The Outrage Thread

[jsmith6919]

 

[boozeman]

The shirtless boyfriend wearing jorts at the end was the perfect ending.

 

[Cotton]

The shirtless boyfriend wearing jorts at the end was the perfect ending.

That bitch has some serious issues. Good lord.

 

[Smitty]

The article the guy wrote is pretty damn good too.

The Dark Psychology of Social Networks
Why it feels like everything is going haywire

• Story by Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Suppose that the biblical story of Creation were true: God created the universe in six days, including all the laws of physics and all the physical constants that apply throughout the universe. Now imagine that one day, in the early 21st century, God became bored and, just for fun, doubled the gravitational constant. What would it be like to live through such a change? We’d all be pulled toward the floor; many buildings would collapse; birds would fall from the sky; the Earth would move closer to the sun, reestablishing orbit in a far hotter zone.

Let’s rerun this thought experiment in the social and political world, rather than the physical one. The U.S. Constitution was an exercise in intelligent design. The Founding Fathers knew that most previous democracies had been unstable and short-lived. But they were excellent psychologists, and they strove to create institutions and procedures that would work with human nature to resist the forces that had torn apart so many other attempts at self-governance.

For example, in “Federalist No. 10,” James Madison wrote about his fear of the power of “faction,” by which he meant strong partisanship or group interest that “inflamed [men] with mutual animosity” and made them forget about the common good. He thought that the vastness of the United States might offer some protection from the ravages of factionalism, because it would be hard for anyone to spread outrage over such a large distance. Madison presumed that factious or divisive leaders “may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States.” The Constitution included mechanisms to slow things down, let passions cool, and encourage reflection and deliberation.

Madison’s design has proved durable. But what would happen to American democracy if, one day in the early 21st century, a technology appeared that—over the course of a decade—changed several fundamental parameters of social and political life? What if this technology greatly increased the amount of “mutual animosity” and the speed at which outrage spread? Might we witness the political equivalent of buildings collapsing, birds falling from the sky, and the Earth moving closer to the sun?

America may be going through such a time right now.

What Social Media Changed

Facebook’s early mission was “to make the world more open and connected”—and in the first days of social media, many people assumed that a huge global increase in connectivity would be good for democracy. As social media has aged, however, optimism has faded and the list of known or suspected harms has grown: Online political discussions (often among anonymous strangers) are experienced as angrier and less civil than those in real life; networks of partisans co-create worldviews that can become more and more extreme; disinformation campaigns flourish; violent ideologies lure recruits.

The problem may not be connectivity itself but rather the way social media turns so much communication into a public performance. We often think of communication as a two-way street. Intimacy builds as partners take turns, laugh at each other’s jokes, and make reciprocal disclosures. What happens, though, when grandstands are erected along both sides of that street and then filled with friends, acquaintances, rivals, and strangers, all passing judgment and offering commentary?

The social psychologist Mark Leary coined the term sociometer to describe the inner mental gauge that tells us, moment by moment, how we’re doing in the eyes of others. We don’t really need self-esteem, Leary argued; rather, the evolutionary imperative is to get others to see us as desirable partners for various kinds of relationships. Social media, with its displays of likes, friends, followers, and retweets, has pulled our sociometers out of our private thoughts and posted them for all to see.

Human beings evolved to gossip, preen, manipulate, and ostracize. We are easily lured into this new gladiatorial circus.

If you constantly express anger in your private conversations, your friends will likely find you tiresome, but when there’s an audience, the payoffs are different—outrage can boost your status. A 2017 study by William J. Brady and other researchers at NYU measured the reach of half a million tweets and found that each moral or emotional word used in a tweet increased its virality by 20 percent, on average. Another 2017 study, by the Pew Research Center, showed that posts exhibiting “indignant disagreement” received nearly twice as much engagement—including likes and shares—as other types of content on Facebook.

The philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke have proposed the useful phrase moral grandstanding to describe what happens when people use moral talk to enhance their prestige in a public forum. Like a succession of orators speaking to a skeptical audience, each person strives to outdo previous speakers, leading to some common patterns. Grandstanders tend to “trump up moral charges, pile on in cases of public shaming, announce that anyone who disagrees with them is obviously wrong, or exaggerate emotional displays.” Nuance and truth are casualties in this competition to gain the approval of the audience. Grandstanders scrutinize every word spoken by their opponents—and sometimes even their friends—for the potential to evoke public outrage. Context collapses. The speaker’s intent is ignored.

