Imagine a middle-aged guy named David, an experienced media professional, sitting at a bar next to Jack, a tech executive. David says to Jack, “You deserve to ‘die of boils.’” When Jack says, “You can’t talk to me that way,” David says, “Oh yes I can. In fact, you, my friend, are the ‘f**kbonnet for our time.’”
David Simon is a 58-year-old writer, journalist and television producer whose best-known works are the TV series The Wire and The Deuce. Jack Dorsey is the 42-year-old CEO of Twitter and Square.
Simon’s Twitter handle is @AoDespair. Dorsey’s is @Jack. Here’s how an interaction between the two unfolded not at a bar but on social media and blog posts. Simon was angered at Twitter’s continued tolerance of Alex Jones’ Infowars (Jones has since been banned from the site) and its failure to swiftly detect and remove posts from “the white supremacists, the anti-Semites, the Nazis, the professional ideological trolls and the bot army.” @AoDespair tweeted that @Jack ought to “die of boils.” @Jack’s company, Twitter, asked @AoDespair to take down the tweet. He refused, and they suspended his account for two weeks.
Simon followed up with a smart and vicious blog post on his own website, a mix of profound reason and scatological and other creative and profane insults. The post, titled “A F**kbonnet For Our Time” begins “Hey @Jack.”
I don’t know Simon or Dorsey. My contention, however, is that most “Davids” would not talk to a guy named “Jack” sitting next to them at a bar the way @AoDespair talks to @Jack. Social media unleashes something that rarely occurs in face-to-face human interactions.
Look at the Twitter comments in response to @Jack’s posts of his recent Congressional testimony.
One commenter posted a photo-shopped picture of Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg in Nazi uniforms. Another wrote “can you just retire already and hand the reins to someone with more than a tenth-grade understanding of ethics and sociology?”
Here’s another response: “You’re demented and should seek treatment instead of continuing to hurt your fellow citizens. How long will you lie to investors about your manufactured ‘errors in machine-learning.” One more: “you’re quite deluded. Did you think you were some Demi-god to decide what is virtuous? Don’t get carried away with big words you don’t believe or understand mate.”
Others are just too nasty to quote here.
My millennial kids taught me not to read comments when I wrote something that was even mildly controversial. And never to engage with trolls. That’s good advice if you want to keep your sanity and continue to do your job as best you can.
Human beings are certainly capable of great sadism, hostility and even evil. Still, if this were an in-person conversation, I argue that the vast majority of adults would never say the things that so easily trip off their keyboard directly to someone’s face.
How do we explain the pervasive and relentless interpersonal meanness on platforms like Twitter? I wrote recently about Twitter’s efforts to create healthier public conversations, beginning with an effort to determine how to measure the health of an online community. Dorsey led with this project when he spoke with Congress.
But without some progress in understanding the phenomenon, the most accurate and sophisticated measurements are unlikely to reduce its raging presence in social media.
Three factors are worth considering:
Disinhibition
Human society depends on us all inhibiting our behavior, including and perhaps especially speech behavior, much of the time. To get along in cooperative society we simply can’t undermine, yell at, insult, demean or attack one another. And getting along in groups has positive competitive evolutionary advantage. It helps us solve complex problems, survive threats and adapt to change.
Someone who wouldn’t say “you’re demented and should seek treatment” at work to a co-worker but feels quite comfortable tweeting it to @Jack is exhibiting “disinhibition.” She’s letting go of an existing psychological regulating function that is in operation for most of us most of the time. Discipline and self-regulation are essential traits of a successful adult person. Do people seek out opportunities to be disinhibited on social media or does social media encourage disinhibition? Both phenomena may be at work, but a second factor —dehumanization—plays a role too.
Dehumanization
Dorsey came across to me when I watched the video of his testimony as very much a real person. He talked about being shy, and he did seem uncomfortable. He seemed authentic, even vulnerable. He was respectful, and not arrogant. He took his share of responsibility for the difficult decisions our society needs to make—and has yet to make—about the monitoring and control of the new means of communication. The solution to lack of health and safety on social media is at this point elusive to everyone.
The photograph on Dorsey’s Twitter feed doesn’t look much like the man who testified to Congress. It is a darkly hued profile shot. The background image is a startling orange and yellow sunset that looks to me like a wave of fire. Dorsey looks fierce, unapproachable and arrogant. These images don’t help people think of him as a real person. Nonetheless, even if he had the most friendly and welcoming images on his page, the structure of internet communications allows us, even encourages us, to dehumanize the other. To the writers who feel entitled to rail against him in their tweets, @Jack is not a real human being with real feelings, strengths and limitations. They are “talking to” a symbol, an icon, an object they have created in their minds. The lack of interpersonal feedback and accountability in electronic communications encourages dehumanization of the object of a message.
Mob psychology
When upset or faced with too much pressure or intolerable levels of change, human beings tend to whip each other into a frenzy, creating mobs, both real and virtual, that behave much worse than any individual in the mob might behave on his own. There is a contagion and encouragement of disinhibition and aggression in an angry and upset group.
Could Twitter’s initiative—or any intervention—change things?
It’s hard to calm an angry mob or get a disinhibited person to behave in a civilized way. Twitter’s health initiative with its data-gathering effort is a good first step. Clear pro-social behavioral norms that are consistently applied are important. Social science research has shown that when people feel they are being observed, they tend to decrease their anti-social behaviors. Even if the “observation” is being done by eyes in a poster! Maybe Twitter, Facebook and other platforms need to put up a mini-poster with a pair of eyes and a message “behave yourself and don’t be hateful” that we all see every time we visit the platform.
Social media platforms talk about their policies of abusive or hate-filled behavior being unacceptable, but responses to emotionally abusive tweets or posts are inconsistent at best. David Simon writes, "Would Twitter’s problems be entirely solved if it demanded attribution, if we all had to venture our opinions under our own identities? Of course. If it were so, existing libel law would actually return to its place as a viable bulwark against the worst and most reckless affronts against the truth." He also suggests that committing resources to look for egregious tweets would be valuable, but then says this is impossible because of the speed of social media and that anyway Twitter would not want to spend the money.
Certainly, social media platforms need to continue to explore what they can and should do to police their sites. However, there is something of a shared fantasy that a Jack Dorsey or a Mark Zuckerberg could solve the problems of vicious human behavior, not to mention foreign meddling in our democracy, if only they would set aside profits and buckle down. They are not going to be omnipotent saviors. Ultimately, it’s the user community that will need to police itself and make it socially unacceptable to behave online in ways that no sober adult would behave in person. And our entire society, including the government, will have to find ways to craft solutions that lead social media to do less harm.
