Social Media and Democracy - Helping or Hurting?

good evening i'm terry rhodes dean of the college of arts and sciences at the university of north carolina at chapel hill and i would like to welcome you to tonight's abby speaker series event democracy and social media helping or hurting the abbey speaker series is hosted by unc's program for public discourse which seeks to build our students capacities for debate and deliberation and to foster a culture of constructive dialogue at unc and beyond four times each year the abbey speaker series brings together experts from different fields and disciplines to showcase productive dialogue on timely issues across a range of perspectives this year's abby speaker series will focus on the relationship between democracy and public discourse tonight's event explores how social media has changed the way citizens and politicians communicate with each other especially after the arab spring that began a decade ago social media platforms were hailed as a means of democratizing information and holding leaders accountable more recently however social media has been depicted as a threat to democracy due to the ways in which online platforms appear to fuel polarization to regulate speech and to accelerate the spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories tonight's panel brings together experts from different fields media studies political science and artificial intelligence who are passionate about preserving democracy and ensuring that social media remain compatible with democratic values i'm sure it will be a lively discussion it's my pleasure to introduce our panelists and moderator roman choudhry describes herself as operating at the intersection of humanity and technology she is now the director of twitter's meta program meta stands for machine learning ethics transparency and accountability dr chowdhury joined twitter after founding and serving as ceo of parity ai a platform that helps corporations analyze their artificial intelligence models to address issues of bias transparency and privacy dr chowdhury has a master's degree in quantitative methods of the social sciences from columbia university and a doctorate in political science from the university of california san diego siva vidyanathan is the robertson professor of media studies and director of the center for media and citizenship at the university of virginia he worked as a journalist for five years before earning a phd in american studies from the university of texas at austin he is also a columnist at the guardian and slate his most recent book is anti-social media how facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy it provides a comprehensive account of the effects facebook has had on the world and our moderator is yasha monk an associate professor of the practice at johns hopkins university where he hauls a joint appointment in the school of advanced international studies and the agora institute his work concerns the rise of populism and the crises facing liberal democracy and he is a senior fellow at the council on foreign relations professor monk is a contributing writer at the atlantic and founder of the online publication persuasion his most recent book the people versus democracy argues that the core components of liberal democracy individual rights and the popular will are at war with each other he has a phd in political science from harvard university thank you to all of our panelists for participating in what is sure to be a lively and thoughtful discussion and now i'll turn it over to yasha our moderator thank you well thank you very much for this warm welcome and i'm really excited uh for the panel that we have ahead um just two notes for the audience first of all a recording of this conversation is going to be available at the ppd youtube channel and secondly i really look forward to hearing the questions of our many attendees so please feel free now or at any point during the conversation uh to put your question into the the chat function the q and a function i should say um and we look forward to hearing from you um so it's a great topic for today's conversation uh social media and democracy helping or hurting um so roman what do you think about this is social media a threat to democracy should we be worrying that twitter and facebook are going to destroy democracy um short answer no a longer answer i think you know the availability of open public discourse and reducing the barriers to having your voice being heard is always a double-edged sword and busy complicated complex complicated things to discuss and it is wonderful that a lot of people have access to be able to reach individuals and talk to others in a way that has literally been unprecedented prior to frankly the internet uh that being said it enables a lot of people who are actively malicious or maybe even just misguided to have equal access to that platform and that sort of openness i would say is sometimes the ugliness of a purely democratic institution but also something worth serving and cultivating silva what do you think about this i mean i'm really struck by the fact that we used to have this really positive view of social media 10 or so years ago i used to teach a class called democracy in the digital age in which i saw my role as the professor to make the case for why social media might be really bad for democracy because i was going against the grain of what all my students believed at the time right um and and now in this weird situation where the conventional wisdom is that that but actually uh you know it's the opposite of what we used to think that that that social media really is this existential threat to to democracy but perhaps make the case for that for us a little bit why why is that a reasonable thing to think well okay i like to disaggregate the question of social media after all media is a plural noun right so social media r rather than social media is and that leads us to also distinguish among these various platforms because they are very different they do different things for us and they work differently in the world so let me just give some numbers to this to give you a sense of it twitter has about 330 million users which sounds like a big number but apologies to roman who works for twitter that's not that big it's not that big compared to say youtube which has 2 billion users but here's the thing youtube and twitter do different things in the world we use them for different reasons they're actually not very comparable they compete for our attention and they compete for advertising money but they're also connected right content flows back and forth between them so that's just two comparisons again 330 million versus 2 billion that's nothing compared to facebook facebook by january 1st should reach 3 billion regular users in the world there are 7.6 billion humans on earth and three billion of them will be facebook users now what are the top five social media platforms in the world well it goes it goes facebook at three billion it goes youtube bet about 2.1 billion right and then it's it's uh um whatsapp at about 1.6 billion instagram at about 1.5 billion facebook messenger about 1.2 billion so four of the top five are facebook products right but let's also remember that even within that list they all do different things for us so many people are i would say most people who use facebook most people who use whatsapp are also facebook users most people use instagram or also facebook users many people who use whatsapp and instagram and facebook all at the same time or or on the phone at the same time like there is no exclusivity here but the important thing is facebook is an unprecedented example of a powerful global company with 300 i'm sorry with 3 billion people constantly communicating and uploading things in more than 110 languages we have never seen anything like this in the world the question of its macro effects are just starting to be understood the question of its micro facts are also just starting to be understood we've had more than a decade to study it those of us who are in this field have been cattle cataloging the negative externalities for some time also cataloging the positive externalities for some time and if there's a general conclusion to be reached about facebook it's really good for almost every one of those three billion people that's why people are on it that's why i'm on it right for the baby pictures and the puppy pictures and my cousin's wedding cousin's kid's wedding right that's why we're there we all get value out of it we're not fools while facebook is good for individuals it's it's tragic it's it's chronically bad for us collectively this is not that much of a paradox my car is great for me your car is probably great for you our cars collectively are terrible for us what does that mean about democracy well consider that the prevalence this global reach of facebook has had effects that are often not catalog we pay way too much attention to the particular content that flies across these platforms especially the particular content that flies across facebook while that's important especially in the local sense that's often paying attention to the weather instead of the climate consider this though when facebook is so pervasive it sucks up money from advertising through advertising that would otherwise go to other outlets that might facilitate information in a more responsible way that might foster deliberation in a more responsible way so facebook in many ways is starving newspapers and magazines around the world that's a problem in addition every other outlet has to pander to facebook because if you don't find your content flowing across facebook you don't find an audience so facebook has restructured our media ecosystem from top to bottom whether it has a direct effect on democracy at this point i think is indisputable the nature of that effect actually differs country to country we've seen authoritarian leaders and authoritarian movements deploy facebook hijack the power of facebook really effectively to to gather their potential supporters to find new supporters and bring them into the movement to motivate them to encourage them to pour them to the polls but often more disturbingly to pour them into uh organized efforts of harassment against opponents critics scholars journalists etc we see this time and time again so i have to say the u.s got off lucky on all of these things so so i think that there is a lot here and we were hoping to disentangle but i feel like you've put a lot on the table which is really helpful i mean you know one thing that i always wonder about is sort of there's one conversation about what would the world look like without social media right if we were just you know we had today's level of development and all the other things going on today but we just hadn't invented this strange technology that is now only present in in our lives right that's one kind of conversation that's a very interesting conversation from a perspective of social science and social scientists here right um but it's sort of less immediately relevant because social media is going to