Facebook superposters and the loss of our own narrative

August 26, 2018

In the NYTimes, a fas­ci­nat­ing piece on fil­ter bub­bles and the abil­i­ty of Face­book “super­posters” to dom­i­nate feeds, dis­tort real­i­ty, and pro­mote para­noia and violence.

Super­posters tend to be “more opin­ion­at­ed, more extreme, more engaged, more every­thing,” said Andrew Guess, a Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty social sci­en­tist. When more casu­al users open Face­book, often what they see is a world shaped by super­posters like Mr. Wasser­man. Their exag­ger­at­ed world­views play well on the algo­rithm, allow­ing them to col­lec­tive­ly — and often unknow­ing­ly — dom­i­nate news­feeds. “That’s some­thing spe­cial about Face­book,” Dr. Paluck said. “If you end up get­ting a lot of time on the feed, you are influ­en­tial. It’s a dif­fer­ence with real life.”

A great many general-interest Face­book groups that I see are dom­i­nat­ed by troll­ish peo­ple whose vis­i­bil­i­ty relies on how provoca­tive they can get with­out being banned. This is true in many Quaker-focused groups. Face­book pri­or­i­tizes engage­ment and noth­ing seems to get our fin­gers mad­ly tap­ping more than provo­ca­tion by some­one half-informed.

For­mal mem­ber­ship in a Quak­er meet­ing is a con­sid­ered process; for many Quak­er groups, pub­lic min­istry is also a delib­er­at­ed process, with clear­ness com­mit­tees, anchor com­mit­tees, etc. On Face­book, mem­ber­ship con­sists of click­ing a like but­ton; pub­lic min­istry, aka vis­i­bil­i­ty, is a mat­ter of hav­ing a lot of time to post com­ments. Pub­lic groups with min­i­mal mod­er­a­tion which run on Face­book’s engagement-inducing algo­rithms are the pub­lic face of Friends these days, far more vis­i­ble than any pub­li­ca­tion or rec­og­nized Quak­er body’s Face­book pres­ence. I writ­ten before of my long-term wor­ry that with the rise of social media gate­keep­ing sites, we’re not the ones writ­ing our sto­ry anymore.

I don’t have any answers. But the NYTimes piece helped give me some use­ful ways of think­ing about these phenomena.