22 ms·

Facebook Makes Us Know Too Much About Each Other

127 points by tysone 5y ago

GhettoComputers 5y ago
I’m not convinced the polarization equates to real life. They don’t reveal the metric to judge how to see how moderate they got. It’s naive and uniquely stupid to assume following a bot will change your politics after a month. The hardiness of peoples beliefs are proof they aren’t being more polarized by online, they’re just looking to agree with others.
helen___keller 5y ago
It turns out, people can get along in real life, not because we’re exposed to many different ideas and ways of life, but in spite of this fact. Take away the human aspect and look only at tweets or shares or headlines, and you don’t have that magical ability that humans have to connect with each other in spite of tribal division.
- sumthinprofound 5y ago
  you can learn a lot about a person by sitting down and having a meal with them and miraculously alot of the online vitrol dissipates when you have a chance to see them as a full person.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > alot of the online vitrol dissipates when you have a chance to see them as a full person But remove the physical proximity and the vitriol often re-animates.
  - hpoe 5y ago
    Interestingly enough that is what Daryl Davis decided to do to start fighting racism, got over a dozen members, including a grand wizard, to leave the Klan. I'd recommend watching his TedTalk it really helped me understand how to better work with others, and how to bring about understanding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORp3q1Oaezw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORp3q1Oaezw
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Or are they just hiding it because social norms require that they do? As we have pretty strong social expectations for how people behave at meals.
    - standardUser 5y ago
      We have very strong social expectations when interacting with mixed company in any in-person setting. And zero social expectations when interacting online, where anything up to and including death threats seems acceptable to many. Cars are an interesting in-between, where we're just barely removed from being in-person and as a result we tend to act far more rudely and dangerously than we would to someone's face.
    - mumblemumble 5y ago
      It's a feedback loop. Put someone in an environment where social norms favor civility and respect, and they will generally become more civil and respectful over time. Put them in an environment where social norms favor tribalism and vitriol, and they will tend to become more tribal and vitriolic over time. That said, I think we should be cautious about nostalgia for how things worked before the Internet. 30 years ago, people in socioeconomically homogenous communities might have been adept at being civil to and empathizing with their neighbors, but they perhaps also had a lot less opportunity to become aware of what was going on outside their bubbles.
    - cnity 5y ago
      I don't mean this personally, but I'd like to dive into this take. It is common these days for people to interpret the self-management people perform as a type of filtering (or "hiding" in your words). I find the cynicism in this viewpoint to be distasteful, when equally one could interpret the same behavior much more favorably. When someone, for example, tidies their apartment because they anticipate a guest, they are engaging in exactly the same thing. But this is widely considered a good thing. The connections one anticipates have caused one to "brush up". The same thing is true for outspoken opinions. We aren't just "real" creatures with disgusting opinions walking around wearing "fake" masks to hide them. The treatment of a person is different depending on which lens you opt for. On the one hand, you view society as a collection of people who ought to be unmasked, for their true identity to be uncovered and scorned appropriately. On the other, you view society as a collection of people with a fluid set of opinions that are molded by the company they are with. The unspoken idea becomes the forgotten, abandoned idea.
  - andrew_ 5y ago
    A few years back I met a woman at a bar, flirted, got a number, and went on a date. About 30 minutes into the date she brought up politics, and was on the opposite side of the spectrum from myself. That didn't change that I thought she was funny and was interested enough to flirt and set up a date. We just mutually agreed that we had no business dating, had a laugh, and finished out the night together with the understanding that we could have a good time despite the differences that wouldn't allow for dating. Online media attempt to amplify these differences to the point of rage because there's money it in.
- FriedrichN 5y ago
  Every time I make the mistake of looking at Twitter I am reminded of how much of an absolute cesspool it is. Only the loudest, rudest, dumbest, most extreme opinions seem to get through. Social media only highlights the extremes of the spectrum whatever the subject.
  - shreyshnaccount 5y ago
    yes! this! it's a giant problem- social media becomes a collection of only the extremes, leaving out the middle ground where most ppl actually fall, in for the clicks :(
  - shoto_io 5y ago
    I hate twitter. Every time I get on I feel much worse than before. So much hate and conflict... > Only the loudest, rudest, dumbest, most extreme opinions I'd add the voice of rich people to this list.
    - dorfsmay 5y ago
      If you restrict to view tweets from people you follow only, twitter can be interesting. If somebody you don't follow tweets something really inspiring then you'll see it either through a retweet or on Reddit. To customize twitter: https://twitter.com/dorfsmay/status/1428712897136533510 https://twitter.com/dorfsmay/status/1428712897136533510
      - ufo 5y ago
        Is there an easy way to stop twitter from showing "recommended" tweets from people you don't follow? I find that those are invariably sarcastic or rage-inducing.
        dorfsmay 5y ago
        The only way I have found is to follow my customization above and use TweetDeck. I heard people using lists, but I have not explored.
- snarf21 5y ago