Human beings evolved to gossip, preen, manipulate, and ostracize. We are easily lured into this new gladiatorial circus, even when we know that it can make us cruel and shallow. As the Yale psychologist Molly Crockett has argued, the normal forces that might stop us from joining an outrage mob—such as time to reflect and cool off, or feelings of empathy for a person being humiliated—are attenuated when we can’t see the person’s face, and when we are asked, many times a day, to take a side by publicly “liking” the condemnation.

In other words, social media turns many of our most politically engaged citizens into Madison’s nightmare: arsonists who compete to create the most inflammatory posts and images, which they can distribute across the country in an instant while their public sociometer displays how far their creations have traveled.

Upgrading the Outrage Machine

At its inception, social media felt very different than it does today. Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook all appeared between 2002 and 2004, offering tools that helped users connect with friends. The sites encouraged people to post highly curated versions of their lives, but they offered no way to spark contagious outrage. This changed with a series of small steps, designed to improve user experience, that collectively altered the way news and anger spread through American society. In order to fix social media—and reduce its harm to democracy—we must try to understand this evolution.

When Twitter arrived in 2006, its primary innovation was the timeline: a constant stream of 140-character updates that users could view on their phone. The timeline was a new way of consuming information—an unending stream of content that, to many, felt like drinking from a fire hose.

Later that year, Facebook launched its own version, called the News Feed. In 2009, it added the “Like” button, for the first time creating a public metric for the popularity of content. Then it added another transformative innovation: an algorithm that determined which posts a user would see, based on predicted “engagement”—the likelihood of an individual interacting with a given post, figuring in the user’s previous likes. This innovation tamed the fire hose, turning it into a curated stream.

The News Feed’s algorithmic ordering of content flattened the hierarchy of credibility. Any post by any producer could stick to the top of our feeds as long as it generated engagement. “Fake news” would later flourish in this environment, as a personal blog post was given the same look and feel as a story from The New York Times.

Twitter also made a key change in 2009, adding the “Retweet” button. Until then, users had to copy and paste older tweets into their status updates, a small obstacle that required a few seconds of thought and attention. The Retweet button essentially enabled the frictionless spread of content. A single click could pass someone else’s tweet on to all of your followers—and let you share in the credit for contagious content. In 2012, Facebook offered its own version of the retweet, the “Share” button, to its fastest-growing audience: smartphone users.
Chris Wetherell was one of the engineers who created the Retweet button for Twitter. He admitted to BuzzFeed earlier this year that he now regrets it. As Wetherell watched the first Twitter mobs use his new tool, he thought to himself: “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”

FROM OUR DECEMBER 2019 ISSUE

The coup de grâce came in 2012 and 2013, when Upworthy and other sites began to capitalize on this new feature set, pioneering the art of testing headlines across dozens of variations to find the version that generated the highest click-through rate. This was the beginning of “You won’t believe …” articles and their ilk, paired with images tested and selected to make us click impulsively. These articles were not usually intended to cause outrage (the founders of Upworthy were more interested in uplift). But the strategy’s success ensured the spread of headline testing, and with it emotional story-packaging, through new and old media alike; outrageous, morally freighted headlines proliferated in the following years. In Esquire, Luke O’Neil reflected on the changes wrought on mainstream media and declared 2013 to be “The Year We Broke the Internet.” The next year, Russia’s Internet Research Agency began mobilizing its network of fake accounts, across every major social-media platform—exploiting the new outrage machine in order to inflame partisan divisions and advance Russian goals.

The internet, of course, does not bear sole responsibility for the pitch of political anger today. The media have been fomenting division since Madison’s time, and political scientists have traced a portion of today’s outrage culture to the rise of cable television and talk radio in the 1980s and ’90s. A multiplicity of forces are pushing America toward greater polarization. But social media in the years since 2013 has become a powerful accelerant for anyone who wants to start a fire.

