The following is a quote from the remarkable non-fiction book The Twittering Machine, which I found via this nice review.
I like the reason for the title of the book:
In 1922, the surrealist Paul Klee invented the Twittering Machine. In the painting, a row of stick-figure birds clutches an axle, turned by a crank. Below the device where the voices squawk discordantly is a reddened pit. The Museum of Modern Art explains: ‘the birds function as bait to lure victims to the pit over which the machine hovers.’ Somehow, the holy music of birdsong has been mechanized, deployed as a lure, for the purpose of human damnation.
Klee, Paul. 1922. 'Twittering Machine'. 1922.
If the social industry is an attention economy, its payoffs distributed in the manner of a casino, winning can be the worst thing that happens to someone. As many users have found to their cost, not all publicity is good publicity. In 2013, a forty-eight-year-old bricklayer from Hull in the north of England was found hanging, dead, in a cemetery. Steven Rudderham had been targeted by an anonymous group of vigilantes on Facebook who had decided that he was a paedophile. For no good reason, someone had copied his profile image and made a banner with it, accusing him of being a ‘dirty perv’. It took fifteen minutes for it to be shared hundreds of times; and three days of hate mail, and death and castration threats, for Rudderham to kill himself.
Only a few days previously, it emerged, Chad Lesko of Toledo, Ohio had been repeatedly assaulted by police and abused by local residents because they thought he was wanted for the rape of three girls and his young son. The false accusation came from a dummy account set up by his ex-girlfriend. Ironically, Lesko had himself been abused by his father. Such mobbing, increasingly common in the social industry, is not always the result of conscious malice. Garnet Ford of Vancouver, and Triz Jefferies of Philadelphia, were both witch-hunted by social media because they were confused with wanted criminals.30 Ford lost his job and Jefferies was hounded by a mob at his home.
These examples may be extreme, but they touch on a number of well-known problems exacerbated by the medium, from ‘fake news’ to trolling and bullying, to depression and suicide. And they raise fundamental questions about how the social industry platforms work. Why, for example, were so many people disposed to believe the ‘fake news’, as it were? Why was no one able to stop the crowd in their tracks and point out the vindictive lunacy of their actions? What sort of satisfaction did the participants expect to get out of it other than the schadenfreude of watching someone go down, even to their death?
While the social industry is perceived as, and can be, a great leveller, it can also simply invert the usual hierarchies of authority and factual sourcing. Those who joined lynch mobs had nothing to authorize the beliefs they acted on other than someone’s say so. The more anonymous the accusations were, the more effective they were. Anonymity detaches the accusation from the accuser and any circumstances, contexts, personal histories or relationships that might give anyone a chance to evaluate or investigate it. It allows the logic of collective outrage to take over. It no longer matters, beyond a certain point, whether the individual participants are ‘really’ outraged. The accusation is outraged on their behalf. It has a life of its own: a rolling, aimless, omnidirectional wrecking ball; a voice, seemingly, without a body; harassment without a harasser; a virtual Witchfinder General. Standards of veracity are not only inverted but detached from the traditional notion of the person as the source of testimonial truth.
A false accusation is a particular type of ‘fake news’. It involves matters of justice, and summons people to take sides. And since most people have no idea what is happening, no one is in a position to mount a defence of the accused. This leaves observers with the choice of maintaining a worried silence, or ducking for cover within the mob thinking, ‘there but for the grace of God . . . ’. At least, in the latter case, you get some ‘likes’ for your trouble.
The social industry did not invent the lynch mob, or the show trial. The vigilantes were out looking for alleged paedophiles, rapists and murderers to torment long before the advent of Twitter. People took pleasure in believing untruths before they were able to get them sent directly to their smartphones. Office politics and homes are filled with a version of the whispering campaigns and bullying that we see online. To disarm the online lynch mobs, trolls and bullies would be to work out why these behaviours are so prevalent elsewhere.
What, then, has the social industry changed? It has certainly made it easier for the average person to disseminate falsehoods, for random bullies to swarm on targets and for anonymized misinformation to spread lightning-quick. Above all, however, the Twittering Machine has collectivized the problem in a new way.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://niklasblog.com/?p=25347
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