TL;DR

Our online discourse is the victim of industrial scale pollution, and the incentives are being aligned in the wrong direction. Rather than polluters being penalised there’s now an entire industry that’s paid to pollute.

Filter Failure at the Outrage Factory is no longer just the work of ‘amateur’ fringe trolls and state sponsored propaganda; it’s become a profession.

We lost our best watchers

The Stanford Internet Observatory (and particularly Renée DiResta[1]) did sterling work tracking and educating about the spread of online misinformation. Sadly they fell victim to a concerted lawfare campaign. In many ways their shutdown tells us all we need to know about the present situation in terms of politics and incentives.

Yet sometimes the rot is too obvious to ignore

X recently added an account location feature that exposed numerous highly visible US political accounts as being located elsewhere. The BBC ran with ‘How X’s new location feature exposed big US politics accounts‘, whilst 404 went with ‘America’s Polarization Has Become the World’s Side Hustle‘, noting:

The ‘psyops’ revealed by X are entirely the fault of the perverse incentives created by social media monetization programs.

It turns out you can fund a reasonable lifestyle in a ‘low income’ country by shit stirring online; and (as Terry Pratchett might put it), “it’s indoor work with no heavy lifting”.

What’s to be done?

We’ve dealt with pollution before. Early industrialists poisoned their workers and the land around their factories. The costs were borne by society whilst they continued to rake in the profits – what economists call an ‘externality‘.

We’re facing exactly the same problem again, only this time the pollution is to our information space rather than our lived environment. But that doesn’t make the toxic effects any less damaging. Our information space shapes our lived environment (and the policies that apply to it), so it’s vital to ensure that everything is kept clean.

Regulate away the poor incentives

We know how and why all this is happening. Outrage drives engagement, and engagement brings in advertising revenue. That flywheel has been amplified by taking a tiny fraction of the ad revenue to drive more outrage.

This is largely happening because social media companies have dodged the (reasonably effective) advertising regulation that applies to more traditional media. But there’s no reason to give them a pass.

Start with political will

This is the hard bit… regulation only happens when lawmakers feel a sense of urgency.

Kids dying from being poisoned gets an immediate response.

But the harms from the pollution of our information space aren’t so obvious. Worse they’re being actively obfuscated by… the pollution of our information space. It’s like the smog from the factory stopping anybody from noticing the kids choking to death.

In many cases one side of the political divide has persuaded itself that the outrage supports their case. Meanwhile their opponents are too in thrall of media power.

There are some glimmers of hope, that I’ll return to in another post; but right now it seems we’re a long way from solving this pollution problem.

Note

[1] Renée’s ‘Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality‘ provides an excellent overview of this problem.