How can digital platforms harness positive social change?
ReD’s Managing Partner Millie Arora sat down with Yasmin Green, Director of Research and Development at Jigsaw, and Gal Beckerman, author of the recent book, “The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas” and senior editor at The Atlantic, to discuss digital platforms and their potential for positive social change. Yasmin and Gal discuss the distinction between private and public-facing online forums, the origins of online moderation and limits of unfettered online exchange, the genesis of conspiracy theories, and more.
“There is an understanding more and more of the importance of not just what we say online, but where we say it. ”
Gal, why did you write The Quiet Before? What brought you to this notion of wanting to research the genesis of radical ideas and how they formed?
[GAL]: I had just finished my first book, which looked at dissidents in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and I became quite fascinated with their use of something called samizdat – [or] underground writing, self-produced writing that was illegal and that would have been censored – [shared] hand to hand, people passed along journals what they had written, books that were not allowed in the Soviet Union, that they had translated or typed out. This form of communication was key to keeping resistance alive inside the Soviet Union under a totalitarian regime.
Contemporaneously, the Arab Spring was happening and there was a kind of triumphalism around social media in connection with it. The notion that these were ‘Twitter Revolutions’ that we were seeing, that it was a revolutionary medium that had allowed dictators to topple and activists to come together in these really dramatic ways. And it immediately became clear to me that social media was going to be good for a certain stage of those revolutions, but might not be great for sustaining it, for building and keeping alive the sort of resistance that was going to be necessary to actually make a real democratic change in those countries.
Communication was a really important function for these dissidents. It allowed them to do things like debate, imagine, and propose new ideas. It allowed them to solidify and even sort of build a sense of coherence and identity as a resistance. I'm not going to sit here and badmouth social media because I think it has important functions for activists. It was an incredible bullhorn … Anybody could get on there and call people to the square—or masses of people onto the streets at an amazing scale and speed as never before. But there were so many other features that it did not provide those dissidents in, say, Egypt. There are so many things that it didn't give them that they actually needed so that the day after the dictator fell.
Yasmin, you're also studying radical ideas, perhaps of a different form. Could you say a bit about radical movements you’ve studied in your work?
[Yasmin]: There was one chapter [in Gal’s book] where you mentioned the Arab Spring that was very poignant for me because that was when we started our group, which is Jigsaw. It's a semi-independent part of Google. I've been at Google for 15 years, and ten years ago the then-CEO, Eric Schmidt had a prophetic idea even though it sounds very obvious now – [he saw] that the Internet and security threats and geopolitics are only going to grow. He said that we should have a group that looks at this … and I think that the world proved that it made sense for us to think about the nexus of radicalization and the internet. At that time, the Arab Spring emerged. I was really caught up in that and in that optimism. I would add, I was born in Iran and left when I was very young and there was an Islamic revolution there that really was a revolution where the people rose up against the king at the time, the Shah. But the people who persevered were the people who were the most organized. They were religious people. And that was what happened actually in Egypt. Many people rose up against Mubarak, but the people that really were able not only to start the revolution but also to finish the revolution were the people who are the most organized. And that was the religiously affiliated groups.
What is social media’s role in incubating ideas? Why do some conspiracy theorists gravitate toward certain platforms and not others?
[Gal]: [Take] white supremacists—later called Unite the Right—they got together on a platform called Discord, which, as you might know, is built for gamers to talk among themselves as they're slaying zombies or whatever they do. Discord was discovered by groups of white supremacists who came to it partly because they couldn't be on the bigger platforms— they were kicked off of the bigger platforms to some extent. They understood that they needed a more private [and] closed room … where they could share ideas and engage in real earnest conversation with one another. I mean that's the thing that fascinated me. There was a hacker group that managed to get tens of thousands of their chats from these chat rooms on Discord. And so I was able to look through those chats for a miserable few weeks of my life, just spending time with these guys.
“I think that so much of the way movements function is a reflection of the way social media functions. And so who gets elevated on those platforms? Sometimes it’s not the most thoughtful or smartest person with the most nuanced set of ideas, but the person is able to say something in three words that capture or that elicits what those platforms want you to elicit, which is a strong emotional response. ”
But you see that the way they're communicating with one another is not the kind of performative stuff that we see on Facebook or Twitter. They're not performing for others. They're talking to each other. On Discord, you choose the size of the room. You can close the doors. You have a moderator who can kick out people if they're not abiding by the rules that you’ve set. There's no “like” or “upvote.” The minute you take that away, the incentive structure, the motivation for a speech act is not “let me say the thing that's going to turn everybody in my direction and get me the most likes” or whatever. It's: “How do I keep the conversation going?” That's the motivation. That's the type of medium that they had in those months leading up to Charlottesville. And they needed that because they were a bunch of disparate groups coming together.
We tend to think white supremacists are all just united by hating everyone else [who] is not white, but they actually do have some distinctions between them. Some of them are more or less anti-Semitic. Like, there's like an older set who has swastikas tattooed on their forehead. And then there's a younger sort of hipster type. But they needed a place to all come together. This was Unite the Right and they wanted to come out in force. They talked a lot about optics, about what to wear, what kind of insignia should we have, what should our slogans be? And this was stuff they really had to hash out. And they could not do that on a public platform with everybody watching them. They needed to do it among themselves in this sort of secluded, quiet corner.
After the so-called hashtag movements of 2011, are we in a moment where we’ve learned from our mistakes and young people today are ready to engage in the serious slow work to make change?