  I think it is just a question of civility. People will post pure hate online, even in response to others. 99.9% of the time the same people would never say the same thing to that person's face, whether for fear of reprisal or social pressure. They would say all those things to the friend or spouse later but the big difference is diffusion. Their anger and vitriol has time to dissipate and they calm down. Hateful Media is an ever increasing ratchet of outrage.
- LanceH 5y ago
  My opinion of the problem is one specific type of communication. The guilty parties include both the left and right politically, as well as anyone else with an axe to grind about something. These people communicate not like they are having a discussion with someone else. They don't just post a link and ask, "can you believe what happened here?" Instead they post the link and tell you what you should think about it. It isn't a conversation. It isn't even just half the conversation. They are lecturing. It's a behavior that wouldn't happen in person, and if it didn't that person would just be avoided. When I identified this style of post and blocked these people, the only thing really left that annoys is the clickbait ads. In short, treat the people on the other side of your messages like friends you are speaking to, not as an audience you are educating on the proper way of doing thinking.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    I'd say it's worse than that: people aren't lecturing to their interlocutor. They're lecturing or signalling to the wider audience. This, IMO, has been the bane of online forums of all kind. People talk like they're pundits on a discussion panel - they make points for the people watching, not for each other.
    - andrew_ 5y ago
      social media is no longer sharing among peers. it's gaming for attention and numbers.
- throwaway769371 5y ago
  > It turns out, people can get along in real life, not because we’re exposed to many different ideas and ways of life, but in spite of this fact. My family's pretty conservative. In 2018, my brother's best friend from high school ran for political office as a democrat and won. Every Christmas, my mom bakes cookies and takes them to family friends. She had to look past all the headlines, politics, political disagreements, and that guy is everything FOX News told her to hate, to remember she likes the guy and his family. It's hard enough to look past disagreements normally; it's even harder when your people are telling you that should you hate this guy you've known for 20 years. On one hand, I'm very encouraged that, when faced with this choice, people can cut through the divisions and look at the person. On the other hand, this doesn't scale, and he's still dead to my dad.
  - twofornone 5y ago
    It really doesn't help when the institutionally dominant side insists that the only way someone could possibly become conservative/republican/right leaning is by falling victim to Fox news propaganda. There's far more nuance to the discussions regarding, say, border security, entitlement spending, immigration reform, etc beyond accusations of racism and xenophobia. It's quite possible for two people to look at the same set of data and come to different conclusions because of differing value systems, priorities, risk tolerance, etc. Maybe part of the problem is this insistence that our platforms are justified in censoring opinions because of this false belief that if two people differ in political opinion, one side must be mislead by "misinformation".
    - andrew_ 5y ago
      check the username of the parent comment. safe to assume that was meant to enflame.
    - gmac 5y ago
      Not-an-American here. Seems to me there's arguably an important difference between (a) being conservative/right leaning and (b) being Republican. People can, of course, legitimately be found in all sorts of positions on the liberal/left leaning <—> conservative/right leaning spectrum (Jonathan Haidt has some interesting things to say on this [1]). But from this side of the Atlantic it looks rather as if Trump's Republican party strongly prioritises getting and keeping power over basic democratic principles [2]. I find that very worrying, and I also find I can only really give two explanations for people supporting it: either "they're bad people" or "they're misinformed". I prefer to think that in most cases it's the latter. [1] e.g. https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_liberals_and_conservatives/transcript?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_... [2] e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/06/republican-party-donald-trump-american-democracy-elections https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/06/republ...
- sadfev 5y ago
  I am not sure if it’s a good thing that humans collaborate with awful humans. It’s a great service of Social media which exposes how awful humans are. How hateful, vengeful and violent seemingly normal people can be. I think it’s a good thing that humans have fractured and awful people are separated from non awful people. There is only harm towards nature and humans (mostly non awful/non aggressive humans) when there is lots of human collaboration. Instead of de-carbonization, we need a technological and political decoupling of human beings. That’s the only hope for humanity and all the innocent flora and fauna of earth. De-globalization is too far too late. We are on the no point of return from absolute and rapid annihilation of nature and humanity.
  - crocodiletears 5y ago
    All these awful people sound dangerous What do we do with them once we've successfully identified and separated ourselves from them?
  - merpnderp 5y ago
    Keep in mind that 99.9% of human history is the awful people enslaving everyone else (who would then prove unworthy when they enslaved everyone when they came to power). Maybe our very short history of treating people equally, offering grace to those who fall short, and working towards consensus, is worth salvaging. The old days of tribalism were more horrific than we can imagine.
bellyfullofbac 5y ago