The Decline of Wisdom

Even if social media could be cured of its outrage-enhancing effects, it would still raise problems for the stability of democracy. One such problem is the degree to which the ideas and conflicts of the present moment dominate and displace older ideas and the lessons of the past. As children grow up in America, rivers of information flow continually into their eyes and ears—a mix of ideas, narratives, songs, images, and more. Suppose we could capture and quantify three streams in particular: information that is new (created within the past month), middle-aged (created 10 to 50 years ago, by the generations that include the child’s parents and grandparents), and old (created more than 100 years ago).

Citizens are now more connected to one another, on platforms that have been designed to make outrage contagious.
Whatever the balance of these categories was in the 18th century, the balance in the 20th century surely shifted toward the new as radios and television sets became common in American homes. And that shift almost certainly became still more pronounced, and quickly so, in the 21st century. When the majority of Americans began using social media regularly, around 2012, they hyper-connected themselves to one another in a way that massively increased their consumption of new information—entertainment such as cat videos and celebrity gossip, yes, but also daily or hourly political outrages and hot takes on current events—while reducing the share of older information. What might the effect of that shift be?

In 1790, the Anglo-Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke wrote, “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.” Thanks to social media, we are embarking on a global experiment that will test whether Burke’s fear is valid. Social media pushes people of all ages toward a focus on the scandal, joke, or conflict of the day, but the effect may be particularly profound for younger generations, who have had less opportunity to acquire older ideas and information before plugging themselves into the social-media stream.


Our cultural ancestors were probably no wiser than us, on average, but the ideas we inherit from them have undergone a filtration process. We mostly learn of ideas that a succession of generations thought were worth passing on. That doesn’t mean these ideas are always right, but it does mean that they are more likely to be valuable, in the long run, than most content generated within the past month. Even though they have unprecedented access to all that has ever been written and digitized, members of Gen Z (those born after 1995 or so) may find themselves less familiar with the accumulated wisdom of humanity than any recent generation, and therefore more prone to embrace ideas that bring social prestige within their immediate network yet are ultimately misguided.

For example, a few right-wing social-media platforms have enabled the most reviled ideology of the 20th century to draw in young men hungry for a sense of meaning and belonging and willing to give Nazism a second chance. Left-leaning young adults, in contrast, seem to be embracing socialism and even, in some cases, communism with an enthusiasm that at times seems detached from the history of the 20th century. And polling suggests that young people across the political spectrum are losing faith in democracy.

Is There Any Way Back?

Social media has changed the lives of millions of Americans with a suddenness and force that few expected. The question is whether those changes might invalidate assumptions made by Madison and the other Founders as they designed a system of self-governance. Compared with Americans in the 18th century—and even the late 20th century—citizens are now more connected to one another, in ways that increase public performance and foster moral grandstanding, on platforms that have been designed to make outrage contagious, all while focusing people’s minds on immediate conflicts and untested ideas, untethered from traditions, knowledge, and values that previously exerted a stabilizing effect. This, we believe, is why many Americans—and citizens of many other countries, too—experience democracy as a place where everything is going haywire.


It doesn’t have to be this way. Social media is not intrinsically bad, and has the power to do good—as when it brings to light previously hidden harms and gives voice to previously powerless communities. Every new communication technology brings a range of constructive and destructive effects, and over time, ways are found to improve the balance. Many researchers, legislators, charitable foundations, and tech-industry insiders are now working together in search of such improvements. We suggest three types of reform that might help:

(1) Reduce the frequency and intensity of public performance. If social media creates incentives for moral grandstanding rather than authentic communication, then we should look for ways to reduce those incentives. One such approach already being evaluated by some platforms is “demetrication,” the process of obscuring like and share counts so that individual pieces of content can be evaluated on their own merit, and so that social-media users are not subject to continual, public popularity contests.

(2) Reduce the reach of unverified accounts. Bad actors—trolls, foreign agents, and domestic provocateurs—benefit the most from the current system, where anyone can create hundreds of fake accounts and use them to manipulate millions of people. Social media would immediately become far less toxic, and democracies less hackable, if the major platforms required basic identity verification before anyone could open an account—or at least an account type that allowed the owner to reach large audiences. (Posting itself could remain anonymous, and registration would need to be done in a way that protected the information of users who live in countries where the government might punish dissent. For example, verification could be done in collaboration with an independent nonprofit organization.)