be around then there's a different kind of question which is well you know what if a particular social media channel wasn't available what if the outage we had of facebook as well as a few other things a couple of days ago were permanent and facebook just disappeared would that change anything right remember the third kind of question is what what if the most altruistic public-minded person was running facebook and they were changing the algorithms in the optimal way to try and bring peace and democracy to the world right and those three questions are actually quite quite different so you know remind perhaps let's start with the smallest one of them which is to say you know how much actually really depends on the particular platforms and the particular design of the algorithms um does that really matter does that really influence how the world is or i was just tempted to say hey all these bad things are happening on facebook so it must be before the facebook but perhaps actually what's happening it's just that a lot of people want to post stuff but that we don't like and whatever algorithm facebook runs that's still going to be the case yes i think the common thread actually across all of your questions is this idea of monopolistic power and sort of scale of ownership and you know whether these industries have naturally trend towards monopolies and whether then if we're going to start talking about regulation whether a regulation is actually more about breaking something up and you know enabling more you know different environments to be there so the interesting thing about social media just even as a and a as a construct or as an industry is social media is only useful if there are lots of other people like me on it like nobody wants to go on a social media platform with three people on we want lots of people so like to an extent like the idea of social media lends itself towards monopoly question mark maybe um so i think that's kind of the interesting thing worth discussing is you know so we do create you know let's say quote-unquote marketplace of ideas but then we throw on top of it algorithms and then that's what starts to complicate things so you know again you know complicated question because on one end personalization to some extent is a very good thing right like you want to see the things you like reading you want to you know uh follow and read the interesting things that the people who you like to hear from are posting given that these platforms are global reverse chronological order would mean that if i live in california it's going to be really hard for me to hear what my friends in europe are talking about and frankly a lot of the people i follow because i'm in the field of responsible ai a lot of my favorite people to follow and learn from are in european time zones so sort of a structural thing right so a to your point like design really does matter and what does it mean to design from the bottom up um many ways to unpack that one is like literally the design like visually what does it look like you know and even if you remember like the whole discussion about facebook having um response icons versus just like thumbs up thumbs down right the same conversation exists on twitter why are we only allowed to like why can't i dislike why can't i do crying face right and an active decision to not introduce like negative emojis means something um so there are design but then there's like core fundamental algorithmic decisions like what kinds of models you're using what kind of data you are using what are you imputing from that data and that's the kind of stuff that you know for me is very fascinating uh and just to you know boil it down to its basic characteristics a model is exactly that it is a representation of the world it is an imperfect representation of the world the same way a model airplane or a model car is something that is a decent representation of those things but is not that thing so any model of the world is a model and will always have imperfection that's really like when we're thinking about a lot of these you know unethical uh you know use cases or negative externalities or even things like misinformation polarization right uh it is a function of things like optimization functions and limitations of what we're capable of doing with this model balanced with you know what kind of data are we are we sharing and what kind of data is being picked up by these companies yeah oh absolutely yeah i mean i think that i mean roman has given us a really good um basic summary of the complications of this question algorithms are not algorithms or not algorithms right there are specific design choices made as people in companies design these algorithms and they they're expressing certain values they're embedding those values in their algorithms now it just so happens that at facebook the two the primary values are growth in terms of total number of people using facebook and engagement which is not just a function of the amount of time people spend on facebook but the extent to which they click share like and comment on posts on facebook and then the algorithms are specifically designed and they've been very clear about this to amplify those items that generate engagement clicks shares likes and comments and therefore unsurprisingly the items that get amplified are those that generate strong emotions spark strong emotions well there are consequences of that and we've seen them and you can look again at the at the weather instead of the climate and look at the the anti-vaccine propaganda and the conspiracy theories and q anon uh and other things that are maladies in the world or you could look at the puppies and the babies the good stuff right and all that gets amplified for the same reason because it's joy versus fear and hatred right all these strong human emotions what's missing is a sense of the broccoli right the stuff we need as citizens in the democratic republic to learn and discuss and debate and deliberate about our future and that's what's getting sucked out of our public systems our public sphere and instead we're being overrun by algorithmic choice right but design choice as as ramon has explained overrun by feelings now they're that's appropriate for many contexts and algorithmic personalization is great for shopping it's not great for learning and it's terrible for politics i love the idea of digging into this concept of broccoli because to yasha to your point of like what is a world without facebook like everybody on this call grew up in a world without facebook right yeah that doesn't like we have that experience right we have that like and what's very fascinating about being the generation that we are in is we were actually like semi-functioning adults or actual adults in the pre-facebook world or pre-social media worlds and we have you know continue to be adults in that post world so we're sort of this you know since we are all social scientists here a really great you know natural experiment of the pre and post design of like a regression discontinuity design of what that might look like and you know was it significantly better i don't know um i listened to this really great podcast that sort of talks through uh it's called you're wrong about because if i'm gonna talk but i have to give them a plug and it's really interesting because it like digs into the things that we vaguely remember from when we were younger and it sort of talks to what the real story was and it's really fascinating to think through how much of what we understood as a world used to get filtered through you know like media giants right uh you know a talking head etc so you know i i don't i there is an aspect here that we need to untangle which is how much of this is you know problems with how media is distributed how we talk about media etc this is not to say that social media companies are off the hook at all because you know we do make design decisions we do make you know active choices of what we choose to prioritize what's important but i do want to dig in this concept of broccoli right so since we all have studied american politics or some sort of politics right uh it is impossible to get people to educate themselves to go to the polls and make an informed decision that has like always been a problem you know what do you do like the state of california which i used to love would mail you this little booklet and i'm like how does anybody vote at a poll how do you go and you like you know remember like i i i'm always on absentee ballots because i literally sit there with like wikipedia eight pages open researching everything but that's me because i'm a big nerd and in my opinion the level of information i would need to have to make an informed vote is significant yet that's broccoli consumption right like i just happen to like that i happen to like broccoli so you know there's this concept here of like and maybe it's worth talking about like how might these platforms be utilized to make broccoli more palatable by somehow pouring cheese over it right i mean i'm not optimistic about any of these companies having such an incentive like what's the payoff to them right these are companies in addition if we talk about facebook specifically it has particular ideological frames through which it has built itself and mark zuckerberg has been very clear about his own ideological frames right but but the question of where do we enjoy broccoli how might we enjoy broccoli right the the nutritious stuff the stuff we actually need to be responsible citizens in a democratic republic of course that's always been hard that's always been a a challenge and a problem it's harder now for two reasons one our media ecosystems have squeezed out much of the broccoli right and like left very little opportunity for the solid deep analysis that we depend on to actually be visible at a high level in addition we have disinvested from the very institutions that foster deliberation and foster deep knowledge and and therefore allow for sort of proxy trust you know institutions of science institutions of learning our our national academies our our international scholarly organizations and serious professional journalism all of which has been recoiled right and and retracted systematically across the world but especially in the united states or most acutely in the united states over 40 years that's a 40-year problem so both of these things happen at the same time right and what we have now are we have really strong instruments of motivation we have the strongest instruments of motivation we've ever had facebook is the best motivational tool ever invented if you want to find like-minded people and gather them to reinforce each other's egos and then commit them to filling a square or the national mall or invading the capital on this on the on the 6th of january it's never been easier but to deliberate deeply about matters of public importance especially among differently minded people that's getting to be almost impossible and it's because we don't have the forums the muscles or the reward system for allowing that to happen yeah i mean there's a really interesting like