Well, a short opinion piece about a complicated topic. > In 2017, Deb Roy, director of the M.I.T. Center for Constructive Communication and former chief media scientist at Twitter, held informal meetings in small towns to talk to people about social media. Several times, people told him they’d given up speaking to neighbors or others in town after seeing them express their opinions online. People have said the verbal part is just a small percentage of real life communication, I wonder if just reading someone's thoughts in text and not actually having a conversation contributes to this. But I guess verbal conversations are very lossy and when someone writes it down, you get their clear thoughts, and that can be good or bad (e.g. if they reveal themselves to be deeply racist...).
- Double_a_92 5y ago
  Social media just gives people occasions to talk about everything, and then everyone can see what they talked about. While in real life you e.g. just never give your neighbour the occasion to talk about politics with you.
- beardyw 5y ago
  People have not learned to self moderate online. Maybe in time they will, or maybe following generations will. Read back what you wrote, then delete it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- giorgioz 5y ago
  Yes I think too much context, feelings and empathy is not transmitted on the web. If you meet a friend on the street and he seem sad you won't be bragging about your awesome vacation or promotion. Humans automatically tone their statements to match the receivers. We might think we speak absolutely the same way to everyone but in practice is not like that. We have the desire to fit and be liked and we adapt our language to be enjoyable for the receiver. Online you are not aware of your receiver and it's very easy to displease dozens of people at once which you would not do if you would speak with them one-by-one in person.
localhost 5y ago
While it is trendy to hate on Facebook, the actual title of the op-Ed is: “We Should All Know Less About Each Other“
- Nicksil 5y ago
  Well you both are right. It seems NYT slipped; the title of the document is <title> Opinion | Facebook Makes Us Know Too Much About Each Other - The New York Times </title> The Facebook hate isn't a trend. People have been hating Facebook -- for good reason -- for quite some time.
- dazc 5y ago
  I know some bad things about my best friends but, I guess, the difference is that these things were not part of their curated image that the rest of the world gets to see.
_ktx2 5y ago
> The opposite happened. “Nobody became more moderate,” said Bail. “Republicans in particular became much more conservative when they followed the Democratic bot, and Democrats became a little bit more liberal.” This is accurate of right wingers, but it skimps on an observation I've noticed. As polarization increases, liberals become more tolerant of their own extremists. Most Democrats I've known throughout my life owned guns, valued the principle of free speech, would never get caught putting down an entire class of people, etc yet all of these are common views to, in some way, argue against as a Democrat these days. One could argue it's the popularity of progressivism and how it's cultural values are now eroding the average Democrats, but I'm not quite sold on that idea. My pet theory has been that "own the libs" builds tolerance for extreme views because they further agitate the right, so it was interesting to see them highlight the rights agitation with the left. For now, I'll stick to calling myself an independent until all of this blows over and we can go back to having beers instead of talking about politics and our "values" for entertainment.
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  What is a right winger? What do libertarians, neoconservatives, and fundamental Christians agree with? The only way I’d classify them is non left, but not at all unified.
  - _ktx2 5y ago
    Agreed, I was bucketing for simplicity and that's probably not optimal for consensus. For the sake of this conversation I'd box it as left and non-left. There probably is some distinction among non-left groups though. I came from Libertarianism and it hardly relates to the right besides depending on it for structural support. Being a Democrat with some progressive political beliefs puts you in a similar bucket. Unfortunately the nature of politics is winner takes all, which has historically made me odd bed-fellows in politics.
    - GhettoComputers 5y ago
      Some places are working on ranked choice voting also called condorcet, but its happening slowly. I do not participate at all since it has no effect in large population areas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method
kderbyma 5y ago
I don't social media makes us know too much, it's that it's unchanging and aggregates one's life into a feed...a torrent of information usually completely unrelated. now they feed you the Facebook select which claim is the choice cut but in actual fact is the left overs from yesterday's main... perhaps it's not the information but the medium is transfer and the lack of engagement with purpose.
nineplay 5y ago
OK, so I'm reading a Hitler biography and it's affecting my outlook, but I think we all need to step back for a moment and acknowledge that people hated their political opponents long before Facebook came along. I do think FB is pushing people to extremes. More precisely I think social media is pushing people to extremes, I find twitter a lot more antagonistic than FB actually, where people think they can 'destroy' their opponents in 280 characters or less. Reddit is a cesspool. We know, or we should know, that these sites are deliberately divisive . There are bad actors who want us to be really angry, all the time, because angry people are stupid. It still is just the latest iteration. People used to gather in beer halls. People used to gather in churches. People used to have their social clubs and circles and had been able to carefully manipulate their environments so that people who disagreed with them lived and worked and went to school far, far away. This anger doesn't go away if Facebook goes away. I'm not sure how to make it go away. I'd wish that people could take a step back and consider for a moment that maybe intelligent, decent people can disagree with them. Probably not.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  Counterpoint: strong social bonds and centers of community make people less susceptible to extremist beliefs/behavior by reducing atomization. In my farm town, both the democrat and the conservative farmer go to the VFW for fish fry. Or - at least - they used to.
  - Loughla 5y ago
