Algorithmic Outrage

Predictably, the weekend riots across England have prompted press fulminations about the malign role of social media. This has evolved to the point where the far-right is now described as "post-organisational", which I think we can translate as "does not actually exist". If you're looking for some morbid humour in all this, you might recall Margaret Thatcher's famous dictum "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families." Obviously there has been some loose organisation at work ("kick-off at 3pm"), as is usually the case in a riot, but just as that organic, confused reality was long subsumed under the myth of "outside agitators" and "foreign influence", so the contemporary response is increasingly to portray hooliganism as a property of the technology. The suggestion that the riots may owe more to the machinations of the Kremlin than the relentless propaganda of the rightwing British press is obviously absurd, but it is also internally consistent in that it inflates a foreign bogeyman into an existential threat. The idea that British society is at risk of being undermined by Vladimir Putin is just the liberal equivalent of the conservative idea that it is at risk from asylum-seekers.

The Observer has been at the forefront of this liberal interpretation: "Prof Stephan Lewandowsky of Bristol University, who is an expert in disinformation, said that social media platforms amplified far-right voices. “Facebook is an outrage machine,” he said." The obvious point to make here is that the press has been an outrage machine for a very long time, and insofar as there has been a significant change in the landscape it is in the extension of tabloid outrage first to radio and then more recently to TV. The crowd that gathered in Southport was not made up of dedicated Telegram users. Their worldview will be primarily influenced by "mainstream" media. This is a point the paper is reluctant to concede. Instead, Joe Mulhall of Hope Not Hate is quoted as saying: "Language used by higher-profile figures such as Robinson, the actor Laurence Fox and ex-MP Andrew Bridgen, who spoke at the 27 July rally, as well as the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, is often repeated in other social networks such as Telegram and WhatsApp". This avoids naming the platforms that promoted the words of those indivduals, i.e. newspapers and TV, in order to focus attention on social media.

It won't come as a surprise that Carole Cadwalladr has waded in, talking about "our new age of algorithmic outrage". She quotes Maria Ress, the Filipino journalist who won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize (so is unimpeachably virtuous): "There’s always been propaganda and there’s always been violence. What’s brought violence mainstream is social media. [The US Capitol attack on] January 6 is the perfect example: people wouldn’t have been able to find each other if social media didn’t cluster them together and isolate them to incite them further." I can still can't work out what she means by bringing violence mainstream, when she first concedes that there has always been violence. It's simply a meaningless statement. The claim that the Capitol riot could not have occured without social media is absurd, as is the implication that prior to the arrival of the technology there was no way of coordinating the far-right. Cadwalladr's wider purpose is to convince us that social media is a "polarisation engine" and that this arises from the use of algorithms that reinforce outrage. In describing the dynamic, she emphasises that the movement misinformation takes is from fringe platforms prefered by the far-right - such as Telegram, Bitchute and Parler - towards X and other "mainstream social media platforms". In other words, this is a plea not for the outlawing of those fringe platforms but for the creation of a firewall to protect the mainstream. 

Helpfully, Stephan Lewandowsky makes a similar point: "It’s a serious problem and is easily solved by modifying the algorithms so that they highlight information based on quality rather than outrage." In other words, we need better gate-keepers, the traditional role of the press. Again, there is a reluctance to admit that the majority of the misinformation that we have to deal with comes not from the periphery but from the centre. Amusingly, Cadwalladr notes that "the Daily Mail ran a shocked banner headline this week about a single suspicious account on X, with signs it may be based in Russia, spreading false information, although it is likely that this was only one very small part of the picture." Presented with evidence of mainstream misinformation she takes it simply as proof that the same paper was wrong to criticise her past work about Brexit misinformation ("investigations that were ignored or ridiculed by large sections of the British rightwing media").

One interesting quote in Cadwalladr's article, from Julia Ebner ("the leader of the Violent Extremism Lab at the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion at Oxford University"), notes an affinity between the far-right and the medium: "It’s very, very similar across the world and in different countries with a rise in far-right politics. No other movement has been able to have their ideologies amplified in the same way. The far right is just really tapping into those really powerful emotions, in terms of algorithmically powerful emotions: anger, outrage, fear, even surprise." The first question to ask here is whether there really has been a rise in the far-right in recent years. The evidence does not suggest it. Much of what gets labelled far-right, e.g. Viktor Orban's "illiberal democracy", is simply conservative nationalism. In India, Modi and the BJP have suffered a setback. In France, Marine Le Pen is no closer to power and anyway her political trajectory has been towards the centre-right, competing with Emmanuel Macron to absorb Les Républicains. In the UK, the right is fragmented and the riots have managed to mobilise only small numbers of people (compare and contrast with the recent pro-Palestine marches).

It may be true to say that the far-right has found social media congenial, but this appears to be true of all political persuasions. To say "No other movement has been able to have their ideologies amplified in the same way" suggests that this ideology is near-hegemonic, but what exactly is it? A belief that asylum-seekers are thieves and rapists, that Islam is a death-cult, or that our statues are a risk from the intolerant left? Ideology seems a generous word to describe a set of prejudices whose prevalence extends well beyond the "far-right". In focusing on anger, outrage and fear, Ebner is echoing the moral foundations theory of Jonathan Haidt, a dubious attempt to justify conservative impulses (you're not racist you're just loyal) and suggest that liberals have blindspots (you don't acknowledge legitimate concerns). The idea that these are "algorithmically powerful emotions" is obviously a nonsense: algorithms don't recognise emotions, they're just shuffling data based on a dynamic taxonomy (you liked that so you might like this). 

The reaction of the British press, both liberal and conservative, to the Internet has always been driven primarily by its material interests. As search engines gobbled up advertising spends, the press went into a tailspin. It only levelled out to the extent that it was able to migrate online. In doing so, it realised that its own interests were better-served by viral contagion than paywalls. This has resulted in a deliberate expansion of the sort of content likely to earn clicks, and that has meant appealing to the emotions, not just anger and fear but envy, amusement and desire. The inevitable coarsening this has given rise to has been blamed on the medium. Where the press have led, other media have followed, hence the explosion of talk radio and now the arrival of partisan TV with GB News. Social media have provided not only the means to disseminate this calculatedly offensive opinion but also a source of original material: the opinions of ordinary people as much as celebrities that can be held up for public censure or ridicule.

In today's Observer, amidst Sonia Sodha insulting the BMA over puberty-blockers and Jane Martinson espying the patriarchy at work in the BBC's handling of Huw Edwards (neither story needed to be written but both will get the clicks), you will find Andrew Rawnsley opining on the riots. "Part of the answer to the violent far right will come from smart and proactive policing. Making the tech giants live up to their moral and legal responsibilities to the rest of society is another must. These are necessary steps, but they are not by themselves all that will be needed. The longer-term challenge for ministers is to find ways to drain the swamps of racism and conspiracism from which the far right recruit." I'm not aware that anyone is actually claiming that the tech giants have not lived up to their legal responsibilities, in contrast to parts of the press who we recently learnt may have destroyed compromising evidence. Likewise, it's hard to take calls for moral responsibility seriously while Leveson 2 remains sidelined. And as for draining the swamps of racism and conspiracism, surely the place to start would be with those wellsprings in the traditional media who keep the swamps watered.