(3) Reduce the contagiousness of low-quality information. Social media has become more toxic as friction has been removed. Adding some friction back in has been shown to improve the quality of content. For example, just after a user submits a comment, AI can identify text that’s similar to comments previously flagged as toxic and ask, “Are you sure you want to post this?” This extra step has been shown to help Instagram users rethink hurtful messages. The quality of information that is spread by recommendation algorithms could likewise be improved by giving groups of experts the ability to audit the algorithms for harms and biases.
Many americans may think that the chaos of our time has been caused by the current occupant of the White House, and that things will return to normal whenever he leaves. But if our analysis is correct, this will not happen. Too many fundamental parameters of social life have changed. The effects of these changes were apparent by 2014, and these changes themselves facilitated the election of Donald Trump.
If we want our democracy to succeed—indeed, if we want the idea of democracy to regain respect in an age when dissatisfaction with democracies is rising—we’ll need to understand the many ways in which today’s social-media platforms create conditions that may be hostile to democracy’s success. And then we’ll have to take decisive action to improve social media.

Good read. I share the opinion that social media is killing our society. I hesitate to rail against it too strongly because it can sound like I’m railing against transparency and free speech, but it’s blatantly obvious that the “anyone can say anything at any time without repercussion,” model that social media promotes is deadly. It has given, frankly, too many people a voice who just don’t deserve one. Freedom of speech should protect from government retribution but at the same time it seems like the filtration system to get your message to the masses needs to be strengthened heavily.

 

[Smitty]

Bottom line: I think Facebook and other platforms need to de-news themselves and go back to being pictures of your family and food porn.

The allowance of news and commentary simply creates echo chambers that are too easily fanned into firestorms that quickly get out of control and reason is completely lost. Corporations and politicians both bow down because of a few thousand shares since it generates negative news coverage (the
Media is complicit in this by the way but that’s another battle).

 

[jsmith6919]

 

[Cotton]

Why the hell was a black guy allowed to play Aaron Burr in Hamilton? I thought we changed those rules, no?

 

[yimyammer]

The shirtless boyfriend wearing jorts at the end was the perfect ending.

that'll win em over

 

[yimyammer]

Good read. I share the opinion that social media is killing our society. I hesitate to rail against it too strongly because it can sound like I’m railing against transparency and free speech, but it’s blatantly obvious that the “anyone can say anything at any time without repercussion,” model that social media promotes is deadly. It has given, frankly, too many people a voice who just don’t deserve one. Freedom of speech should protect from government retribution but at the same time it seems like the filtration system to get your message to the masses needs to be strengthened heavily.

I don't think the problem is that any idiot has a voice, its that there are apparently even more idiots without the discernment, logic and ability to think critically who give their dumb ass comments weight & merit via likes, retweets and a media that panders to clicks and eyeballs, its an incestuous mess

 

[boozeman]

Good for her. Fuck them. She had the name first and they have the audacity to sue her.

 

[boozeman]

For all you Jemele lovers


and yes, there's apparently a Woke 100 list

And that broad belongs at the top.

 

[Cotton]

Good for her. Fuck them. She had the name first and they have the audacity to sue her.

No doubt. They are the epitome of the hypocrisy that is shown by the left on daily basis.

 

[Cotton]

And that broad belongs at the top.

Agreed, she should be right at the top of the dumbass list.

 

[Cotton]

James Madison and Thomas Jefferson also played by black people in Hamilton. WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?

 

[boozeman]

James Madison and Thomas Jefferson also played by black people in Hamilton. WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?

You racist.

 

[Cotton]

You racist.

Just trying to play by the rules that have been set in place.

 

[boozeman]

‘Hamilton,’ ‘The Simpsons’ and the Problem With Colorblind Casting
Egalitarian in theory, the practice is more often used to exclude performers of color. But even well-intentioned efforts at increasing diversity create complications.

