This is a brilliant exchange by @NancyMace yesterday in Congress. There is a tiny group of hateful left-liberal fanatics whom have been arbitrarily dubbed "Online Safety Experts" and constantly warn hateful rhetoric incites violence. Yet they're the most hateful people around.
Four minutes worth watching.
Glenn's entire thread is worth a read, including his discussion of the important book by Jonathan Haidt and Gregg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind. This video is Exhibit A, introducing us to one of the many adult-sized children who think they are clever to tear down America's institutions while offering nothing in their place. In short, they are purveyors of Chesterson's Fence. They have turned out this way because they have been coddled throughout their lives, never forced to learn how to have adult conversations . . . until now.
Matt Bivens describes the extent to which Russian Facebook postings swung the 2016 election:
Chest-thumping about how the FBI needs to drive the dastardly foreigners out of our Facebook and Twitter feeds was, of course, not new. It was always eye-rolling to anyone who looked into it.
For example, we’d been told it was a major national security concern that the Russians were using our own Facebook against us — dividing us from within, with devious and manipulative ad purchases! — because they hated our freedoms. But as summarized in the Columbia Journalism Review, at issue was a mere $100,000 in “Russian” Facebook ads over the entire election season, at a time when Facebook’s advertising revenue per day, much of it political in that pre-election moment, was running about $96 million. So the entire alleged months-long Russian propaganda campaign would have amounted to less than 0.1 percent of a single day’s Facebook ads.
(It gets even more ludicrous. The ads were of no actual coherence — they were obviously nothing more than random, revenue-generating clickbait. As cited by solemn U.S. Congress reports, “the Russians” had spent their $100,000 on a bunch of nonsense — ranging from ads for fake hotlines to get help with masturbation addiction, to banners with the words “Born Liberal!” over a peaceful skycape of birds. So this was almost certainly not a devious Kremlin-directed plot, and instead simply the sleazy-lazy business of spam and clickbait.)
For me, the symbolic pinnacle of this insanity was a cartoon supposedly weaponized against us by our Russian adversaries. It was of a muscular, rainbow-colored Bernie Sanders:
Rainbow Buff Bernie ran for a single day in 2016. It was clicked on 54 times. Yet the U.S. House Intelligence Committee addressed this social media posting as part of a formal report into Russian meddling in our affairs. It was a matter of the highest concern. The House report informed us “the Russians” paid the exchange rate equivalent of $1.60 for this. Buzzfeed at the time solemnly reported these “facts” — $1.60, spent to buy 54 clicks — yet instead of mocking Congress and the FBI for this lunacy, they dutifully tracked down the American citizen who originally drew the cartoon for a pro-Bernie Sanders coloring book, so that she could explain herself! (She told them, “I feel pretty violated and very confused!”)
Clearly by 2020 we needed the FBI and the national media working hand-in-hand to police our social media — because Russia! Iran!
At Quillette, Vincent Harinam and David Kopel explain availability cascades. These can be harmful "to the survival of a society because they choke off accurate information and thoughtful discussion." I find this topic compelling in light of my recent essay regarding the resignation of Glenn Greenwald from The Intercept, of which he was co-founder. Here are some excerpts from Harinam and Kopel's much longer article:
When all available information seems to indicate that everyone is falling in line with a certain belief, we may be under the influence of an “availability cascade.” . . .
Two components make up an availability cascade: an informational cascade and a reputational cascade. An informational cascade creates genuine changes in people’s beliefs by providing plentiful but misleading information. A reputational cascade is a vicious cycle in which individuals feign expressions of conviction to retain social approval.
. . .
Availability cascades can only occur when an influence network exhibits a “critical mass” of early adopters. For an availability cascade to occur, a minimum number of individuals must first adopt it. Once this threshold is reached, the cascade becomes self-sustaining with more and more adopting it. Persons A and B declare support for a particular position. Person C disagrees but is worried about retaliation if he dissents; so, he pretends to agree with the position. Person D sees that C is going along, so D goes along too. As social media drives information flows and connects swaths of people, critical mass can be achieved much faster. Social media is a cascade builder.
