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Free Speech and Audience

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For most of my life I’ve been a bit of a free speech absolutist. I believe, or maybe believed, that even idiots had the right to free speech. You want to deny the holocaust or believe the earth is flat? You are an idiot. You are free to express your beliefs and people are free to ridicule your unsubstantiated beliefs. You want to share your stupidity, go ahead and do so to the cost of your social credibility.

But social media has changed, or is changing, my view. If you wanted to stand on a soap box and share dumb ideas, you will likely be ridiculed in the community you live in, and no one will take you seriously. You will essentially ostracize yourself and your message would fade as people got fed up listening to your nonsense.

But move from a town square to the metaphorical global town hall of Twitter and Facebook, and suddenly you get these echo chambers of stupidity that feed off of each other. Throw religious absolutists into the mix and some really silly beliefs start to get amplified. Essentially, there is an opportunity for idiots to find their tribe.

“A theory isn’t a fact,” is a common theme used to debunk scientific explanations. But then pseudo facts that are invented by these people are not held to nearly the same standard. So, on social media, bad ideas spread, gain popularity, and start to build an audience of believers. Instead of ridicule, these fools find a community. Instead of being ostracized, these morons find followers.

So the incentives are there to be inauthentic and to spread misinformation, instead of the disincentives of ridicule and shame. And so absolute freedom of speech no longer has the consequences it once had, and bad information ends up spreading faster than good information.

Even the debunkers and scientific thinkers speaking out against these charlatans peddling misinformation end up feeding the algorithm that puts the bad messages in front of more people. So bad ideas get spread, and this happens at a faster rate than good ideas.

I don’t know how to fix this, and I struggle to think that censorship is the answer. But allowing bad ideas to spread freely seems wrong too. Who decides? Who censors? What criteria do we use? The reality is that censorship is a slippery slope… but we are already on a slippery slope where the current social media models and the algorithms that promote more time on these apps already seem to favour the spread of bad ideas. And the tools used to elevate ideas effectively are being used to share and amplify bad ideas faster than good ones.

Ultimately, despite this, I am still a free speech absolutist. I just think free speech and the right to an audience are two different things. How we police this is not something I think can or will be solved any time soon.

Know your audience

Social media is filled with people who are ‘preaching to the converted’. There is nowhere that this is more evident than in politics and religion. I’m amazed at the blindness with which people spew their ideology.

Basically, what I (mostly) see are two ignorant camps:

1. I don’t care what you think.

2. You don’t think like me, so you are an idiot.

Neither of these deliver a message that comes remotely close to convincing anyone of anything. Neither of these pander to an audience beyond those that already agree with the perspective being shared. Neither of these promote thought or dialogue.

Sure it might feel good. Yes, it’s nice to be in the company of others that completely agree with you. But social media shouldn’t just be about screaming into an echo chamber, and there should be opportunities for dialogue that goes beyond winning a point against a foe whom doesn’t even acknowledge your point.

I keep coming back to the realization that ideas lie on a spectrum, and the reason I keep coming back to this is because most of us don’t sit on the extremes, even if that’s where we argue our points from. We don’t really wish ill of those that oppose our view, we don’t really believe that our neighbours are unneighbourly because they view things differently than us, politically, religiously, or ideologically. Yet that’s what it looks like on social media.

Are you trying to share your view only with people that already agree with you? Or are you trying to share your view with others who think differently? If your answer is the latter, then think about your audience, and share a message they can actually hear.

Plus one – an audience matters

A couple days ago I wrote Publish button pangs, about the tension I feel before hitting the publish button on a blog post. I know it’s going to an audience and I want it to be perfect, even though I’m keenly aware that I will often make mistakes. Aaron Davis wrote a comment on that post and he shared:

This touches on Clive Thompson’s argument for the power of public:

Many people have told me that they feel the dynamic kick in with even a tiny handful of viewers. I’d argue that the cognitive shift in going from an audience of zero (talking to yourself) to an audience of 10 (a few friends or random strangers checking out your online post) is so big that it’s actually huger than going from 10 people to a million.

There is a lot of merit in this quote that Aaron shared. I remember teaching science and introducing Grade 8 students to wikis back in 2007. I had one ELL – English Language Learner – in my class that was quite low, and I could never get him to edit and improve his writing after handing in something. Then we started our wiki and he had his own project page (it was on the now defunct Wikispaces or I’d share it here). On this sight I had a little widget called Meebo that let me know when people were on this site, and allowed me to chat with them (they got a random number as a username, and could change that to their actual name). I remember about midway through the project I started seeing this ELL boy online after 10pm and would often end up telling him to go to bed, via the Meebo widget, closer to midnight. After about 3 days of seeing him on this site late at night, I decided to go into the wiki history and see if there was any activity by him, or was he jus looking around? It turned out he was there editing his work! There were small changes, mostly grammatical, but there was no doubt that he was working on improving his page. See An Authentic Audience Matters for more on this idea project and idea.

When a student hands in work to a teacher, there isn’t an audience, there is an assessor. No one is ‘seeing’ the work, it’s ‘just going to the teacher’. When a student has to share work with the class, suddenly there is an audience. When a student has to share something online, then there is a ‘real’ audience… even if no one is going to the page, the perception of there being one more (or 10 more) people watching changes the student’s perception of the importance to do a good job.

One counterpoint to this Clive Thompson quote:

“I’d argue that the cognitive shift in going from an audience of zero (talking to yourself) to an audience of 10 (a few friends or random strangers checking out your online post) is so big that it’s actually huger than going from 10 people to a million.”

Social media is changing this. One of my daughters, when she was younger, used to delete her Instagram posts that didn’t have a minimum threshold of ‘Likes’. Social media seems to put a bit more emphasis on popularity and a larger audiences. That same daughter though, was happy when Instagram made the shift to not letting the public see how many likes were on a post. She thought that was a great decision. So, with young students there is definitely a greater emphasis, pressure, or focus on the size of the audience.

That said, I do believe that the critical idea of having a ‘plus one’, having an audience that is bigger and unknown, increases the stakes for many, and helps inspire them to do better work. I know that’s true for me.

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Image by cocoparisienne from Pixabay