Tyranny of the Like-Minded Algorithms

This is a long blog today, but it begins with the history of our expressions on social media and walks right down to the present nasty environment where people are getting killed. It started out rating college girls and then migrated to some kind of bulletin board where an authorized community could keep in touch with mutual postings. Facebook. MySpace tagged along. Lot of little communities created similar bulletin boards and personal information contacts and content. The business world became LinkedIn. Corporate and social organizations created their own online social communities. Colleges routinely communicated with students with coded special access, even a place to submit papers or take exams.

High school and college friends could keep in touch after graduation. Snap, Instagram. People with what may have once been hobby and narrowly-defined special interests could reach around the world to find others with similar interests. Opinions could be posted, certain to reach those prescreened to be likely acceptors of resonating messages. Reddit. Twitter. Followers. Entertainment blended in so well. Search became YouTube with rich media audio-visual content. All the other platforms followed. New platforms grew. SVOD, AVOD, Pandora. Netflix.

Money from every level of the capital markets poured into these new platforms, soon growing so large as to become some of the largest corporate structures on earth, worth hundreds of billions of dollars. But capital expected returns. Meta-data, tracking made targeted marketing a snap. Advertising became explosive… many justifiably skeptical of the numbers they were being told were “real.” Robo-influencers manipulated with self-directing messaging. Direct marketing blew up so many aspects of bricks and mortar retail. Amazon. Malls were shutting down or becoming “destinations” for upscale dinning, entertainment with very specialized shopping thrown into the mix.

Privacy? Ask any American Millennial, and they will laugh. Sexting aside, and its magnitude would scare anyone not familiar with this very ubiquitous practice, most even mildly-digitally aware Americans truly believe that “privacy” is so “twentieth century.” Even as Europe (with its General Data Protection Regulation) and various states (including California and its Consumer Privacy Act of 2018) wrestle with online information gone awry, believing that a right to privacy is a “fundamental right.” Is privacy a fundamental right that no one with online access has?

The U.S. Constitution, particularly the First Amendment with its rights of free speech, religious choice and freedom of association, is rather dramatically underwritten to handle the challenges of the digital communications universe. You can scream that the Supreme Court needs to read the Constitution as it was drafted, but you know the founding document was not designed even to accommodate a telegraph, air travel or nuclear weapons…  much less civilian access to military weapons and the explosive spread of social media.

Hate crimes in the U.S. are on the rise, and the big spike began during the 2016 presidential campaign, a hog-fest of name-calling and criminal accusations of entire ethnic and religious groups. “Data collected by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, authored by Professor Brian Levin, [present] findings [that] amount to the most comprehensive hate crime data to date for the divisive election year, and back up alarming anecdotal evidence of emboldened bigotry in America…  According to Levin, the study found nearly identical’ increases in hate crimes across two separate data sets.

“The first data set consists of hate crime numbers reported by law enforcement agencies in 31 large cities and counties, including the 10 largest cities in the U.S. The study found 2,101 hate crimes in those cities and counties, a nearly 5 percent rise from the 2,003 hate crimes in the same places the year before.

“Of the nation’s five largest cities, all but Houston experienced double-digit percentage increases, Levin said… Hate crimes in Chicago rose 20 percent in 2016, 24 percent in New York City, 15 percent in Los Angeles, and 50 percent in Philadelphia. The city with the largest increase in hate crimes was Washington, D.C., which saw a 62 percent rise…

“Also notable in the city data: of the seven cities that broke down anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2016, six saw increases in that category. Nationally in 2015, hate crimes targeting Muslims rose 67 percent.

“The second data set in Levin’s study consists of hate crime numbers provided by 13 states, including 5 of the nation’s 10 most populous. There were 3,887 hate crimes in those 13 states in 2016, according to Levin, representing a nearly 5 percent increase from the 3,705 such crimes the year before.” Huffington Post, 9/18/17.

But the intensity and magnitude of hate crimes (some of which can be labeled as “domestic terrorism”) did not subside following the election.  The rhetoric, name-calling and false criminal accusations, seemed to accelerate. Anonymity on the Web seemed to encourage unedited hate-spewing messaging. But those most “out there” seem to relish the notoriety generated by their overt social media hateful xenophobia. Some of those then turned to bombs and bullets.

To the President some of the Nazi-sympathizers in Charlottesville, some of those torch-bearing angry chanters were “very fine people.” The vitriol continued to roll out, left and right ripping at each other’s throats… with a president who, by his own admission, loves hyperbole and seldom checks his “facts” (many of which are openly derived from conspiracy websites). But that old “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” maxim is a myth that the twenty-first century has finally put to rest. Now those words, amplified with bombs and military assault weapons among social media fanatics, can kill you easily… with folks in that extremist community cheering.

Lorraine Ali, writing for the October 29^th Los Angeles Times, looks at the empowerment, the ability to aggregate extremist views that once existed as very unconnected and isolated pockets far apart, inherent in social media. “The alleged Pittsburgh synagogue shooter posted his hateful, racist screeds against Jews and immigrants on a website favored by neo-Nazis. The Florida mail bomber suspect’s all-caps rants against Democrats, the media and critics of the president received likes on Twitter. And the gunman charged in the killing of two random black shoppers at a Kentucky supermarket posted his views often on Facebook and Twitter.