    Counter-counterpoint: those social bonds made sure 'new' thoughts were excluded inherently, ensuring differences were small, local, and low-friction. Take segregation for instance. How open to conversation about abolishing segregation would the folks at the VFW fish fry have been?
  - nineplay 5y ago
    My father tried to go to a VFW meeting after Vietnam and he was treated like crap by the WWII veterans. These clubs are more exclusive than one might hope. That was a long time ago, but today's Afghanistan veterans may not be getting a warm welcome either. See also how Black WWII veterans were treated at the officers clubs. Not well. The matter I described earlier still applies too. When neighborhoods have been carefully and deliberately segregated, you don't run into much risk of seeing neighbors of a different religion and color at your fish fries.
joelbondurant 5y ago
Friendship has to be mandatory or nobody will comply.
darthvoldemort 5y ago
Same thing happened with Tom Cruise a while back. He fired his publicist and started to go on interviews, and it turns out he's fucking wacky. He was jumping on couches on Oprah and laughing maniacally, and doing other really weird stuff. People were shocked, and his star dropped for a couple of years. Lesson learned. Keep your mouth shut and let people think you're stupid, instead of opening it and confirming it.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  Everyone has known Tom is wacky since we figured out he's a scientologist.
beefman 5y ago
Kirk: What have you done to my friends? Sybok: I've done nothing. This is who they are! Didn't you know that? Kirk: No I didn't. Sybok: Now learn something about yourself. Kirk: No. I refuse!
icecap12 5y ago
I'm guilty of effectively ending friendships after seeing things former-friends have posted or stated online. In most cases, their posts or social media content revealed fundamental hypocrisy in what they said versus how they lived, or a belief-system in direct contrast to my own. I really had a hard time with that, and decided that I didn't want to talk to the person anymore. In one case, it was somebody I'd known since like 4th grade. It's hard to want to be friends with someone that might support the abolishment of something you like, or that supports something you should feel abolished (does it matter which?). It's still possible, but I've found that I eventually figure out where someone stands on something and gravitate away from them, even without social media. Ultimately one of the biggest problems is the total lack of civil discourse. If that was more prevalent, I think it would be easier to have friends with opposing views. Nowadays, people throw up their arms and accuse you of being X when they can't articulately argue a position. That gets tiring. As the article mentions, in some cases, social media reveals the depths of someone's political positions, personal beliefs, or other that you might not have known. Is it worse to know those things, versus not know? Hard to say, but I personally like to have things in common with my friends. There are no easy answers here, so my personal solution was dumping most social media, like Facebook and Instagram. I hate Twitter, but find myself having to use it to keep up with news in the infosec community; even if the group on Twitter is an echo-chamber club that mostly uses their "status" in the community to influence on topics other than cyber (super annoying). All I know is, my peace of mind seems to be much better without social media; I don't miss it at all. [edit] spelling correction
- jdavis703 5y ago
  This seems strange to me. I’m sure I’m friends with people who want to abolish the IRS (American tax agency) or folks who perhaps want to privatize other agencies like Social Security (American “pension” system) or folks who send their kids to charter schools. I couldn’t imagine ending a friendship over this.
  - Loughla 5y ago
    So for me, it came down to the individual view. I have dumped friends for 'other' political views. But they didn't tend to be related to agencies, like you list. They're the personal ones. People who don't believe gays should be allowed to be married by the state. People who don't believe women or minorities should be allowed to vote. People who believe all immigrants come here to kill/steal/crime whatever. The difference is when it's an institution (private versus public schools for example), that's pretty easy to disagree over. One side does not believe the other is inherently evil and a 'lesser' person. When it's about individual rights, and an attack on you as a person, and your inherent rights as an individual, that is almost impossible to overcome.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
I like this framing. Facebook’s problem is that it facilitates the feeling of connection at the expense of the real thing. You see some Evil Conservative post or Evil Liberal post that you’re sure to interpret uncharitably, and you’ve never talked to the poster about this topic (or at all), so you’re sure you have a good picture of that person in your head. But it’s a good framing beyond that too. You see vacation pictures posted by a friend you haven’t talked to in five years, so you feel connected. You feel connected to tons of people you haven’t actually talked to in ages. When I left social media, the biggest change I found was that I’d actually directly contact friends more. I had to now! Less pub-sub and more one on one interaction. You trade superficially knowing more about each other without effort for actually knowing more about each other with effort.
clarkevans 5y ago
I found the linked 2019 article on the Front Porch Forum to be rather interesting. In particular, this social network's posts/responses are have a 24h delay. https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/24/18129437/front-porch-forum-vermont-social-network-listserv-local-online-community https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/24/18129437/front-porch-foru... Besides membership, FPF seems to be sustained though local advertising.
bradgessler 5y ago
Privacy makes us more civil. Next time somebody says they don’t care about privacy tell them that. When we think we know everything about somebody, our mind is no longer curious about that person. We think we know everything about them and start making assumptions.

