The Hostile Media Effect

I caught about the last half hour of the documentary The YouTube Effect yesterday.  Sometime I’ll have to manage enough consecutive minutes getting through the whole thing.  Semi-random reaction, when Congress sat with the leaders of the major social media sites to talk about their feelings on their product’s effect on misinformation and hate speech the Congressman specifically said “Yes or No answer”.  Which lead to a long rambling word salad answer.  Personally, I would have interrupted and said, “What part of Yes or No did you not understand?”

The translation of demanding these platforms take accountability on moderating what is going on is the big issue of free speech.  Is it really about free speech?  Or do you really just want to not have government regulations involved?  Big corporations love themselves some non regulated environment to focus on profits.  And free speech for one person can and does lead to reduction in the rights of others to… maybe not have some mentally I’ll person get all fired up to take a gun to a pizza parlor looking for human trafficking activity in a nonexistent basement.

Within the echo chambers of social media there are a lot of people that use it as a news source and as a creative money making side hustle.  As opposed to just for fun as a social environment to partake of their chosen passions for entertainment.  And people have no attention spans worth talking about and easily get distracted by arguing about the news instead of just focusing on cat pictures.

The Hostile Media Effect describes the cognitive biases involved in the approach to digesting media content.  Even if a news story is completely unbiased (i.e. not on Fox News) there is a large tendency to view it as biased against your chosen partisan stance.  Partisan stances are fine when you’re just complaining about the referees calling a holding penalty on your team while ignoring the same bad call a bit ago, but please keep it out of political arguments in the YouTube comments section.

I do not get to see a lot of this partisan bickering.  For entertainment I’m more likely to hit on the late night talk show hosts that are decidedly left biased.  On YouTube there are what they claim to be trolls (and frankly they usually actually are trolls with no well reasoned points) that are treated roughly in replies to their comments.  The less than brilliant content I digest for research is weeded regularly.  The desire is to create an atmosphere of friendly anger.  The content is all right wing after weeding out (deleting comments from opposition) the left wing trolls.

A genuinely neutral approach to news on social media would be able to pick out good pieces or bad pieces from each side.  Especially when the topic is a genuinely debatable big topic.  The hostile media effect takes control, and I do see this regularly, where it’s heavily encouraged to pick one side or the other with no middle ground for compromise.  You’re not a true Democrat if you don’t post Anti-Trump content.  You’re not a true Republican if you’re pro women’s choice on abortion.  And if the actual content is unbiased, it’s assumed to be anti your side IMMEDIATELY.

As the Wikipedia article states, a kind of disconfirming bias is at play.  People who use social media for news fall for the old trick of feeling smarter than they are when they have a topic to complain about.  If they were smarter they would not use social media as a neutral news source.  If sensationalism over neutral reporting wasn’t so important over engagement we’d still get to enjoy Robin Meade anchoring HLN news who I never saw interject, “Ya know what I think?  Well let me tell you.”

Things like gematria are great internet hostile media fertilizer.  There’s no actual evidence.  It just gives the talking heads higher up the food chain talking points to add in to their narratives.  The kind of shit that fertilized how there are people that have no business being in politics still manage to get elected.  Be it MTG or Menendez.  Short term growth over long term health of the plant.  It doesn’t matter how much fertilizer you put on if there’s not enough water to sustain it.

People have not been properly socialized for real life interaction by social media interaction, and the design of social media promotes this.  Like other under regulated things the goal of being “too big to fail” has been achieved.  The infrastructure in place now - we’re dependent on it so much a radical change is likely to do more short term harm than good.  Probably more likely to do more long term harm than good.