“Robert Bowers, Cesar Sayoc and Gregory Bush have been called extremists in the days and hours after their arrests. Gunman Bowers is alleged to have killed 11 innocent people Saturday when he stormed a synagogue. Sayoc is believed to have made at least 14 explosive devices that he mailed to Democratic targets including former President Barack Obama and U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters of Los Angeles. Authorities said Bush headed to the supermarket where he did his killing after being thwarted from entering a black church.

“But these reprehensible men were hardly alone… They were part of a community where dangerous fringe ideologies share the same space with cat memes and Kardashian gossip. Twitter, Facebook and the bottomless pit of smaller platforms that cater to every conceivable whim certainly didn’t invent racism or deadly partisan rancor, but they have connected people who might never otherwise meet in an ecosystem with few rules and even fewer personal consequences.

“Just as social media has united millions under the innocuous banners of cute panda videos and ice-bucket challenges, it’s also encouraged dangerous strains of virtual tribalism with lethal, real-world implications.

“The same ‘thumbs up’ icon we click on to celebrate the birth of a friend’s baby is also used to applaud incendiary comments on the depravity of Republicans and/or Democrats, validate fake news and conspiracy theories and cheer xenophobic trash talk that should have no place in a country founded by immigrants. In your news feed, fabricated stories from Putin’s troll farm and elsewhere arrive in the same stream as breaking news from established journalism sources like the Washington Post, NPR or the Wall Street Journal.”

While Donald Trump can point to the conversion of his daughter Ivanka to Judaism (her husband’s faith) as evidence of his support of Jews, the plain fact remains that his endorsement and constant personal us of angry vitriol against both individuals and ethnic groups has effectively normalized open expressions of hate, at both an individual and group level. That in turn has motivated too many haters to move to violence.

Vociferous antisemitism has indeed risen in the Trump era: “Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino [notes that] ‘the anti-Semites and white supremacists are more emboldened.’… The Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2017 count of hate groups, released in February, showed that the number of white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups rose to 121 — a 22% increase from 99 a year earlier.

“Some of those groups, such as Vanguard America, took part in that summer’s Charlottesville rally, which jarred the country with one of the most public demonstrations of anti-Semitism and racism in decades.

“Most anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. do not happen at large events or through deadly violence… This year, the Anti-Defamation League reported that ‘4.2 million anti-Semitic tweets were shared or re-shared in English on Twitter’ over a yearlong period ending in January… ‘A lot of anti-Semitism has now gone from public spaces to virtual spaces,’ Levin said. ‘We have a fragmentation of hate groups. We now have loners, autonomous actors and small local groups filling the gap where the largest groups had previously exerted some kind of prominence. Not anymore.” Los Angeles Times, October 30^th.

Donald Trump was warned to let the Pittsburgh Jewish community mourn and bury their dead before attempting a visit. On October 30^th, he went anyway. “President Donald Trump… in Pittsburgh to pay his respects and encountered hundreds of shouting, chanting protesters with signs such as ‘It's your fault’ and ‘Words matter,’ a reference to allegations his bellicose language has emboldened bigots. Pennsylvania's governor and the mayor of Pittsburgh declined to join him during the visit.” Associated Press, October 30^th.

There always seem to be online platforms for hate-mongers, particularly since the President’s tweets have set the pattern of denigration and vitriol as acceptable political speech. Gab.com, a platform favored by extremists (including Robert Bower with his antisemitic rants), is shutting down as aggregators and credit card companies closed down Gab’s access to those facilities.

But there are no clear answers. We just know that the President is making a bad situation much worse. But as fast as social media players can create countervailing measures to extremist communications, these message whack-a-moles return. Algorithms and even in-person edits haven’t made a dent in this tsunami of democracy-destroying negativity. Just look at the international community, autocrats and online manipulation are increasing, democracy is flailing and nations that control social media with a vice-like grip seem to be getting the upper hand.

After piper bomber Sayoc was apprehended, Trump “rejected calls to temper his political rhetoric in the aftermath of a nationwide bomb scare involving many prominent Democrats with whom he has traded barbs… ‘I think I've been toned down, if you want to know the truth,’ Trump told reporters before leaving the White House for a campaign event in North Carolina.

“The president reiterated his belief that the news media has been ‘unfair’ to him, a point he said he could make in more pointed terms if he wanted… ‘I could really tone it up because, as you know, the media's been extremely unfair to me and to the Republican Party,’ Trump said.” The Hill, October 26^th. After the Pittsburgh killings, Trump fanned the flames by stating that mainstream media was still “the true enemy of the people,” that the synagogue shooting was their fault, by spreading false news about how his rhetoric was inciting violence. Huh?

I’m Peter Dekom, and without some serious changes in those at the top taking responsibility for the statistically-clear association between hateful rhetoric and lethal hate crimes, the situation is likely to get a whole lot worse.