127 points by tysone 5y ago

I’m not convinced the polarization equates to real life. They don’t reveal the metric to judge how to see how moderate they got. It’s naive and uniquely stupid to assume following a bot will change your politics after a month. The hardiness of peoples beliefs are proof they aren’t being more polarized by online, they’re just looking to agree with others.

helen___keller 5y ago

It turns out, people can get along in real life, not because we’re exposed to many different ideas and ways of life, but in spite of this fact. Take away the human aspect and look only at tweets or shares or headlines, and you don’t have that magical ability that humans have to connect with each other in spite of tribal division.

sumthinprofound 5y ago
you can learn a lot about a person by sitting down and having a meal with them and miraculously alot of the online vitrol dissipates when you have a chance to see them as a full person.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > alot of the online vitrol dissipates when you have a chance to see them as a full person But remove the physical proximity and the vitriol often re-animates.
- hpoe 5y ago
  Interestingly enough that is what Daryl Davis decided to do to start fighting racism, got over a dozen members, including a grand wizard, to leave the Klan. I'd recommend watching his TedTalk it really helped me understand how to better work with others, and how to bring about understanding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORp3q1Oaezw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORp3q1Oaezw
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Or are they just hiding it because social norms require that they do? As we have pretty strong social expectations for how people behave at meals.
  - standardUser 5y ago
    We have very strong social expectations when interacting with mixed company in any in-person setting. And zero social expectations when interacting online, where anything up to and including death threats seems acceptable to many. Cars are an interesting in-between, where we're just barely removed from being in-person and as a result we tend to act far more rudely and dangerously than we would to someone's face.
  - mumblemumble 5y ago
    It's a feedback loop. Put someone in an environment where social norms favor civility and respect, and they will generally become more civil and respectful over time. Put them in an environment where social norms favor tribalism and vitriol, and they will tend to become more tribal and vitriolic over time. That said, I think we should be cautious about nostalgia for how things worked before the Internet. 30 years ago, people in socioeconomically homogenous communities might have been adept at being civil to and empathizing with their neighbors, but they perhaps also had a lot less opportunity to become aware of what was going on outside their bubbles.
  - cnity 5y ago
    I don't mean this personally, but I'd like to dive into this take. It is common these days for people to interpret the self-management people perform as a type of filtering (or "hiding" in your words). I find the cynicism in this viewpoint to be distasteful, when equally one could interpret the same behavior much more favorably. When someone, for example, tidies their apartment because they anticipate a guest, they are engaging in exactly the same thing. But this is widely considered a good thing. The connections one anticipates have caused one to "brush up". The same thing is true for outspoken opinions. We aren't just "real" creatures with disgusting opinions walking around wearing "fake" masks to hide them. The treatment of a person is different depending on which lens you opt for. On the one hand, you view society as a collection of people who ought to be unmasked, for their true identity to be uncovered and scorned appropriately. On the other, you view society as a collection of people with a fluid set of opinions that are molded by the company they are with. The unspoken idea becomes the forgotten, abandoned idea.
- andrew_ 5y ago
  A few years back I met a woman at a bar, flirted, got a number, and went on a date. About 30 minutes into the date she brought up politics, and was on the opposite side of the spectrum from myself. That didn't change that I thought she was funny and was interested enough to flirt and set up a date. We just mutually agreed that we had no business dating, had a laugh, and finished out the night together with the understanding that we could have a good time despite the differences that wouldn't allow for dating. Online media attempt to amplify these differences to the point of rage because there's money it in.
FriedrichN 5y ago
Every time I make the mistake of looking at Twitter I am reminded of how much of an absolute cesspool it is. Only the loudest, rudest, dumbest, most extreme opinions seem to get through. Social media only highlights the extremes of the spectrum whatever the subject.
- shreyshnaccount 5y ago
  yes! this! it's a giant problem- social media becomes a collection of only the extremes, leaving out the middle ground where most ppl actually fall, in for the clicks :(
- shoto_io 5y ago
  I hate twitter. Every time I get on I feel much worse than before. So much hate and conflict... > Only the loudest, rudest, dumbest, most extreme opinions I'd add the voice of rich people to this list.
  - dorfsmay 5y ago
    If you restrict to view tweets from people you follow only, twitter can be interesting. If somebody you don't follow tweets something really inspiring then you'll see it either through a retweet or on Reddit. To customize twitter: https://twitter.com/dorfsmay/status/1428712897136533510 https://twitter.com/dorfsmay/status/1428712897136533510
    - ufo 5y ago
      Is there an easy way to stop twitter from showing "recommended" tweets from people you don't follow? I find that those are invariably sarcastic or rage-inducing.
      - dorfsmay 5y ago
        The only way I have found is to follow my customization above and use TweetDeck. I heard people using lists, but I have not explored.
snarf21 5y ago
I think it is just a question of civility. People will post pure hate online, even in response to others. 99.9% of the time the same people would never say the same thing to that person's face, whether for fear of reprisal or social pressure. They would say all those things to the friend or spouse later but the big difference is diffusion. Their anger and vitriol has time to dissipate and they calm down. Hateful Media is an ever increasing ratchet of outrage.
