Re: The Noisy Room

The Noisy Room is an interactive article that describes a problem I agree and proposes a solution I do not. Reading it got me to finally flesh out my own framing of the problem: The Internet is Full of Strangers. On this page I'll discuss specifically why I disagree with Community Checks, the solution proposed by the article.

The “community check” is a widget under divisive posts on social media which would show data of how people on the platform and nationally feel about those issues. The goal would be to add context to posts so people will collectively know that even if they only see a bunch of posts designed for high engagement, there are related policy questions for which there’s a clear bipartisan majority consensus on. They hope to fix the distortion that all our political enemies are a monolith that holds the opposite and extreme views as us.

The distortion clearly exists and I trust the data showing it leads to increased hostility between the parties. However, I don’t think this will actually lead to better politics. The article argues that politicians are making their decisions based on these distorted perceptions, so fixing the perceptions would lead to more universally popular policies. In practice (within US politics), I can see the argument that the republican party makes decisions more aligned with the distorted perception of Republicans caused by the radical right online. But how do you justify the DNC acting anywhere near like the radical left? I believe their view of our liberal democracy is too simplistic/idyllic and doesn’t offer systemic analysis on how these power structures reproduce and reinforce themselves.

The community check would add context to divisive posts about where people stand on an issue in aggregate, but that doesn’t make the person whose post you’re reading a non-stranger. It doesn’t tell you who they are, and how they’re a complex and contradictory and growing person. The community check may have reduced hostility towards members of the opposing political party for a month in a lab study, but I do not think it is sufficient to rebuild community and re-humanize each other; to allow us to disagree but still extend grace. If common knowledge is the goal, it’s better created by knowing your neighbors’ actual views through repeated interaction, not a widget.

I do think there's value in clearing up the distortion and reducing hostility. Our political system is a mess and its not the fault of any individual, regardless of party. We don't need hostility towards conservatives, we need to help each other unlearn the harmful ideas we've ingrained into our society. I just don't think the community check is capable of helping with that.

I find it interesting they included statistics on how both Democrats and Republicans have similar ratios of those who support “political violence”, which they do not define but cite a paper that defines it as “the use of violence against rival partisans”. What this definition ignores is the violence of policies for which the members of each party voted for. Under this definition, supporting officers deporting people is not supporting political violence. Supporting policies that deprive people of the food, water, shelter, or healthcare they need to survive is not supporting political violence.

I think both cited numbers would be far higher if the definition contained forms of state sanctioned violence they supported politically. What they've done instead is reinforce a narrative where state sanctioned violence is not considered violence but anything outside the political system is. So the protestor is violent, but not the police who shot them under the guise of crowd control. This is a facet of neoliberalism and treats politics as some abstract thing to politely debate over divorced from the context of its real world impact. It's a political framework unsuitable to deal with fundamental issues with liberal democracy, and its influence over the community check system will make it ultimately stifle political creativity and anything too radical in favor of minor changes that do nothing to fundamentally alter the status quo.

I really think they identified the actual cause of the problem - virality - but their analysis and biases led to a solution that would ultimately stall our path to actual liberation. They made this clear when they introduced the article talking about “severely toxic” posts, only to silently replace them with radical politics for the remainder of the article.