into the pandeminc, and still living through an ever-changing socio-economic landscape, probing news consumption patterns and media effects is now more urgent than ever.

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Sources:

BBC (2021). The darkly soothing compulsion of 'doomscrolling'. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210226-the-darkly-soothing-compulsion-of-doomscrolling [accessed 29 November 2021]

Bendau, A., Petzold, M. B., Pyrkosch, L., Mascarell Maricic, L., Betzler, F., Rogoll, J., … Plag, J. (2021). Associations between COVID-19 related media consumption and symptoms of anxiety, depression and COVID-19 related fear in the general population in Germany. European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, 271(2), 283–291. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00406-020-01171-6

Gao, J., Zheng, P., Jia, Y., Chen, H., Mao, Y., Chen, S., … Dai, J. (2020). Mental health problems and social media exposure during COVID-19 outbreak. PLoS ONE, 15(4). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231924

Price, M., Legrand, A. C., Brier, Z. M. F., Van Stolk-Cooke, K., Peck, K., Dodds, P. S., … Adams, Z. W. (2021). Doomscrolling during COVID-19: The negative association between daily social and traditional media consumption and mental health symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic. Preprint, 1–8. Retrieved from https://storywrangling.org/?ngrams=

Ytre-Arne, B., & Moe, H. (2021). Doomscrolling, Monitoring and Avoiding: News Use in COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown. Journalism Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2021.19524

Images:

Image 1: https://www.today.com/health/how-stop-doomscrolling-its-affect-your-brain-t188725

Image 2: https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/health/a34344905/how-to-stop-doomscrolling/

[certaininternetdestiny]

Does digital dualism contribute to the incredulity of online threats against women?

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Popularised by Nathan Jurgenson (2011b), digital dualism is the belief that the virtual world and the real, offline one are two intrinsically separate realities. One would believe that in today’s digital environment, which is becoming increasingly enmeshed with people’s everyday “real” lives, the online-offline binary would finally be proved fallacious. However, current publications like Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, Morozov’s The Net Delusion, or even the blockbuster The Social Network show us that digital dualism is a concept still deeply entrenched in popular conscience (Jurgenson, 2011b).

The rise in cyber abuse against women in the public sphere, corroborated with the poor response from law enforcement when called into action (Sobieraj, 2020), has made me wonder whether the online-offline discrepancy plays a role in the lack of appropriate legislature against online threats. And if so, is this the right approach? Even though this post mentions online threats against women, the role of digital dualism in the skepticism against any type of virtual abuse could be extrapolated.

According to Sobieraj (2020), digital harassment against women is often trivialised for its lack of “real life” consequences. Looking at US legislature, offences such as defamation, stalking, harassment, or threats of violence could lead to severe repercussions in the court of law. However, when these happen online, they are given less importance. Moreover, since US law focuses on the suspects’ individual actions, the case of cumulative online abuse against women falls short of the mark when broken down into all the separate comments. Combined with the semi-obscurity of online harassers, enforcement against virtual attacks becomes even more uncertain, with policemen being more inclined to advise women to “just log off the internet” instead of taking any action against the perpetrators (Sobieraj, 2020).

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Indeed, it is the aura of anonymity which leads the general public and academics alike to wonder whether the online sphere transforms decent people into “trolls” (Rossini, 2020). It relates to the digital dualist misconception that the “real-world” person is the 1st self, whereas the online equivalent of the same individual is the 2nd self, a darker more unhinged version of the former (Jurgenson, 2011a). This notion often excuses the behavior of such “trolls”, seen as decent people getting carried away by online affordances.

I propose a different perspective on the issue. The ubiquity of technology in our lives and the increasingly intertwined online and offline social spheres prove that rather than a stark separation between the virtual and the real, the former should be seen as an augmentation of the latter. From employers inquiring your online presence, to more radical examples like the massacre committed by self-proclaimed incel Elliot Rodger in 2014 (BBC, 2018), it is now more than ever clear that online activity can have dire offline consequences.

Seeing that women in the public sphere conduct most of their professional activity online, virtual threats against them can impact their livelihood beyond the bounds of the screen. Silencing their voices also has far deeper antidemocratic implications (Sobieraj, 2020).

So I wonder, rather than seeing trolls as lost souls acting in a moment of recklessness, why should we not consider them people whose real intentions are revealed by online affordances, who pose a real threat to women?

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Sources:

BBC (2018). Elliot Rodger: How misogynist killer became 'incel hero'. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-43892189 [accessed: 20 October 2020]

Jurgenson, N. (2011a). “Digital Dualism and the Fallacy of Web Objectivity”. Cyborgology (blog). https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/09/13/digital-dualism-and-the-fallacy-of-web-objectivity/ [accessed: 20 October 2021]

Jurgenson, N. (2011b). “Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality”. Cyborgology (blog). https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/02/24/digital-dualism-versus-augmented-reality/[accessed: 20 October 2021]

Rossini, P. (2020). Beyond Incivility: Understanding Patterns of Uncivil and Intolerant Discourse in Online Political Talk. Communication Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650220921314

Sobieraj, S. (2020). Credible Threat: Attacks Against Women Online and the Future of Democracy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press

Images:

Image 1: https://www.behance.net/gallery/26296429/dualismi

Image 2: https://trendland.com/dan-bejar-illustrations/