algorithmic component to what you're talking about so when you are sort of listing all the things that like one can mobilize people to do on social media i was jokingly going to say narrow to run through area 51 uh if you if you remember that right like i completely agree it's very fascinating so it's you know like how might we create you know healthy conversation healthy debate and healthy discussion um and it's something i'm actually thinking a lot about in you know within my team at twitter you know we've been talking about sort of capturing positive externalities but this doesn't mean sort of uh you know sort of ethics washing or like rose-colored glasses and looking away from the problem it's you know one issue with a lot of these discussions is you know uh uh you may put it in philosophically health is more than the absence of disease right like so when we often when we're having these discussions about misinformation ethical use etc we're very focused on like how do we stop the bad stuff and we should absolutely stop the best the bad stuff needs to be stopped however what is that world in which we're doing exactly what you said where people are having reasonable conversations and discussions and positive discourse that's not about like you know getting a zing or a gotcha or ending with like a sassy meme right and because like and yes like so like to kind of spill a little bit of a dirty secret i avoided twitter until 2015 like 2016. uh and i i actually i was teaching data science at the time and i i actually asked one of my students like what's the point of being on twitter how am i supposed to express a complex thought in so few characters and i worry that it just like i actually think it like to like think speak like you can only say certain things in certain ways and like optimize to be like ah zing uh and at that time you know i preferred facebook as my platform of choice because you could actually write your thoughts you know in a significant manner and people could give long-form answers so very funny like how much the world has shifted but also like i agree because that was my perspective like how do you on the social media platform uh have this discourse but i do want to point like when you were listing social media companies it's very interesting how you named ones that are more like messaging apps like whatsapp and we didn't really get to talk about like the nature of the media you are sharing and how that impacts you know like the outcome of how people perceive it what people take away from it and also literally like uh the ability to share misinformation or falsehoods or you know or even like to the point of the this talk like you know impede or um you know help you know the principles of democracy and finally fasting that you brought what's up and i know exactly why but then it's like all right should we expand to include signal telegram you know sms on my iphone and android right yeah yeah yeah well i mean that's and this is the category problem i i pointed to right facebook is unlike all of the others even those that facebook owns instagram is unlike all of the others whatsapp is like telegram right there are a bunch of messaging facebook messenger in that list i was citing the list uh and i followed that list quite a bit mostly to show the scale of facebook relative to everything else right that three billion is the number no one has ever seen the bbc has never reached three billion people cnn has never reached three billion people the wall street journal's never right it's just this unbelievable thing uh how they're you know twice as many facebook users as there are muslims in the world right that's that's a stunning number and i think it's that it's that scale i think a lot of people miss especially when they try to imagine tweaks to facebook that are supposed to solve the problem right when oh yeah how you gonna scale that to three billion people in 110 languages go on tell me right so that was really my point but but your point on this is really valuable here there is no other every service here does something differently for us and they all work together in our information ecosystem which is why it was important to remember that instagram users don't stop using messaging services outside of instagram and and facebook users also use twitter right so uh while there's a relative number around the world and you can relatively look at the power of these companies they they aren't exclusive and content moves back and forth we need to approach these questions from the point of view of an ecosystem and that makes it very hard for forgive me remind quantitative political scientists because they're so used to isolating variables and these are variables that cannot be used once they're isolated they lose their meaning completely and you get another result i want to ask a question which is you know even harder to isolate but but it's an important naive question i think which is that i'm still not sure from this conversation but i understand what impact social media has right so i think we've talked a lot about scale which is also you know in part a problem of of potential monopoly or it's a problem of political power for companies the problem of how they can use all of that to avoid taxes and other things and i take that seriously but let's leave that to one side of a moment and think about the discursive problem right the way in which social media transforms our public discourse in ways we might amplify falsehoods or that might make it easy for hateful politicians to rise and so on and so forth and you know i still am not sure how different the world would look today if we didn't have facebook and twitter and instagram and and all of the above and i'm very aware that when you go back through history you have people blaming the newest medium that's available for all of the problems over time so the rise of out of his lower supposed supposed to do with you know radio and the ready availability of that and many other political problems of a post-war period where television which was such a superficial medium right and then when i was growing up with sort of you know cable television and there's so much different entertainment and we're having a fracturing of a public sphere because not everybody's watching the same shows anymore um maybe they were all correct what are these persistent fears when people want to displace what's bad about that particular time period to the new shiny thing that that people are doing right and so try and walk me through you know how different do you think the world would be today let's make it very concrete you know what percentage of people wouldn't be getting the coveted vaccines in a pre-social media world because obviously a lot of misinformation about the pandemic in general and covered vaccines as being shared on social media but we also know but there's all kinds of conspiracy theories before the rise of social media right so you know what's your prior you know how many more or fewer people would be getting vaccinated uh right now if all of social media didn't exist and and and why do you think that would be that different roman um so a lot of really really great and very salient points you're making and also you know this is this link to like video games cause violence and etc to kind of the new shiny thing um what a great question about you know sort of how many people would be getting covered vaccines i mean i here's the thing that's always hard to figure out and this is actually a result of algorithmic amplification everything was talking about it is hard to understand sometimes how many people really do have these very extreme views or whether they are who they've always been which is like some small degree of you know people there have always been people who thought that you know there's some we're being poisoned by the government and like this thing and that thing is happening now have we allowed them a bigger platform than usual right you know and then in a pre right about for a second about 10 percent of the u.s population thought that the moon landing was fake in 1999 and on the post that i trust it's a hard thing to poll i think about 10 percent of u.s population to any serious degree believe in some version of q and on today right so right so this is that like yeah so is it just there's always 10 of people who are pretty right are they just more visible right so like are they just more visible now than we would have been otherwise because we would not have run into these people in our day to day the part like maybe the complicated variable i want to bring into this is that to see this point about like reach and access you know bbc and the cnn aren't able to reach as many people uh and we were all talking kind of about this like american narcissism and this idea of american exceptionalism but one you know one thing is we are also used to at least in the western world in general media being for us and about us and you know in a lot of developing countries um these are the channels by which people get information and share information so this actually is an interesting conversation to have like what what would the world look like without social media in bangladesh is a very different story than what it would look like you know in america because in bangladesh and like in my family's talk that she used to go there a lot as a kid um you know you know you still watch bbc and cnn and you watch some news happening in other parts of the world and then you kind of get like a little bit of local television and you don't get the in-depth sort of you know sharing and spreading of information good and bad frankly uh that you would otherwise and sometimes that may mean you are not being exposed to government propaganda and other times that means you know someone's uncle has this like weird tinfoil hat theory that is now spread through your entire family and everyone's talking about it and therefore no one's getting a vaccine right yeah i mean i i think um one thing we might want to consider is i would argue that uh without social media the united states would be slightly different but brazil would be significantly different india would be significantly different bangladesh would be significantly different myanmar would be very different uh the philippines would be different rodrigo duterte would not be president of the philippines without without facebook and whatsapp uh narendra modi would probably be prime minister of india but he wouldn't have the mobs at his disposal to engage in in storms of violence as he has now those mobs existed when he was chief minister of gujarat they're just more easy to summon and they're more easy to deploy especially through these services themselves right he's perfected this terrorism through threat through this by the way sorry just to interject not just locally but globally i have been subject to that harassment right here we are happy across the world and these people can find us and harass us but to to the question of this 10 problem right yeah 10 percent of americans might have doubted the moon landing was real in what was it 1999 you said right