LanceH 5y ago
My opinion of the problem is one specific type of communication. The guilty parties include both the left and right politically, as well as anyone else with an axe to grind about something. These people communicate not like they are having a discussion with someone else. They don't just post a link and ask, "can you believe what happened here?" Instead they post the link and tell you what you should think about it. It isn't a conversation. It isn't even just half the conversation. They are lecturing. It's a behavior that wouldn't happen in person, and if it didn't that person would just be avoided. When I identified this style of post and blocked these people, the only thing really left that annoys is the clickbait ads. In short, treat the people on the other side of your messages like friends you are speaking to, not as an audience you are educating on the proper way of doing thinking.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  I'd say it's worse than that: people aren't lecturing to their interlocutor. They're lecturing or signalling to the wider audience. This, IMO, has been the bane of online forums of all kind. People talk like they're pundits on a discussion panel - they make points for the people watching, not for each other.
  - andrew_ 5y ago
    social media is no longer sharing among peers. it's gaming for attention and numbers.
throwaway769371 5y ago
> It turns out, people can get along in real life, not because we’re exposed to many different ideas and ways of life, but in spite of this fact. My family's pretty conservative. In 2018, my brother's best friend from high school ran for political office as a democrat and won. Every Christmas, my mom bakes cookies and takes them to family friends. She had to look past all the headlines, politics, political disagreements, and that guy is everything FOX News told her to hate, to remember she likes the guy and his family. It's hard enough to look past disagreements normally; it's even harder when your people are telling you that should you hate this guy you've known for 20 years. On one hand, I'm very encouraged that, when faced with this choice, people can cut through the divisions and look at the person. On the other hand, this doesn't scale, and he's still dead to my dad.
- twofornone 5y ago
  It really doesn't help when the institutionally dominant side insists that the only way someone could possibly become conservative/republican/right leaning is by falling victim to Fox news propaganda. There's far more nuance to the discussions regarding, say, border security, entitlement spending, immigration reform, etc beyond accusations of racism and xenophobia. It's quite possible for two people to look at the same set of data and come to different conclusions because of differing value systems, priorities, risk tolerance, etc. Maybe part of the problem is this insistence that our platforms are justified in censoring opinions because of this false belief that if two people differ in political opinion, one side must be mislead by "misinformation".
  - andrew_ 5y ago
    check the username of the parent comment. safe to assume that was meant to enflame.
  - gmac 5y ago
    Not-an-American here. Seems to me there's arguably an important difference between (a) being conservative/right leaning and (b) being Republican. People can, of course, legitimately be found in all sorts of positions on the liberal/left leaning <—> conservative/right leaning spectrum (Jonathan Haidt has some interesting things to say on this [1]). But from this side of the Atlantic it looks rather as if Trump's Republican party strongly prioritises getting and keeping power over basic democratic principles [2]. I find that very worrying, and I also find I can only really give two explanations for people supporting it: either "they're bad people" or "they're misinformed". I prefer to think that in most cases it's the latter. [1] e.g. https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_liberals_and_conservatives/transcript?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_... [2] e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/06/republican-party-donald-trump-american-democracy-elections https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/06/republ...
sadfev 5y ago
I am not sure if it’s a good thing that humans collaborate with awful humans. It’s a great service of Social media which exposes how awful humans are. How hateful, vengeful and violent seemingly normal people can be. I think it’s a good thing that humans have fractured and awful people are separated from non awful people. There is only harm towards nature and humans (mostly non awful/non aggressive humans) when there is lots of human collaboration. Instead of de-carbonization, we need a technological and political decoupling of human beings. That’s the only hope for humanity and all the innocent flora and fauna of earth. De-globalization is too far too late. We are on the no point of return from absolute and rapid annihilation of nature and humanity.
- crocodiletears 5y ago
  All these awful people sound dangerous What do we do with them once we've successfully identified and separated ourselves from them?
- merpnderp 5y ago
  Keep in mind that 99.9% of human history is the awful people enslaving everyone else (who would then prove unworthy when they enslaved everyone when they came to power). Maybe our very short history of treating people equally, offering grace to those who fall short, and working towards consensus, is worth salvaging. The old days of tribalism were more horrific than we can imagine.

bellyfullofbac 5y ago

Well, a short opinion piece about a complicated topic. > In 2017, Deb Roy, director of the M.I.T. Center for Constructive Communication and former chief media scientist at Twitter, held informal meetings in small towns to talk to people about social media. Several times, people told him they’d given up speaking to neighbors or others in town after seeing them express their opinions online. People have said the verbal part is just a small percentage of real life communication, I wonder if just reading someone's thoughts in text and not actually having a conversation contributes to this. But I guess verbal conversations are very lossy and when someone writes it down, you get their clear thoughts, and that can be good or bad (e.g. if they reveal themselves to be deeply racist...).