According to a Cato Institute poll, 62 percent of Americans say that the current political climate prevents them from expressing their views. Majorities of Democrats (52 percent), independents (59 percent) and Republicans (77 percent) now self-censor. The only group where the majority did not feel pressured into silence were leftist Democrats. Another study found that the higher the level of education, the greater the self-censorship.
Moderates may be the worst off. Whereas the right wing and left wing can retreat to zones where their views are reinforced rather than vilified, moderates cannot. The moderate who rejects the dominant views of the Left and the Right is shouted down by both sides. For moderates, there exists no safe haven from the culture wars.
A girl in my grade school was repeatedly bullied, but the teachers (Catholic nuns) failed to intervene. Several of the boys formed a mob that picked on her, both in class and on the playground. They mocked her with nicknames. They chanted at her. They made fun of the way she looked, including the thick glasses she wore. They sneered at her, sometimes causing her to look very sad. Other students would sometimes try to intervene but it was at the risk of becoming targets themselves. Several decades later, this bullied girl had grown into a very impressive woman who told me that this bullying contributed to severe depression while she was a young adult.
As I reminisced about this sad chapter of grade school, I thought about how far we haven’t come. On social media (for me, FB and Twitter), I’ve seen similar boorish online behavior by numerous people, including intelligent people who I consider friends and who are offering ideas I consider valuable. The bad behavior is usually directed to people on the “opposing political team,” but that is no excuse. There is no excuse at all. Why do people who are generally decent and thoughtful stoop to the low bar set by the President? Do they think it’s OK to be like Trump?
Why do so many people think it’s OK to engage in name-calling, slurs, ad hominem attacks, guilt by association and numerous other fallacious and malicious forms of argument? These things are the broken windows and graffiti of social media and they are also symptoms of something much deeper. Why do grown educated adults make fun of the way other people look, including ridiculing the President’s obesity, lack of hair and skin color? Trump’s behavior repulses me, but I will keep my criticisms aimed only at his behavior, not his looks. What is the justification for doing otherwise in a civil society?
Many people justify their social media loutishness by pointing to the loutish behavior of members of the other political team, as though this justifies anything. We need to rise about this temptation and with a little discipline we can do it. Others have done it in much more trying circumstances. Ben Fainer, a friend of mine, died a few years ago. He was tortured and terrorized for six years at Buchenwald and other concentration camps during WWII. In his 2012 video, I asked him whether he hated the Nazis for what they did to him and his family. He said, “If I hate, I’m going to hurt myself.” The way that Ben discusses his survival in the camps is an inspiration to me (See minute 38:20). Truly, we can stay above the fray.
As new fault lines are becoming more apparent within the two traditional political teams, I’m seeing even more of this bad behavior online. Why is this OK? We don’t hurl weaponized language at each other in person. Why aren’t we taking special care on social media, given the increased risk of treating each other as floating words rather than as fully human?
Can’t we see that we are engaged in cheapest type of virtue signaling when we use low rent language and bullying tactics? For those of you who claim to be Christian how can you possibly justify this behavior? Is that how any of us were raised? Don’t we want to be good examples for our own children? Wouldn’t it be better for us to take our inspiration from real life great communicators like Martin Luther King rather than by plummeting to the coarse ignorance of Donald Trump?
In tumultuous times like this, when mortality salience is thick in the air, we are being poisoned by the ingroup bias. It binds and blinds far more than we realize. This group bias can make a pit of venomous snakes look like soft puppies and it can make puppies look like venomous snakes. Our deeply ingrained groupish tendencies can cause the confirmation bias run rampant and most of us are completely oblivious. Until we muster the discipline to take the red pill that allows us to see this cluttered world as a complex ecosystem rather than a Manichean battlefield, we will suffer a long succession of missed opportunities. Step one is to recognize the full humanity of each other while online.
If we have the better facts and persuasion, then let us educate and persuade each other. If our ideas are so undeniably correct, why not offer our ideas fairly and, yes, forcefully, after giving our opponents their best foot forward? Let’s make social media a place where we want to be both inspired and challenged. Let’s clean up all of this broken glass and graffiti. When we disagree with others, let us have the courage to work together to find out why we disagree. When we can’t seem to resolve our differences, let’s make sure that we always recognize the humanity in each other in the process. That is the only way we will stop this insanity.
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