um it would be really interesting to see how many doubted it in 1969 um you know whether that grew as people who actually witnessed it on tv uh faded from view but but the other thing is um uh uh you could say ten percent of americans believe in q anon what matters is not what they believe or the ex or the or the pervasiveness of the belief what matters is the consequence that 10 of americans believed the moon landing was fake or even 50 of americans believed the moon landing was fake as far as i can tell nobody stormed cape canaveral in florida and tried to take it over and tried to kill people but on january 6th that happened in the united states the consequences matter because facebook is not just about spreading beliefs and and subscribing people to beliefs or people subscribing to beliefs facebook is about action facebook is about motivation and here's the thing about democracies this the bulwark to too much motivation is deliberation every democratic republic needs both motivation and deliberation right the hot and the cold and at this point we lack serious deliberation i i have a question for you then building this is really fascinating so this is kind of the idea of like different social media platforms and different like ways of sharing media are very different do you think that somehow that facebook is more of a tool of coordination than other platforms and like when i say facebook actually like the facebook ecosystem right so just just like bring in my thread earlier about what's happened whatsapp ended up limiting the number of shares that centered this people were mobilizing so like and more of a question i have for you because i find this thread very fascinating yeah well no doubt so my colleague david neymar has been studying the role of whatsapp in brazil and specifically whatsapp groups and and even more specifically pro bolsonaro whatsapp groups now whatsapp does not is not subject to algorithmic amplification right it's subject purely to social amplification it's not disconnected from facebook right people find each other on facebook and and invite people into whatsapp groups right but so there is coordination across those media as well and everything that happens that bolsonaro spreads and his supporters spread on on on whatsapp also works on facebook so these are not different systems completely nonetheless what he's finding is this question of creating people creating these these um these groups that fire each other up that motivate each other that exclude that fire up fear and paranoia and then direct people to action and we're seeing this time and time again and it's a really fascinating phenomenon again we know this happens in india the same way right but but what's happening there is it's explicitly coordinated and organized by bolsonaro his son and and the party right so uh so i think that that's that's something we really have to take into account quite clearly that there is there are these tools are so effective at what they are designed to do and originally they were designed to make us connect with each other over hobbies they've just been hijacked for other purposes i want to get back to something that you both were saying sort of a few minutes ago i'm glad that we're talking about many democracies outside of united states um that are struggling at the moment a topic that's particularly dear to my heart um but both of you seem to say that in a way social media has made less of a difference in the united states than perhaps it has in india and brazil and bangladesh and other countries around the world and that's a really interesting photo to me i hadn't heard that before this conversation um and i'm not quite sure what the reason for that would be so i'd love to for both of you to to to talk me through this room on what why why if i'm understanding you right you think that it's made a bigger difference way in in countries outside the united states than it has uh domestically yeah i mean i think it goes back to the point i was making about there was a bit of an information vacuum you know in a lot of these smaller countries or sort of less noticed countries are actually often not smaller countries from either a geographic or political sense they're smaller from like a gdp and you know impact on global economy sense right um there was just not a lot of visibility you couldn't get information there wasn't a journalist being funded by cnn to do the bangladesh beat right there there was literally no such thing so it it was it's not so much that it's it's made a bigger difference because there was a bigger vacuum and they sort of came in and sort of and this is completely unintentionally swept in and consumed in this vacuum and like and this is where the problems arise right and this is a mismatch of incentives and incentive structures you know social media companies did not expand to you know a country the global south with the intention of providing information and information vacuum they just went because they wanted to get people to like share memes and talk about stuff right but then in in optimizing for sharing memes and talking about stuff it led to all these negative externalities around things that are actually quite critical for global development and like you know insert plug here about why there needs to be more social scientists working at all of these companies and developing these algorithms because any social scientist could tell you this is what was going to happen and i would add to that i'll get a little wonky here so forgive me uh and sort of media policy wonky um there's this concept called zero rating so you know we all pay for data when we uh pay our cell phone bills every month i pay a t way too much money uh you know whatever company you use you pay them a lot of money to have this unlimited flow of data in the united states it's generally unlimited and unmetered that's not true in most countries so imagine most of the world let's talk about sub-saharan africa let's talk about parts of south america the poorer parts of brazil let's talk about most of south asia or southeast asia in fact and in those places if you go back almost 10 years you're just starting to see the introduction of mobile phone networks and they are mostly urban phenomena and they're mostly among those who can afford to pay a standard monthly fee and can a afford to pay for very expensive data services well mark zuckerberg decided this was a problem that there were going to be two billion people on earth who might never get access to high-speed streams of data and he's actually pretty phyllis he's actually very very socially minded in these matters even though i think he's completely misguided and thoroughly uneducated um but his naive vision was oh wouldn't the world be better if all of these farmers and all these workers and these women who are toiling uh carrying water on their heads for five miles would somehow have access to all this knowledge and all of this data and be able to communicate with each other and start small businesses wouldn't that be great so he started this program called free basics and what that meant was he would cut deals with these telecommunication companies and the governments in many states at this point it's something like 40 countries and he said if you offer this suite of applications through your phones and and people use this particular suite of applications they just happen to be mostly facebook applications their facebook their facebook messenger their whatsapp their instagram but there's also a wikipedia app and there's usually a public health app and an app that takes you straight to government services this suite of apps if people use those they will not have to pay for data it's zero rated it's free this was the only way that people were going to get access to data streams and data communication and any sort of internet service and this had a tremendous and almost immediate impact in kenya in nigeria in bangladesh in pakistan in sri lanka in myanmar in the philippines in indonesia in vietnam in cambodia it's and and it it has been tremendously successful from the point of view of facebook of bringing all these new people in that's how they reach 3 billion people so quickly the problem is for people living in this country dependents set in almost immediately how else can you keep up with your family if you have a cousin who's serving on an ocean line a filipino family has one cousin serving on an ocean liner and they need to be in touch with this person the only cost-effective way they can be in touch with this person is through whatsapp and through zero rating right so the dependent set in so when we had a six hour outage of all facebook services on monday that was actually quite dangerous to millions maybe billions of people around the world who need these services as a lifeline the dependence is that strong and we're talking about a lot of countries that never had a good landline system and had barely had a decent voice system for mobile telephony right and so and so the the dependence is serious and therefore living through the facebook algorithm becomes that much more pervasive in many of these countries not coincidentally you have dictatorial leaders like in cambodia like in vietnam like in myanmar who are exploiting these services quite effectively now let's remember while the us is less affected it's less effective because we have a diverse communication system we have options we can live it on facebook when facebook went down most people laughed right i didn't even honestly i found out through twitter right and it was and it was during the work day and you know so even school kids weren't on instagram let's hope during the school day right so it was no big deal in the united states very few people were really hurt in fact the lower income you have the more you were affected because lower income people depend on facebook to do things like coordinate child care and transportation in ways that wealthier people who have choices like that don't have to so we have to look at again social scientists know this because we interview people who use these services in different ways and their devices in different ways and we track how it affects people in different countries and at different income levels so there's no generality about this but let's also recognize that while the u.s has affected far less than brazil or india or bangladesh germany and sweden where facebook usage is actually less of a constant part of the day are affected even less by uh these sorts of things whereas in hungary and poland facebook is incredibly important to daily life right so these coincidences should should not just remain pure coincidences uh so one thing i want to actually like sort of raises a point that's worth discussion is like you know i don't want it to seem like we're sort of giving people a free pass we're not giving social media companies are free pass this and why this matters in like in my day-to-day job right when i think through algorithmic bias or like issues and negative externalities and bad things that happen one of the most important things to think about is intent why it