Double_a_92 5y ago
Social media just gives people occasions to talk about everything, and then everyone can see what they talked about. While in real life you e.g. just never give your neighbour the occasion to talk about politics with you.
beardyw 5y ago
People have not learned to self moderate online. Maybe in time they will, or maybe following generations will. Read back what you wrote, then delete it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
giorgioz 5y ago
Yes I think too much context, feelings and empathy is not transmitted on the web. If you meet a friend on the street and he seem sad you won't be bragging about your awesome vacation or promotion. Humans automatically tone their statements to match the receivers. We might think we speak absolutely the same way to everyone but in practice is not like that. We have the desire to fit and be liked and we adapt our language to be enjoyable for the receiver. Online you are not aware of your receiver and it's very easy to displease dozens of people at once which you would not do if you would speak with them one-by-one in person.

localhost 5y ago

While it is trendy to hate on Facebook, the actual title of the op-Ed is: “We Should All Know Less About Each Other“

Nicksil 5y ago
Well you both are right. It seems NYT slipped; the title of the document is <title> Opinion | Facebook Makes Us Know Too Much About Each Other - The New York Times </title> The Facebook hate isn't a trend. People have been hating Facebook -- for good reason -- for quite some time.
dazc 5y ago
I know some bad things about my best friends but, I guess, the difference is that these things were not part of their curated image that the rest of the world gets to see.

_ktx2 5y ago

> The opposite happened. “Nobody became more moderate,” said Bail. “Republicans in particular became much more conservative when they followed the Democratic bot, and Democrats became a little bit more liberal.” This is accurate of right wingers, but it skimps on an observation I've noticed. As polarization increases, liberals become more tolerant of their own extremists. Most Democrats I've known throughout my life owned guns, valued the principle of free speech, would never get caught putting down an entire class of people, etc yet all of these are common views to, in some way, argue against as a Democrat these days. One could argue it's the popularity of progressivism and how it's cultural values are now eroding the average Democrats, but I'm not quite sold on that idea. My pet theory has been that "own the libs" builds tolerance for extreme views because they further agitate the right, so it was interesting to see them highlight the rights agitation with the left. For now, I'll stick to calling myself an independent until all of this blows over and we can go back to having beers instead of talking about politics and our "values" for entertainment.

GhettoComputers 5y ago
What is a right winger? What do libertarians, neoconservatives, and fundamental Christians agree with? The only way I’d classify them is non left, but not at all unified.
- _ktx2 5y ago
  Agreed, I was bucketing for simplicity and that's probably not optimal for consensus. For the sake of this conversation I'd box it as left and non-left. There probably is some distinction among non-left groups though. I came from Libertarianism and it hardly relates to the right besides depending on it for structural support. Being a Democrat with some progressive political beliefs puts you in a similar bucket. Unfortunately the nature of politics is winner takes all, which has historically made me odd bed-fellows in politics.
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    Some places are working on ranked choice voting also called condorcet, but its happening slowly. I do not participate at all since it has no effect in large population areas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method

kderbyma 5y ago

I don't social media makes us know too much, it's that it's unchanging and aggregates one's life into a feed...a torrent of information usually completely unrelated. now they feed you the Facebook select which claim is the choice cut but in actual fact is the left overs from yesterday's main... perhaps it's not the information but the medium is transfer and the lack of engagement with purpose.

nineplay 5y ago

OK, so I'm reading a Hitler biography and it's affecting my outlook, but I think we all need to step back for a moment and acknowledge that people hated their political opponents long before Facebook came along. I do think FB is pushing people to extremes. More precisely I think social media is pushing people to extremes, I find twitter a lot more antagonistic than FB actually, where people think they can 'destroy' their opponents in 280 characters or less. Reddit is a cesspool. We know, or we should know, that these sites are deliberately divisive . There are bad actors who want us to be really angry, all the time, because angry people are stupid. It still is just the latest iteration. People used to gather in beer halls. People used to gather in churches. People used to have their social clubs and circles and had been able to carefully manipulate their environments so that people who disagreed with them lived and worked and went to school far, far away. This anger doesn't go away if Facebook goes away. I'm not sure how to make it go away. I'd wish that people could take a step back and consider for a moment that maybe intelligent, decent people can disagree with them. Probably not.

