Trials of the Election Year I: Introduction and Social Media Dialogue

Hello! It's been awhile!

I have plenty to write about but due to certain... aspects of those prospective posts, I wanted to push this one to the front and engage with those aspects somewhat directly in a separate post.

Normally I don't like to shove politics into things, but at this point I feel like having unvoiced opinions is significantly worse than voicing them at all. Given the nature of this election cycle, I find it's important to touch on things leading up to it in an attempt to vocalize how I feel about things, and channel some frustrations. In addition to that fact, my mere existence is political, and whilst I don't think screaming about things endlessly on social media is particularly productive past a certain point, I find that muzzling myself is going to cause more problems than saying anywhere from little to nothing.

Enter: The Trials of the Election Year: A US-centric series of posts talking about policy and the modern body politic, all the way throughout the chain.

Make no mistake: I'm not so deluded as to think that my opinions alone should be the law of the land, I am not a political science major, I am not the standard for everyone, and I am certainly not above critique in any manner. I mostly want to stir conversations that I feel need to be had in order to create and engage in dialogue. I'm also aware that these posts probably won't help me make any friends, but I'm willing to accept that risk. Constructive feedback is welcomed.

This post will primarily cover my observations on social media discourse, particularly in the context of social media, primarily Twitter. If it's not that interesting to you, you can probably skip this one. There's a lot to cover generally, and this one is somewhat banal if for no other reason than to ease into the format. In this instance, it's more anecdotal than future entries will be. A little more casual, if you will.

Social Media Dialogue

Or, the benefits and limitations therein

Social Media: The overall replacement for forums past 2012, for the most part.

When I was in high school, I had started a twitter account. I don't really remember why I did it, and I don't really think there was a good reason at the time. I had already fallen out of facebook because it wasn't interesting and I was already heavily annoyed with the privacy implications via the Nym Wars, amongst other things.

Not that twitter was much better by any measure, but it didn't have a "real name" policy so it was a lot easier, in my eyes, to use and explore even before I began my transition. I remember finding the infosec community, and becoming infatuated with systems that way. Getting news immediately. Following my favorite musicians, all of that. The problems with twitter's pre-Musk model were numerous, but the ability to disseminate and gather information quickly was what made it appealing. For years I engaged with multiple communities, ranging from hackers to OSINT people to retrocomputing folks, learning new things, meeting new people digitally. For a short while, I heavily enjoyed my presence on Twitter.

Then 2020 happened.

Misinformation, Outrage, and Political Disavowal

The sheer amount of misinformation of the somewhat-still-ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the racial justice protests, and elections really showcases some of the absolute glaring flaws of fast-paced social media discourse. Grifters popping up all over touting ivermectin as a cure for coronavirus symptoms, defenders of the boot, cryptocurrency scams, people 'concerned' about 'optics'¹, and election denialism. Needless to say, there's a ton to dissect here. The early stages of the pandemic in 2020 strained already-weak systems to the breaking point. Medically, socially, and politically. For this particular instance, I'll focus on the sociopolitical and vaguely technological aspects; It's much more interesting and relevant to how we engage with politics online these days, in my opinion.

Misinformation, specifically, is a damning condemnation of our modern media landscape, and is the bane of moderation teams and semi-political social media users practically anywhere. It permeates like water into your coffee grounds, and is practically impossible to control if a sufficiently motivated group abuses algorithms or advertising to get what they're touting in front of as many eyes as possible. It's even more miserable when the President at the time is spewing conspiracy theories and grifts himself. This can make judgment calls incredibly difficult. This continued into 2021 with NFTs, and naturally continues evermore until the dying breath of a production VPS collapses into silence. Tragically, it's incredibly difficult to produce solutions to this problem outside of dismantling algorithms in favor of chronological timelines, for example, but you run into the issues of missing posts and the fact that some people actually like having algorithms around, not to mention that it doesn't even entirely fix the issue.

Algorithms have largely a financial incentive and as a direct result, are gamed pretty hard, too. We've reached the point in the media landscape where click prioritization, mass-produced water-eating LLM-generated slop, and search engine optimization cast their shadows heavily and oppressively upon the ever-crowded timelines of social media webapps. Social media is oft an advertising machine, and nothing feeds those dragon-style piles of money like clickthrough rate (stemming largely from clickbait from advertising-based news sites), engagement, and granular data collection (and furthermore, the sale of that granular data at-scale). This toxic combination in the context of politics ultimately results in outrage baiting for advertising dollars and easy political points for election year. This is not to say that all outrage is entirely unwarranted. In fact, I would prefer even outrage than say, pure apathy. Rather, it's more akin to how easily outrage can be redirected to something impermanent: It's incredibly easy to pacify a cause by redirecting social media outrage to something pointless if that outrage could threaten the status quo. The ability to decipher outrage bait versus a legitimate cause is becoming more challenging by the day, and some of that info might not even be real anymore. There's concern in any movement about outrage and the effect it has in regards to digesting media. It does not mean we should filter everything out with the precision of a sledgehammer, though.

As the racial justice protests of 2020 were starting up, and even a while before, I remember hearing a lot about biases in technological design. One of the prime examples of this at the time was racial bias in soap dispensers - a failure of imagination attributed to lack of diversity and compassion in the tech industry. I remember the backlash this received, particularly from people who think technology is somehow apolitical in nature. People shutting down conversations because they didn't want to think about the political, social, or similarly economic consequences of what they were building. Or maybe they'd prefer to solve the problem technologically, despite it being innately a human problem that can only realistically be solved by challenging biases and more stringent, inclusive testing for example. For some, it was an immensely uncomfortable² conversation, but one that needed to be had in order to make tech solutions work for everyone.

This, naturally, culminated into a few tech people disavowing any political discourse in their feeds, a common sight even still. The fundamental flaw with this approach, however, is twofold: To start, by filtering out all politics, you could become ignorant to issues plaguing the body politic (i.e. systemic issues in infrastructure) being engaged in dialogue, and additionally, your silence could be (and often is) construed as a political position itself. This is not to say that you should engage in political dialogue in every waking breath (especially because it is so exhausting), but awareness is step one in resolving political issues of our time. Thus it's my current position that using your tools (blocking, muting, prioritizing certain tags, etc) are probably your best bet at engaging in political discussion in a healthy manner. Asking people to drop certain topics or discourse isn't necessarily going to be productive, either, mostly because it comes across as provocative (and frankly, hostile). More careful selection of sources helps too, but with large language models taking hold and search engines becoming more and more useless, it's becoming a lot harder. More digging will be required if we want to keep discussions generally sane.

In summation, contemporary social media has fundamental economic and human-related flaws in regards to its design that may even outweigh its benefits. Misinformation, outrage, and ignorance all play a significant part in pitting individuals against each other whilst platforms benefit directly based off of advertising dollars and engagement. Politicians benefit by creating nonsensical culture war outrage bait and scoring easy political points for mostly non-issues, generally partnered with campaign advertisements centered on political opponents.

Capital is generally only concerned with continuous/infinite growth and consolidation of capital itself. How it fulfills those obligations is generally irrelevant, and, in the context of social media, it all feeds back into itself to create a vitriolic harmony of internet brain poisoning, algorithmic game theory, political apathy, and the inability for the average person to envision what better systems would actually look like. Even in the face of this, there is no perfect social media site, and no matter what platforms or protocols you're on now, you should engage with the movements you believe in, especially if you're pretty bitter about it. You might not change minds, but you'll have made a point and like I said earlier, awareness is step one in solving the problems of our time. Rational conversation is another step. Maybe then, we'll find synthesis in understanding, build those better systems, and make them worth engaging in further.