happened and it is a very very different approach to things like misinformation and disinformation for example when somebody is for example a bot farm that is a malicious actor that has been paid by a political party to amplify wrong information versus you know even if it's a ceo of a social media company or you know some well-meaning uncle or whatever who didn't realize or didn't think about it and they should have been better educated absolutely but the thing is the approach for mitigation is actually quite different so you know do we face it head-on as i'm fighting an enemy or do i face it in the sense that like hey you know this this person might actually be on this journey with us if there is better visibility and understanding of what these problems are you know and i think like today if we're talking about facebook i think often that is what we are debating right it's like did they know and not care or did they just not know right i i feel like people have like very solid and very developed opinions but like the reason the answer to that question matters is that answers the questions of what we should do about it i'm glad that he brought up misinformation this information because i think that's an important strand of a current public discourse that we haven't really touched on so far in our conversation and you know one of the things that i worry about those terms is that they're very very broad and they describe you know all kinds of different things as you're saying it describes you know the well-intentioned uncle that you know has fallen prey to some silly idea and is sort of spreading that stuff on on facebook or twitter it sometimes refers simply to an idea or a theory that is considered by uh sort of you know people in in in in in the political or the business elite uh to be beyond the pale in some kind of way uh to be you know clearly erranus um even for perhaps it's still an unsettled question i think this happened for example of reference to the origins of a pandemic and then it can be you know a foreign government uh deliberately employing a bot army and other people in order to very deliberately spread some kind of force information right um what can we do about these different categories of things my understanding is that when this is a bot army there may be things we can do about it because while i'm a sort of fervent believer in freedom of speech it's not clear to me but i am a believer in the freedom of people to have you know 700 fake accounts speak for them and i think you can make you know relatively clean distinctions there i'm sure there's hard cases it's not technologically straightforward but you know conceptually i think bad distinction is relatively easy um when it comes to the other things it becomes much much harder right we decided about a year and a half ago that the idea that uh the origin of a pandemic maybe something like a lab leak was beyond the pale um people were de-platformed from facebook and youtube including nobel prizes in virology for maintaining that that was one of the possible origins of a pandemic and while we still don't know what the truth of a matter is at this point the highest circles of the american government as well as many mainstream newspapers are taking that seriously as one possible explanation for what happened right so one of the first big examples of a use of a misinformation disinformation discourse in order to say this is beyond the pale has turned out to be at the very least premature and perhaps an important mistake and then when it comes to sort of saying hey you know uh uncle steve you don't get to say this stuff because we think you're a little too stupid and what you're saying there is sort of incoherent um that's sort of problematic in a different way still so so how do you think about you know what we should do about misinformation and disinformation what we can do without it really restricting freedom of speech or putting us in danger of actually uh cutting off important debates in a way that's itself quite harmful um roman why don't we start with you and then i might actually defer to a bit of start to like start the ball rolling on this question because uh yeah i think i made it further i know you've been working on this for years yeah i mean there was a lot in in that uh question yes i i would say um sort of working backwards from that the question of beyond the pale that notion of what was beyond the pale was for a long time regulated by a rather narrow set of of uh of elites in uh just about every society including every democracy right so what was beyond the pale in let's pick on 1999 uh was determined by those who decided what got on the nightly news what got expressed in the editorial pages of major newspapers there was a set of group a certain amount of groupthink that way because people who worked for those institutions tended to have all come from the same social class often the same race mostly the same gender and one of the things we struggled uh for most of the 20th century was to diversify the set of voices who got to be gatekeepers who got to decide what was beyond the pale or where the pale would sit right where would we put the pail and and that is a fascinating discussion if you look at all of these debates not just about censorship because censorship is very much about governmental action but about what would be a legitimate concern for public deliberation and debate that's never been easily settled but it's often been a reflection of who gets to choose who is in power now we have an environment in which lots of people can say lots of things in lots of formats where we have too much noise too much expression and very little ability to filter sense from nonsense that said we have two aspects that reflect power or amplify power one is we still have uh certain mal distributions of social power in society so yasha you get to write for the atlantic i get to write for uh wired and and the guardian we are powerful relative to our cousins who don't get that option right so that's important um we also all three of us have the power to speak through this channel which is pretty powerful it's sanctioned by the great university of north carolina right tremendous amount of cultural power we get to say a tremendous amount and we get to choose what we say and there's very little anyone can do to stop us and if we were just de-platformed from the university of north carolina there are a thousand other places that we could be heard because we have followings we have status we have degrees etc right so that's important to remember too but we're now in the 21st century living in a in a moment when everybody gets to say something but not everybody gets to reach the same audience so our my concern is that we still have quiet portions of society people who are not being hurt or not finding audiences and not having not having an ability to be listened to largely because they are making sense largely because they're saying things that are well thought out well researched calmly uh commonly expressed and there is no market for the calm there is no market for the thoughtful now it's not that there's no market it's just harder to reach because the structure of our systems is favors the extreme favors the angry favors the radical favors the the divisive and that's ultimately unhealthy i think it's a much bigger question than the notion of de-platforming right um you know you can unde-platform people all the time if you've found you made a mistake i don't think that's really a crucial problem in society well there's an interesting concept like two d platforming right and you know twitter has a whole team that works on this concept of healthy conversations and what does it mean to have like good public discourse things that are like immensely unmeasurable you know good luck like trying to catch light in the class right but what's fascinating and something i've been thinking about a lot lately is like what is the purpose of deep platforming right so you know we have all of these tools and we can mute things and mute people and maybe see this goes back to like the very first thing you said about you know we all optimize for individual pleasure and consumption but then sort of net it is a harmful thing or you know maybe put it another way we all have the ability to mute donald trump why did twitter then still have to take them off the platform you know very easy go on you know you type the words out you never have to see it again but then what is this of collective negative externality that requires the platforming or makes makes you know these things better or some may say worse if an individual is deep i do agree with you it can be reversed etc um but it's very it's very interesting to think through and again like not to bring everything back to measurement but i've been thinking a lot about some systems level bias so in my world people talk a lot about algorithmic auditing i had a company in algorithmic auditing and like my biggest like bang bang my head against the wall problem is that like we treat these algorithms like they exist in a bubble like they don't exist by human interaction even your conversation he was saying about like you know political leaders weaponizing these things what's fascinating from like an inside perspective is somebody who you know may influence or be part of creating algorithms to do things you know an algorithm does not distinguish bolsonaro from an average brazilian citizen but like obviously in the real world this individual carries a lot more weight clout power etc that is organic to existing in the real world and not a function of an algorithm so like the biggest problem to tackle here is the systems level by like to like go overly academic for a minute in a systems level bias that is a function of the socio-technical interaction between users and an algorithm and that is frankly where like the most the most interesting part of my job lies it's interesting because it is the most difficult to solve or resolve or even address cool so i have a question about that uh before you remind but what comes out of an earlier strand of a conversation and after that i want to bring in some of the great questions for where we're getting from the audience um so you know you're sitting at twitter and you're trying to think how can we tweet the algorithm um in in such a way potentially to improve the systems level attributes of the discourse to make it better and more public spirited and so on we said earlier that in a country like brazil one of the problems you have is whatsapp and the way that people can gather in whatsapp and groups and mobilize to to to attack political opponents or uh you know to propagate propaganda for you know an authoritarian leader but whatsapp doesn't really have an algorithm right it is just the ability to send particular people messages or form a group and send messages to that group and yet it it appears that many of the toxic attributes that you see on twitter and what you see on facebook are just as strong on something like whatsapp but if that's the case then isn't any tweak to an algorithm going to be like a drop of