The big problem with the Internet is incivility and immoderate speech, right? That’s the reason that British social media users are prosecuted in their hundreds, that Australian tabloids enlist sports stars in campaigns to “stop the trolls” and beef up our own laws, that journalists complain endlesslyabout the antagonism they cop from readers, and that public awareness campaigns tell us what to do in cases of persistent online conflict.
This idea that the Internet is a hotbed of irrational, intractable conflict — especially when it comes to politics – is by now an article of conventional wisdom. So common sense should be troubled by the release of a report yesterday from the respected Pew Center suggesting that people were far less likely to express disagreement with prevailing views in social media than in other contexts.
In Social Media and the Spiral of Silence, researchers looked specifically at American citizens’ discussion on the Snowden leaks, which revealed widespread electronic surveillance of ordinary citizens, some of which has a similar character to the kind that the Australian government is currently proposing to extend on all of the country’s Internet users.
They found not only that social media users were unlikely to share opinions that they thought their followers disagreed with, but that Facebook and Twitter users were less likely to express potentially controversial opinions in face-to-face contexts as well. To explain this, the researchers employed an old conceptual stand-by from social-scientific approaches to communication, the “spiral of silence”, which posits that minority opinions are not expressed in group settings due to individual fears about social isolation, or more serious reprisals (like losing your job, or your status).
Contrary to perennial optimism about the Internet’s contribution to increased freedom of expression, the researchers found that “social media did not provide new forums for those who might otherwise remain silent”, and the possibility that the “spiral of silence might spill over from online contexts to in-person contexts”. A significant number of Internet users dare not disagree with their partners in conversation, online or off.
As always, caution is needed in generalising beyond the US context of the research, and even to other topics. Nevertheless, the idea that the Internetmay, at least in some circumstances, be an engine of consensus mirrors more critical work done in the more theoretical end of social media research.
The limitation of the spiral of silence approach, though, may be that while classically it relies on individuals’ vaguely intuiting the nature of majority opinion, in social media we receive concrete evidence of the consequences of breaking ranks with prevailing opinion on a daily basis.
In the last week alone, the brave free speech warriors of the IPA ditched long-term fellow Alan Moran for his performance in social media, after another former fellow was disendorsed as a Liberal candidate for virulently homophobic remarkson Facebook. Here in the US, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois was recently “unhired” for his trenchant remarks on the Israeli invasion of Gaza.
Apart from the familiar spectacle of such social media sackings, all of us will know of pile-ons, broken friendships and professional ostracism which have emerged from political discussions online.
Further, the topic that the Pew researchers asked about may have a special resonance, and induce a particular kind of silence. Just as the Church Committee findings about the NSA in the 1970s apparently did little to curb the appetites of the US security state, it may be that the slow-drip release of the Snowden revelations has simply brought about a greater, more fearful awareness of surveillance, rather than eliciting a determination to reclaim rights to privacy and speech.
Surveillance itself may be one reason that social media users are more reticent about offering their opinions on surveillance. This capacity for surveillance to limit politics before it even gets started may be a better reason to oppose its extension in Australia than any vague and contested notions of privacy.
The environments we interact in are also shaped by a commercially-motivated imperative that has political effects: the desire to keep us happy. The Facebook research that occasioned recent controversy over research ethics was all part of a larger effort to algorithmically minimise conflict, whose starting point, according to Facebook data scientist Adam Kramer, is that “exposure to friends’ negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook”. With less and less aberrant disagreement inside our “filter bubbles”, perhaps we are losing the knack.
The unfortunate possibility that such research adds weight to, though, is that we act in far more immediate ways to limit one another’s expression than the state or our platforms do. In the midst of social media’s perpetual flurries of outrage, we teach one another that the range of acceptable opinion is small, that we are individually responsible for comporting ourselves within these limits, and that the negative consequences are unpredictable, and potentially catastrophic. Accepting cues – from media, government and other authorities – about the dangers of incivility and extremism, we monitor each other’s conduct, ensuring that it doesn’t cross any arbitrary lines.
Most importantly, we monitor our own, and limit ourselves in the name of consensus, and the quiet life.
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