germinalphrase 5y ago
Counterpoint: strong social bonds and centers of community make people less susceptible to extremist beliefs/behavior by reducing atomization. In my farm town, both the democrat and the conservative farmer go to the VFW for fish fry. Or - at least - they used to.
- Loughla 5y ago
  Counter-counterpoint: those social bonds made sure 'new' thoughts were excluded inherently, ensuring differences were small, local, and low-friction. Take segregation for instance. How open to conversation about abolishing segregation would the folks at the VFW fish fry have been?
- nineplay 5y ago
  My father tried to go to a VFW meeting after Vietnam and he was treated like crap by the WWII veterans. These clubs are more exclusive than one might hope. That was a long time ago, but today's Afghanistan veterans may not be getting a warm welcome either. See also how Black WWII veterans were treated at the officers clubs. Not well. The matter I described earlier still applies too. When neighborhoods have been carefully and deliberately segregated, you don't run into much risk of seeing neighbors of a different religion and color at your fish fries.

joelbondurant 5y ago

Friendship has to be mandatory or nobody will comply.

darthvoldemort 5y ago

Same thing happened with Tom Cruise a while back. He fired his publicist and started to go on interviews, and it turns out he's fucking wacky. He was jumping on couches on Oprah and laughing maniacally, and doing other really weird stuff. People were shocked, and his star dropped for a couple of years. Lesson learned. Keep your mouth shut and let people think you're stupid, instead of opening it and confirming it.

colinmhayes 5y ago
Everyone has known Tom is wacky since we figured out he's a scientologist.

beefman 5y ago

Kirk: What have you done to my friends? Sybok: I've done nothing. This is who they are! Didn't you know that? Kirk: No I didn't. Sybok: Now learn something about yourself. Kirk: No. I refuse!

icecap12 5y ago

I'm guilty of effectively ending friendships after seeing things former-friends have posted or stated online. In most cases, their posts or social media content revealed fundamental hypocrisy in what they said versus how they lived, or a belief-system in direct contrast to my own. I really had a hard time with that, and decided that I didn't want to talk to the person anymore. In one case, it was somebody I'd known since like 4th grade. It's hard to want to be friends with someone that might support the abolishment of something you like, or that supports something you should feel abolished (does it matter which?). It's still possible, but I've found that I eventually figure out where someone stands on something and gravitate away from them, even without social media. Ultimately one of the biggest problems is the total lack of civil discourse. If that was more prevalent, I think it would be easier to have friends with opposing views. Nowadays, people throw up their arms and accuse you of being X when they can't articulately argue a position. That gets tiring. As the article mentions, in some cases, social media reveals the depths of someone's political positions, personal beliefs, or other that you might not have known. Is it worse to know those things, versus not know? Hard to say, but I personally like to have things in common with my friends. There are no easy answers here, so my personal solution was dumping most social media, like Facebook and Instagram. I hate Twitter, but find myself having to use it to keep up with news in the infosec community; even if the group on Twitter is an echo-chamber club that mostly uses their "status" in the community to influence on topics other than cyber (super annoying). All I know is, my peace of mind seems to be much better without social media; I don't miss it at all. [edit] spelling correction

jdavis703 5y ago
This seems strange to me. I’m sure I’m friends with people who want to abolish the IRS (American tax agency) or folks who perhaps want to privatize other agencies like Social Security (American “pension” system) or folks who send their kids to charter schools. I couldn’t imagine ending a friendship over this.
- Loughla 5y ago
  So for me, it came down to the individual view. I have dumped friends for 'other' political views. But they didn't tend to be related to agencies, like you list. They're the personal ones. People who don't believe gays should be allowed to be married by the state. People who don't believe women or minorities should be allowed to vote. People who believe all immigrants come here to kill/steal/crime whatever. The difference is when it's an institution (private versus public schools for example), that's pretty easy to disagree over. One side does not believe the other is inherently evil and a 'lesser' person. When it's about individual rights, and an attack on you as a person, and your inherent rights as an individual, that is almost impossible to overcome.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

I like this framing. Facebook’s problem is that it facilitates the feeling of connection at the expense of the real thing. You see some Evil Conservative post or Evil Liberal post that you’re sure to interpret uncharitably, and you’ve never talked to the poster about this topic (or at all), so you’re sure you have a good picture of that person in your head. But it’s a good framing beyond that too. You see vacation pictures posted by a friend you haven’t talked to in five years, so you feel connected. You feel connected to tons of people you haven’t actually talked to in ages. When I left social media, the biggest change I found was that I’d actually directly contact friends more. I had to now! Less pub-sub and more one on one interaction. You trade superficially knowing more about each other without effort for actually knowing more about each other with effort.

clarkevans 5y ago

I found the linked 2019 article on the Front Porch Forum to be rather interesting. In particular, this social network's posts/responses are have a 24h delay. https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/24/18129437/front-porch-forum-vermont-social-network-listserv-local-online-community https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/24/18129437/front-porch-foru... Besides membership, FPF seems to be sustained though local advertising.

bradgessler 5y ago

Privacy makes us more civil. Next time somebody says they don’t care about privacy tell them that. When we think we know everything about somebody, our mind is no longer curious about that person. We think we know everything about them and start making assumptions.