water in the bucket is isn't it going to be far too small to have a desired impact if even something that doesn't do the you know attention grabbing whatever engages most is going to be at the top of the news feed et cetera something that doesn't have those features still um can end up being toxic if a political context is toxic in that way then what can any changes to the algorithm possibly hope to achieve that's a great question to kind of think about it another way maybe changing algorithms or banning algorithms or whatever is not actually a holistic solve in and of itself right there are many things that need to happen among them and maybe to give a more dissatisfactory answer part of this may be actually just battling against human nature right so it's kind of you know we to like bring it to like a dietary perspective we evolved you know as a species to really love the way salty fatty sweet foods taste i know that i can't eat pizza for every meal but man don't i wish i could right but i have to wake up and like have my protein shake in the morning and have broccoli at lunch to see this point right so we know we have to do these things so like yes but but maybe an ice cream truck shouldn't come by my house every day you know so there is an aspect to it that like you know algorithms may be tempting people like dangling candy in front of you in a way that's you know the things you are seeing when you open your social media as a function of an algorithm which is a function of optimizing for possibly some of the worst aspects of ourselves that we have to battle against uh and now this is not to like sort of adapt this whole like algorithms are evil and manipulative and algorithms are big tobacco i think that's a that's kind of a facile argument because the thing it ignores is you know the human ability to actually make decisions and like some of the decisions we make are not easy but we do things in our everyday lives that are you know long-term good for ourselves even if they're like short-term uncomfortable like exercising but to your point of like you know part of this is sort of how people may end up misusing these platforms and like we never really got to like talk about misinformation this information and the thing i want to like distinguish here and this is all about going back to this idea of intent right there's also like what is the nature of this misinformation or disinformation and one of the unfortunate things is like everything has gotten mashed together like miss slash disinformation when they are two actually very very distinct things you know one of them is with over lies and the other one which i find the most fascinating is more of a like bait and switch we're gonna make you look over here so you're not doing what's you're not looking at what's happening over there why is that important because the thing happening over here like and i'm going to quote like butter emails right the thing happening over here is not actually the most critical thing it is truthful that thing x is happening i am just going to make you look over here like a magician so that when i like do my thing over here you're not noticing that and those are like and again because what i always think in my head is like how do you stop these things how do you address these things two totally different ways of thinking and addressing these concepts i mean when i think about this uh so i said i want to start bringing some some questions in from from the audience because we have a lot of great ones and just to remind you you can add ones uh by submitting them to the q a q and a function at the bottom of your zoom screen we have a great question from declan who asks if social media companies are owned by individuals that are largely interested in maximizing profit how much trust can we have but these companies will limit their profits for the sake of honest and well-intended social debate um and i think one of the sort of paradoxes that this speaks to is that um you know on things like deep platforming or even on things on how to regulate and change algorithms on one side we could leave a decision up to you know a few people in silicon valley like mark zuckerberg and your boss roman and we would have to trust that they're actually public spirited when they have a very clear market interest to follow and frankly probably some of them if they didn't follow those market interests the votes would eventually substitute them with somebody who does so they're also under constraints right but then on the other hand uh the alternative is well let the government decide but given the state of democracy around the world given the existence of uh exterior four town leaders uh like hayabusa now in brazil or amlo in mexico or narendra modi in india or some of the recent and perhaps future presidents we have here in the united states um you know there's very real reason why you don't want politicians to get too involved in this survivor so um how do we you know square this circle well there are more than two hands uh there's not just on the one hand the on the other hand so let me give you a sense um uh so first of all to the premise uh facebook is owned by shareholders but there's a very strange and rather unhealthy form of corporate governance at facebook mark zuckerberg will in perpetuity and his heirs after that have majority control of the voting shares of the stock and that's never going to change it's part of the charter part of the ipo documents it's not good this was a system that was created for and by google and its founders and it's found its way into other companies that were far less successful or moral companies like uber companies like wework it's a terrible idea so in fact no one can fire mark zuckerberg he is chairman and ceo for life until he decides he doesn't want to be right it doesn't seem like he's getting bored with his job so what about that what do we know about mark zuckerberg and his motivations it turns out he's not motivated by money and there's a reason for that he's never done gone without money imagine having so much money that you don't have to care about money that's how much money mark zuckerberg has and how much money facebook has now believe me there are richer people than mark zuckerberg who still care very much about money right bezos being one of them right so it's not that everybody at that level of wealth has a different ideological motivation but mark zuckerberg is a very special person he is unlike any other corporate leader i have ever looked at he is motivated by idealism it's just not healthy complex nuanced historically informed sociologically sophisticated uh altruism it's a the kind of altruism that is that is a techno fundamentalist right he believes firmly that if you wire people together and you structure their conversations and their social relations from above like up like a puppeteer then people will start living better behaving better trusting each other more liking each other more this is why he redesigned facebook a few years ago to push us into groups this is why he redesigned facebook a few years ago to minimize the the amplification of legitimate news services including yasha your articles right they become they got less play on facebook since 2018 and what he has turned up the volume on and this again very well documented very much declared by facebook was posts from our cousins our uncles our neighbors right so les joshua monk and more crazy uncle and that has not been healthy but it's because mark zuckerberg truly believes that if we are in contact with people who uh we care about and occasionally in contact with people we might not know we're gonna get to trust each other more like each other more live better food will taste better cats and dogs get along better we'll sing kumbaya this is his motivation he truly believes that the more we use facebook the better we will be the more reasons we use facebook the better we will be the more time we spend with facebook the better we will be and nothing has shaken him from that belief all the bad pr in the world to him just seems like bad pr and misunderstanding of his ideological function that's why he spends so many billions of dollars every year trying to get facebook into the hands of people in the poorest countries in the world from whom he will make no money probably ever so that's what i mean like that just sort of echoes the sort of silicon valley techno solutionism and the ego around it i mean we see andres and horowitz of creating their own media outlet now that you know tech bros are no longer the darlings of media so the answer has not been oh maybe we should like rethink our impact on society if we are hearing from you know the general public no no the answer actually is we're just going to go make our own because we don't like what you're saying right so it's sort of like a global you know sort of problem or we'll create a society on the sea right we'll see stan there's a libertarian society on the scene why do you think we're trying to go to space right like it's not for you and me we're never going to space we're never calling like you and me will never be on a mars colony right we may be like serving food on the mars colony we'll never actually legitimately be there uh but but i think that's a really good point i mean i i think there is this you know techno libertarianism um and i'm going to try to remember the name of this really wonderful and very interesting article from dates back from the 90s and i really cannot remember it but it is actually about this phenomenon this idea of like how this idealism of tech kind of gets warped into you know what if you know what if human beings are the problem and then technology will sort of be the solution so the problem is yasha and siva you exist and write articles and actually the solution is this sort of you know humble everyday man type of thing which actually isn't you know maybe not the the issue with pointing out that problem is it sounds like you are this like pro-government pro you know institutionalist individual who doesn't want the average man to like have their say in the world so like it's it's a it is a very unintentionally devious intelligent uh argument to make right and this is where you know if we're gonna like have this bigger picture and josh i know you sort of referenced coven a few times it's like this anti-intellectualism right and this is like this is not just about doctors and people making common vaccines and people who are actually educated like epidemiologists this is about attacking university professors this is about attacking you know educational institutions in general under this guise of like the everyday person must be elevated and you know it you know my the thing is for those of us who've been doing american politics a very long time i think all of us had that moment when we just stopped talking to people on social media about elections because man it's like you know you know forget my literal phd in american politics and the fact that i studied state and local politics and like oh tell me more about what you googled and like you know just talk at me about how your