House of Eratosthenes

How can Americans talk to one another—let alone engage in political debate—when the Web allows every side to invent its own facts?

This past August, the left-leaning San Francisco–based Web site AlterNet posted a remarkable scoop: members of a group calling itself the Digg Patriots were banding together to promote conservative-leaning online stories and to drive down the rankings of stories that the group felt showed a liberal bias. Digg, founded in 2004, was one of the first social-media sites, and it remains the largest one devoted to disseminating news stories; its primary function allows the “collective community” (to employ the optimistic phrase Digg uses to describe its participants) to promote stories it likes and/or deems important and, until recently, to bury stories it dislikes.

Further, the AlterNet story alleged, Digg Patriots were creating ghost accounts whereby they could muster “bury brigades” with far more influence than their actual numbers permitted. “One bury brigade in particular,” the article said, became “so organized and influential that they are able to bury over 90% of the articles by certain users and websites submitted within 1-3 hours.” The effect of this burying was to prevent other Digg users from finding those articles and rendering their own opinions on them, effectively coming as close to censorship as is possible in the social-media sphere. After the AlterNet article was posted, the Digg Patriots user group was taken down, and Digg eliminated the “bury” option on its site; Digg also began an internal investigation into AlterNet’s claims.

The article received little attention outside a few tech-oriented blogs—in part, one suspects, because Digg is no longer the agenda-setting monster it was a few years ago, when many establishmentarians saw it as a threat to the editorial functions of major news organizations. That issue has long since been argued and decided, and Digg itself has been superseded by far more popular services such as Twitter and Facebook, which cannot be gamed in the same way.

But the episode raises an intriguing, and disturbing, question, especially coming on the heels of a number of similar incidents. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said (or is famously reputed to have said) that we may each be entitled to our own set of opinions, but we are not entitled to our own set of facts. In a time when mainstream news organizations have already ceded a substantial chunk of their opinion-shaping influence to Web-based partisans on the left and right, does each side now feel entitled to its own facts as well? And thanks to the emergence of social media as the increasingly dominant mode of information dissemination, are we nearing a time when truth itself will become just another commodity to be bought and sold on the social-media markets? Or, to cast it in Twitter-speak: @glennbeck fact = or > @nytimes fact? More far-reachingly, how does society function (as it has since the Enlightenment gave primacy to the link between reason and provable fact) when there is no commonly accepted set of facts and assumptions to drive discourse?

I don’t know how to read something like this; I try and try, and the words just get all blurry. I can’t tell if it’s just me, or if the thoughts really are this incoherent.

Maybe I’m coming from the wrong planet. See, I live in this place where you figure out what to do about something based on the opinions you have about what’s going on, and you form those opinions about what’s going on based on facts. In my world, the distinction between facts and opinions is an important one because opinions are formed according to your judgment and methods, but facts are not. Facts are not “formed” at all; they are perceived.

You can form an opinion without regard to the facts, to emulate what you perceive to be a consensus. That makes you a bit of a dipshit but it’s still your prerogative.

From the best I can determine, out on Planet Hirschorn things work much differently. “Discourse” is driven by “Fact,” which seems to be indistinguishable from “Opinion” because both are much more concerned with what everybody is talking about, and neither is terribly concerned with what is really happening. By bumping and burying, you can distort something Hirschorn calls “fact.”

It has not escaped my notice that, in this scandal that is being described at a high, thirty-thousand-foot level, the only misrepresentation that is being alleged is one of prevailing viewpoint: “creating ghost accounts whereby they could muster ‘bury brigades’ with far more influence than their actual numbers permitted.”

Hirschorn goes on to complain about similar trivialities, such as the turnout for this march or that one, whether it was in the tens of thousands or well up into the millions. If he wanted to be thoughtful, it would have been far more productive to contemplate why such things matter to anybody — at least, on my planet it would have been. What kind of person perceives it to be some kind of crisis when it becomes more difficult to find out what everybody else is thinking? Under what situation, if any at all, would it be good for that kind of person to make decisions about things? Such a person doesn’t even want to decide things in the first place, does he? Why would it matter to such a person what his individual sentiments ultimately evolve to become, when he’s spending such effort to effectively suppress those very things?

Hirschorn also gets in a quick jab against the statements about death panels. Blogger friend Phil dealt with that rather soundly a few weeks ago.

What kind of person perceives it to be some kind of crisis when it becomes more difficult to find out what everybody else is thinking?

That would be the kind of person who needs to base or justify what he is thinking upon what “everyone else” is thinking.

This kind of person also tends, when it’s clearly not “everyone else” — to somehow (silently or otherwise) qualify “everyone else” to mean “everyone that matters”.

People disagree on shit. Surprise! It’s been going on since there were 2 people. People make up “facts”. Yup. They’ve been doing that forever, too. This is nothing new.

As always, it is up to us to wade through it all and figure it out.

One way of doing this is to be skeptical and go check what people are saying out. Check out the verifiable facts. If they keep checking out fine from a particular source … you start to trust that source and you don’t need to check that source as often after that. That’s the way it works. We don’t have time to check out each fact, but we build trust with sources.

Still, it is always up to me to decide for myself what I think, and if I do that, well it really doesn’t change anything if nobody else thinks it.
- philmon | 10/13/2010 @ 10:38
Hmmm…. somebody deep in the liberal media hive-mind thinks that everyone else thinks via hive-mind. Shocka!!!

Seriously, though — every time I read one of these stories, I detect the peculiar whining note of “they stole our playbook!” Lawyers say that when you’ve got the facts on your side, you argue the facts; when you’ve got the law on your side, argue the law. Having neither, liberals simply try to drown out objections by incessantly repeating their mantras. What liberal argument doesn’t boil down to a version of “ALL intelligent people believe X, neener neener neener”?
- Severian | 10/13/2010 @ 11:38

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

I Don’t Know How to Read Something Like ThisWednesday, October 13th, 2010

I Don’t Know How to Read Something Like This
Wednesday, October 13th, 2010