“Hamilton” has been celebrated as a bold exemplar of diversity. But it’s not enough to simply slot actors of color into historically white roles.Credit...Disney+

By Maya Phillips

• Published July 8, 2020
• Updated July 10, 2020
  
  

Late June brought news that the animated shows “The Simpsons,” “Family Guy,” “Big Mouth” and “Central Park” would recast characters of color who have been played by white actors.

A week later “Hamilton” dominated the cultural chatter on Independence Day weekend when Disney+ premiered the film version of the Broadway phenomenon.

In both situations performers inhabited characters of racial backgrounds that were different from their own, often referred to as “colorblind casting.” But one provoked the usual apologies and promises to do better while the other was celebrated anew as being a bold exemplar of diversity — though it ultimately presents a set of more complex concerns.


Still, the difference between the two lies in their approaches to the all-encompassing nature of whiteness in American industries and narratives. Whereas the world of voice-acting for animation is just another dominated by white workers, casting a person of color as a typically white character is an act of subversion, a normalization of something other than the white standard. The Black and brown founding fathers of “Hamilton” make the story of America something that can finally be owned by people of color, as opposed to the reality, which so often refutes the relevancy of their lives and contributions.

Though egalitarian in theory, colorblind casting in practice is more often used to exclude performers of color. It’s a high-minded-sounding concept that producers and creators use to free themselves of any social responsibility they may feel toward representing a diverse set of performers.

The history of the practice in live-action takes is more egregious, and has been well-documented: Mickey Rooney’s notorious Asian landlord in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”; Alec Guinness’s Arab prince in “Lawrence of Arabia”; Laurence Olivier in blackface as Othello. In the past decade alone, Natalie Portman, Emma Stone and Scarlett Johansson, among others, played characters onscreen who were of Asian descent in the source material.

And though this trend so often favors white actors — if you have a few hours, or days, to kill, Google “whitewashing controversy” — it certainly isn’t limited to them. People of color are often tagged in to represent an identity different from their own, as though Chinese is synonymous with Korean or Mexican is synonymous with Indian.

It seems needless to say, and yet, here it is: Any casting of a performer in the role of a race other than their own assumes that the artist step into the lived experience of a person whose culture isn’t theirs, and so every choice made in that performance will inevitably be an approximation. It is an act of minstrelsy.


Kristen Bell, who voiced the biracial Molly Tillerman in the Apple TV+ show “Central Park”; Jenny Slate, who voiced the biracial Missy Foreman-Greenwald in “Big Mouth”; and Mike Henry, the voice of the Black “Family Guy” and “The Cleveland Show” character Cleveland Brown, each announced their decisions to gracefully bow out in the name of proper representation. Hank Azaria, who for years voiced the Indian “Simpsons” character Apu, stepped away from the role earlier this year — last month the show announced that it will no longer use any white actors to play characters of color.

Mike Henry, who played Cleveland on “Family Guy,” was one of several white actors who recently announced that they would stop voicing animated characters of color.Credit...Fox, via Associated Pres

Despite this recent trend, actors and creators have defended such choices with purportedly merit-based arguments. Earlier this year, in fact, Loren Bouchard, one of the creators of “Central Park,” explained Bell’s casting by saying “Kristen needed to be Molly; we couldn’t not make her Molly.

More often than not, when the defense rings out in the chord of “they were the best person for the job,” that “best person” is white. That is no coincidence.

Another popular defense that pops up, most often in internet discourse, involves canon: The story, the holy text, must be preserved as written. Even if this defense didn’t presuppose that anything canon should not be open to challenge or reinterpretation, it would still fail to recognize that in many stories the character’s whiteness is incidental to the narrative. So why not use that opportunity to re-create the character as someone who doesn’t fall into the majority
The fact that Ariel is white has nothing to do with her story about wanting to be with her love and walk on land. The casting of a Black actress to play Hermione Granger in the play “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” provoked howls from many fans, but the character’s whiteness never had any bearing on her brilliance. In fact, stories that do not take their characters’ whiteness as a given may find fresh relevance and invite new audiences into their sphere, because for so many people of color, they don’t get to see themselves represented in the media they consume.