opinions are the same as my degree but again you can't say that because then you are the elite um i have another question from noah which is in light of recent information from a whistleblower about facebook should lawmakers consider restrictions to social media sites and i'm going to broaden the question a little bit to ask you what kind of laws or regulations would actually help to solve some of the problems we've been talking about yeah so speaking of armchair speculation right sorry it's even gone but i just had to get my like dig in right there well okay so a couple of things around the world content on social media is highly regulated you may not criticize islam in pakistan you may not criticize ataturk in turkey using facebook right end of story like there are many countries around the world with significant legal restrictions on content on social media and other media forms that's not us nor should it be right and in fact because of our constitution we won't have the kind of restrictions that seem to address what i call the weather rather than the climate right which is the bad stuff that bothers us flowing on social media uh it's bad like the weather can be bad but it's ultimately not the problem and because it's not the problem let's think about what might work and most of the proposals for addressing the the problems of facebook address either the problems of facebook from a purely american point of view or from a purely american legal point of view or imagine that facebook is this tiny little website that exists in the united states and people only publish in english or they're looking back to 20th century precedence and imagine that this company resembles in any way standard oil or atn t and it's one of the reasons i think antitrust is basically a dead end for this kind of address there's something different about facebook and google and twitter and by the way walmart and a t and verizon and cvs and that is these are all data companies these are all companies that monitor everything they can about us our our our locations our movements our our social relations and our social networks our expressions our shopping habits our uh our relative wealth all of these things feed into this predictive systems that then feed back to us often products we want that's good i'm a dog person i'd rather see dog ads on cat ads great that's a slight convenience however it has a tremendous number of effects by structuring us by guiding us by having tremendous control over what we see and what we ultimately think and with whom we interact and ultimately the prices we pay for things there are all sorts of ways that this data surveillance is bad and if we really want to take the problem of facebook seriously we need to strike at the at the at the very thing that the beast eats and the beast eats data we need strong data protection in this country and in most countries stronger than the general data protection regulation in europe right now which is a nice start and a good outline of principles but in practice it's falling way too short we should have real serious limitations on how long these companies can control data and for what they can use it this would not be a first amendment problem it doesn't restrict anyone from saying anything it doesn't restrict any company from promoting anything it merely weakens the engine the algorithmic engine the predictive engine the artificial intelligence engine and probably spread some of that power to other parts of society specifically we're turning power to people spreading misinformation about being a dog person until you show us uh live and dawg adorable adorable dogs thank you it's very cute well in that case you have to show them to us but uh yes so what do you think right so like whenever i think about regulation you know and maybe this is sort of the disaster planning individual in me i always like to think of what is the worst that someone could do who was someone i did not like in power right so as we think about what we want in terms of regulation what would that regulation mean in the hands of a political actor who was somebody i despise and whoever that may be right so like we need to be very very careful when we think about how this is why you know most legal people are like are very careful individuals because frankly that's how they think they think of what are all the ways this can be misused in the ways that we did not intend right so we may think that you know banning algorithms is a great idea no social media company should use algorithms like great okay well how might that be misused if there was somebody in power who wanted to consolidate power or control information you know how might they expand that regulation that's kind of one way uh i think about this and you know kind of cutting to the heart of data and back to this like maybe there's a world in between one complete black box ownership of data by companies and two you know i've been thinking a lot actually about gdpr and you know the two things that did introduce that this you know has been positive but frankly is a bit of a blunt instrument is the right cannot be found in the right to own your data right so you know the answer kind of lies in this in-between world of like i don't want to not be found i just want to be found on my own terms and that's actually a very different thing and requires a lot more work by both government as well as companies uh and you know from like an infrastructure perspective and a lot of companies like as a really really hard thing to do um and it's been interesting sort of in my own job like thinking through that and the idea of like user agencies so one thing that we've been tackling on my team with dr sarah roberts who's been a scholar in residence uh she's co-director of the the ucla center for uh oh gosh the center for critical internet inquiry uh you know so we've been tackling this idea of like algorithmic choice and user agency and this you know the way user agency has usually been so constructed is it's a series of like toggles and it can turn things on and off it doesn't actually fundamentally change whether or not the company has this data and what they might be doing with this data and it certainly does not change whether or not you know bad things exist it just allows me to kind of gentrify my neighborhood right so to give like a very san francisco analogy to it there is massive homelessness in san francisco all the hyper wealthy tech people do is go live in the neighborhoods where they can pay for people to shove out the homeless people that does not actually solve homelessness it just puts them in other places where we don't have to look at it and that has largely been the approach on social media or just you know in general about like user agency or ownership it's not solving problems it's like sort of making sure i don't have to look at it but like what does it mean to have meaningful ownership over data and you're right see if it's actually not a solid problem at all i have a slightly different uh question that that sort of opens a different strand of conversation but it's really interesting from john if you could design a curriculum for children growing up today so that they would know how to use these tools effectively uh what would you want them to learn oh god can i can i hop into this because this is literally my origin story this is my origin story this is how i got into out like 100 this is my origin story so are you trying to tell us you're a super villain i mean that's usually who has an origin well wait why did you go straight to villain that's that's the context which i think of origin stories like superheroes have origin stories too i like to think of this oh that's true sorry you're a people that's right right there's an event doesn't every villain like to think of themselves as a hero so um back when i was in my phd program i'm you know because we are all broken year grad students i was teaching a course at a local community college grossmont community college i absolutely loved it and i love teaching at community college because the students there you know are all like incredibly intellectually curious and like rarely get access to like you know the kind of information uh you know that they they want to learn from and get a lot of amazing amazing students and i had a student tell me that she doesn't believe in climate change and i did not know how to answer her uh because that that statement did not make sense to me right like it is not like for me like how i was raised the institutions i went to and how i was educated there's no such thing as believing or not believing in science it's science it's a thing like and i didn't know how to answer her and as a teacher i said well you know you could not believe the sun is going to come up tomorrow but it's still gonna come up like i did i didn't understand her i literally could not comprehend the statement so this is actually the same year uh uh eli paris's book on the filter bubble came out and that that was the book i read that's what really got me into like oh my gosh like all these things exist uh and you know it sort of can lead to people misunderstanding things or not understanding things and what i realized about a lot of my students and i started to introduce this in curriculum is that you know it is assumed that because younger people are digital natives they just automatically know how to parse through good bad information oh they're better than us and using tech now it's actually not true and i specifically remember as a child being brought to a library and being taught to do primary and secondary information i remember having these like worksheets we had to find primary information sources and things like that and i actually started to introduce that into by this is like an inter-american politics class right i started to introduce i used to started to teach literally college children like college adults two things that they were not taught as children because there was an assumption that they kind of knew how to parse through good and bad information i found that largely they could not um and a and the thing that's kind of misleading about the internet is like you know anybody is a superstar right like there's no reason anyone should necessarily listen to me over that over lots of other people about certain topics yet you know somebody might and so you know dovetailing with this era of influencers with this era of sort of you know talking heads and spokes people you know a reasonably well designed sub stack you know it's not necessarily objective media but it is very very hard to discern the two and we do ourselves a disservice and we assume younger people understand how to do that and frankly i think it is more confused than it has ever been before so that's one thing i actually started doing my classes back in 2011 was literally teach students how to discern primary and secondary source of information you know and like every professional jokingly will say jokingly like no you're not allowed to cite wikipedia in your paper right so like all of these things like there is a lot of education for even digital