For me, it was “The Wiz,” starring Diana Ross as a Black Dorothy; I loved it so much more than the original “Wizard of Oz.” And in 1997, it was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical “Cinderella” film, which was completely colorblind. The singer-actress Brandy was a Black Cinderella, with a white stepmother (Bernadette Peters) and a Black stepsister, as well as a white one. The prince was of Filipino descent, with parents who were Black and white (Whoopi Goldberg and Victor Garber). And Whitney Houston was a glamorous fairy godmother.
The whole movie was a visual feast, with bright costumes and playful dance numbers, and it never explained the puzzling genealogies of its characters. It simply allowed the audience to soak in the story and characters as they were.

A 1997 film adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Cinderella” starred Brandy as the title character and Whitney Houston as her fairy godmother.Credit...Disney

But however well-intentioned, there are complications that come with works that aim to use colorblind casting to highlight people of color who wouldn’t otherwise be represented. Creators may cast blind, thinking their job done, failing to consider that a Black man cast as a criminal or a Latina woman cast as a saucy seductress — even when cast without any regard to their race — can still be problematic. One kind of blindness can lead to another.

And then there’s also the “Hamilton” problem. The show may place diverse bodies on the stage, but productions that would subvert a narrative traditionally owned by white characters must not just tag in actors of color but reconsider the fundamental way the new casting changes the story. In “Hamilton,” the revision of American history is dazzling and important, but it also neglects and negates the parts of the original story that don’t fit so nicely into this narrow model. The characters’ relationship to slavery, for example, is scarcely mentioned, because it would be incongruous with the triumphant recasting of our country’s first leaders. (The “Hamilton” star and creator Lin-Manuel Miranda responded to this criticism this week, calling it “valid.”)

The trouble of a colorblind production might not be the casting itself, but the fact that the casting may still erase the reimagined characters’ identities. (If Willy Loman is Black, wouldn’t he have a more complex understanding of the American dream?) Careless colorblind casting — in animated roles, in live-action roles on TV, movies or the stage — assumes that identities amount to nothing and that all experiences are transferable, which is far from the reality.

In a 1996 speech, the playwright August Wilson spoke out against colorblind casting overall, saying:

To mount an all-Black production of a “Death of a Salesman” or any other play conceived for white actors as an investigation of the human condition through the specifics of white culture is to deny us our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make our own investigations from the cultural ground on which we stand as Black Americans. It is an assault on our presence, and our difficult but honorable history in America; and it is an insult to our intelligence, our playwrights, and our many and varied contributions to the society and the world at large.

Wilson called not for colorblind casting, but for institutions that invite art by and for people of color, to tell their own stories and not simply ones adapted for them. He doesn’t call for blindness, but visibility: people of color seen on stages and behind the curtains. This applies to all art forms — people of color should be on movie screens, on the TV and in recording booths giving voice to stories about them.

It’s hard not to see his point. Even times when it’s employed with good intentions, colorblind casting often fails in the execution. It’s a larger problem of the narrative of our nation, which frequently refuses people of color their own stories, reflexively opting for a white purview or offering stories written for white characters but with people of color haphazardly slotted in. We’re forever fighting our America’s racial default.

Blindness is no excuse. In a moment when we’re reassessing everything surrounding representation, perhaps it’s time for all of us to finally open our eyes.
---

Yeah @Iamtdg ...it is complicated. Or something.

 

[Genghis Khan]

It seems needless to say, and yet, here it is: Any casting of a performer in the role of a race other than their own assumes that the artist step into the lived experience of a person whose culture isn’t theirs, and so every choice made in that performance will inevitably be an approximation. It is an act of minstrelsy.

That's ludicrous.

 

[Genghis Khan]

But however well-intentioned, there are complications that come with works that aim to use colorblind casting to highlight people of color who wouldn’t otherwise be represented. Creators may cast blind, thinking their job done, failing to consider that a Black man cast as a criminal or a Latina woman cast as a saucy seductress — even when cast without any regard to their race — can still be problematic. One kind of blindness can lead to another.

That's also ridiculous.

I'm starting to think this whole article is trash. At least most of it.

 

[Genghis Khan]

Oh, I just saw it's from the NY Times. Suddenly it makes sense.

Arguing that even color blind casting isn't woke enough is right up their alley.

Good Lord.