natives on how to parse through good and bad information that we need to impart so i would add to that my answer will be both orthodox and heterodox the orthodox part is what should such a curriculum look like to maintain a widespread proper sense of critical sensibility and and facility it should have a lot of math and a lot of science uh specifically statistics which i think we have astounding illiteracy about statistics probability etc i mean right down to why you would get a vaccine right or not a lot of it comes from this inability to understand relative risk you know um so there's that so that's old school right that's orthodox stuff chemistry biology physics statistics you know more of that better that now but here's the heterodox part i don't think education is the way to think through this for several reasons one right now the problem in the world is not 15 year olds the problem is 50 year olds it's the 50 year olds who are screwing up the world i'm a father of a 15 year old she is not hurting anybody she's doing just fine and she's actually quite good at discerning these things because she's fully engaged in her world she just happens to be lucky enough to go to a good school which most americans are not right so let's do better across the board with education in general and bring better classes and better paid teachers across the board and we have a lot less to worry about now that said it's too late for the 50 year olds but the thing about education is we often put our solutions to our social problems our complex social and historical problems on teachers and students when they didn't cause the problem they are the victims right if someone is getting through school without a full vision of how statistics and probability work how science is really supposed to work they are the victims they're not the problem to be solved right the problem to be solved is that mal distribution of educational opportunity in in this country and in the world let's also remember that this is a global problem it's a global problem again concentrated among older people who actually have power to do things and hurt people in the world not younger people so i think it's a mistake to start thinking about curriculum first that said if we're going to think about curriculum it's got to be about math and science it also should be about history it also should be about poetry it should be about humanity it should be about how we got to think how we are how we got to know each other and understand one basic thing so many questions about this incident that rahman brought up i believe or i don't believe those are expressions of identity those aren't expressions of thought or logic this is a way of saying this is my team my tribe my people we don't adhere to this we don't subscribe to this it's not my kind of thing once you see it like that it's a lot easier to unpack the influences and maybe reach a point where you can say well maybe that's a perspective question rather than a matter of facts and evidence sorry i'm on mute we have a great question from melissa which i i really couldn't improve on it it sort of captures a lot of things we've been thinking through which is in your opinion does social media facilitate aggressive polarization in politics or does polarization make social media aggressive may i jump right in this so earlier in the conversation roman brought up a phrase in the middle of one of her uh really brilliant rants and the phrase is so important and that was socio-technical systems we're talking about socio-technical systems to ask is it this or that is the wrong question because every technology is embedded within networks of social relations and every technology reflects back the power that has been in bit that has been built into those technologies so there is no way of distinguishing between whether the system caused people to behave a certain way or think a certain way or the people caused the system to reflect this both are true because there's constant feedback and conversation over time the dynamism is something we really have to pay attention to again we we're in the habit of isolating variables that's how we do chemistry experiments it's not how we should think about humans and their technologies because every technology is an expression of cultural value and every technology reflects back upon cultural value and reflects back on beliefs and activities i would also point out that polarization in and of itself is not a bad thing right having people disagree vehemently about the world is actually healthy it's so much better than false consensus that ultimately limits imagination right if we have people with a wide range of views and in fact clusters on the extremes that's not necessarily bad as long as we have forums and norms and habits and mutual respect that allows for at least a mutual recognition of the problems to be solved followed by deliberation about how we might address those problems so if the country and the world are polarized that's not a bad thing that's actually how we make progress well then maybe to put a slightly academic slant on it academic research about increasing political polarization predates the existence of modern social media so like the earliest papers about like hey as a society we are maybe getting more uh polarized et cetera like for the delta's increasing kind of dates back to i would say from the 90s if i remember grad school properly um so it kind of predates but to see this point like there is no original position right there there is no pre whatever there wasn't a world in which we sort of existed as like naive babies and then social media was introduced like wouldn't that be a lovely experiment to have so it is difficult question to answer so like the answer is yes and yes right so people came in and their expectation implicit or explicit of utilizing this tool would be to find like-minded individuals to find their tribe to find you know their you know their their their plan of people or the like-minded individuals it is subconsciously what they are attracted to if we think about sort of the new ide world of like influencers it is actively what they cultivate themselves for i find it really interesting that the social media platform we have not talked about if we're talking about your information is tick tock because text has to be very very fascinating because it's like you know there is sort of this evolution of even how we work on social media that has changed over time where we were sort of more just ourselves you know sort of a verbal diarrhea on social media when it came to like friendster and like all the early days and even on facebook we were sort of our whole selves twitter is kind of when people started to create personas not on purpose but just sort of you realize that you could find the people like you if you had a persona tick-tock is almost solely about creating a persona you are on tick-tock as like the lady with the cute farm and sheep who like sing songs to hershey right like you you go in with the intent of i am a part of their persona right and this is how we see like you know people who are the most successful uh on these platforms you know i'd like solely thinking of low laws x right now are people who are really smart at manipulating that and sort of wrapping it around the person they're trying to build about themselves so like to the question of like is x influencing y or did y influence x it's a bit of both we have also changed how we interact on social media as it you know pertains to polarization because of how we act differently on social media today versus social media 20 years ago yes yes yeah i love that i do wonder how social tick-tock is but that's for another time is it social media um a very brief note to the audience you should have had a little questionnaire pop up uh in the background it's voluntary but would be very helpful uh for you to fill out so thank you very much for doing that um meanwhile i'm going to ask uh rahman and silva a last question which is that you know we were talking during the conversation and before about you know how quickly the change has taken place of social media how radical that is um but we haven't talked very much about the adaptation of particular individuals to that right in past times when new technologies came on the horizon eventually one of the social responses to it was that people figured out how to engage with it how not to engage with it we figured out collectively rules of engagement but also individually how we want to make sort of use of them and and i wonder whether one of the pieces of hope we might have is that those platforms that are the most toxic but are the most political actually but are the most uh controversial are going to start turning people off whether people will eventually say you know what um i don't want to be an environment that's completely toxic perhaps a go and tick tock where everybody has the cued singing to sheep on the farm persona i don't have to worry about this other stuff so um if things look better in 10 or 20 years you know is that because of choice of individuals is that because of government regulation is that because mark zuckerberg changes his idea of what to do sort of what would the positive path be and we have two minutes so uh uh silver one minute i'm gonna look at my 60 second clock and then we'll get romantic close it up okay i mean i would only say that there is no reason to think that facebook is turning people off despite all of its problems and toxicity at the macro level because again at the micro level it's still not only important and valuable to most of the three billion users but to many of them it's crucial and they can't live without it so if you are in brazil if you are in india if you are in bangladesh chances are living without facebook is not viable right now uh i think it would be a combination of all of the above i don't have a ton of faith that you know people uh or organizations that are not incentivized to change their behavior because of siva mentioned they are incentivized have other behavior will sort of magically grow conscience nor should we expect that right and so this is the cynic in me that you know people are driven by incentives i do think that as individuals we can and should be granted more agency and ability to control the world around us so i do not think the world you know the decision should lie in a few people with a significant amount of power yeah well thank you so much uh to the unc program for public discourse for hosting this wonderful conversation thank you to the many attendees and the great questions you asked uh but most of all of course thank you to ruman and siva uh for for really a wonderfully engaged and insightful conversation i hope we'll see you soon at one problems again thank you bye thanks

Channel: UNC Program for Public Discourse

Views: 748

Keywords: Rumman Chowdhury, Siva Vaidhyanathan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, UNC Chapel Hill, deplatforming, algorithms, social media regulation

Id: mTcXEh8Q5TY

Length: 89min 51sec (5391 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 08 2021