[Gal]: I think that so much of the way movements function is a reflection of the way social media functions. And so who gets elevated on those platforms? Sometimes it's not the most thoughtful or smartest person with the most nuanced set of ideas, but the person is able to say something in three words that capture or that elicits what those platforms want you to elicit, which is a strong emotional response. I think it's true, certainly with Black Lives Matter. A lot of the organizers, the people really on the ground, just felt so frustrated by it. At some point in 2016-2017, there were magazines that were running articles and there were a few of these, you know, that said, who are the most influential activists and Black Lives Matter. And they used follower counts on Twitter to justify these reports. But it wasn't just magazines. Those were the folks who were then being invited to the White House!
“The leaders of some movements in the recent past were almost unjustified leaders or maybe more like unqualified leaders – we gravitate towards the darlings of the media and not necessarily the leaders who should be speaking for the movement. ”
Meanwhile, you have people, like the people that I profiled, who decided to just get off of social media. They said, we really need to go into the communities that we say that we're serving and understand what their needs are, what their actual needs are, and go beyond just a simple slogan. And even on something as fraught as police reform, they asked is it that people don't want any police, or is there some kind of better understanding that they have about what community safety could look like? So there was a lot of frustration with the people who then became famous or well-known or who came to represent the movement or become avatars of a movement when the movement itself had so much more complexity to it.
[Yasmin]: The leaders of some movements in the recent past were almost [all] unjustified leaders or maybe more like unqualified leaders – we gravitate towards the darlings of the media and not necessarily the leaders who should be speaking for the movement.
We’ve seen a rise of closed-loop communications platforms, e.g., private blogs and newsletters. How do these closed platforms shape social movements?
[Yasmin]: One project we worked on was looking at the spending, dynamics, and impacts around what we called “de-platforming.” So when I started working in tech, it was really all about free speech, about a free marketplace of ideas. The antidote to bad speech is more speech – or so we thought. These ideas didn’t age well!
And we've slowly let go of that libertarian idea that you can just let ideas blossom and you should have a noninterventionist preference. I remember once listening to somebody at [Google] talk about Anwar al-Awlaki, who was an Islamist recruiter for Al Qaida and very charismatic. And he had some sermons on YouTube that were about obesity and how it's not good. And she was like, “Oh, you know, obesity isn't actually good and he's saying obesity is not good. And so we should have to keep it up because it's the speech, not the speaker we are considering.” You know, someone in government might say he’s a terrorist recruiter—and yet she didn't want to take him off. But as time has passed, we've become more understanding of the harms associated with online speech. And there are more harms as time passes and there are more categories of content and more communities are being denied access to the social media platforms.
And all of this is going to lead to some unintended consequences. But…from the perspective of speakers who either have been denied access, the golden asset for them is your email. Because if you keep me off Facebook…I might go to Parler or I might go somewhere else, I might try my own website, but my relationship with you can be maintained if I have your email, which is interesting because that's kind of like more on the model of the closed, intimate forum. I mean, at that point you're fighting the rise of Substack and journalists who have these really intimate voices, even though they don't know you. And it's tens of thousands of people who subscribe. But that's one of the consequences of the phenomena that we've been studying around de-platforming.
[Gal]: To me, some of the sadness of the last 20 or 25 years since that moment [when the first online social movements took form] is that the ideology or romanticism of that moment of, “Hey, we can all come together in cyberspace and, you know, throw our bodies aside and just be like minds interacting and the beautiful friction that comes out of that,” we've preserved that. That's the Silicon Valley ideology, right? But we've forgotten how much work it took, how much work it took to get it right, to have those conversations actually be productive, and to have people feel invested and good about the sorts of interactions they were having.
And that has fallen by the wayside in big ways, certainly for an Elon Musk, who represents that anything-goes attitude about it. But it is really interesting. I encourage people to think about those origins because we have a lot to learn here in all kinds of strange ways from that initial excitement. I mean, the people who created those early platforms, were hippies. They were commune dwellers. They are people who had spent the Seventies going back to the land. And this was their idea of how we can do this in a virtual way. And to think of how far we've gone away from that is really interesting.
Conspiracy theories are actually down – what accounts for that?
[Yasmin]: I think the average person would feel that belief in conspiracies has gone up over time. But no, it just got louder. And so there are two things to consider. One is how much do people believe in conspiracies? And it's a difficult one to test because 20 years ago we were talking about 9/11 and now we're talking about COVID. So it's difficult to capture the entire universe of conspiracies or to ever figure out what absolute belief looks like. But what professor Joe Uscinski from the University of Miami has been testing for quite some time is ‘conspiratorial thinking’ in general. Do you believe that some shadowy elements are controlling what you see? Do you believe that the people whom we elect are indeed making the decisions? Or do you think it's a deep state behind it all?
And conspiratorial thinking has remained remarkably stable over time. That was one of the things that really stunned us during the studies we did with ReD on conspiracy theorists. My initial goal was to try to understand some of the attributes of a dangerous conspiracy theory. For example, there's one called “the great replacement” – or “white genocide” – which is basically the belief that white societies are getting browner, which they are, but, so the theory goes, this is because of a secret cabal of Jews – Jews who are trying to dilute the white race so that they can take over. That particular conspiracy theory is written in every manifesto of white supremacist shooters.
But the moon-landing-as-a-hoax conspiracy is not so dangerous. I hypothesize that there are some things in the middle. We did 70 interviews with conspiracy theorists and there wasn't a single person that only believed one conspiracy theory. [That] totally makes sense, actually, once you start to understand that it is a conspiratorial worldview – once you believe that the stuff that is playing out is not what it seems, but rather it’s because the Illuminati or something in the backstage, then you can believe that about everything that you see. And in fact, a lot of people actually believe conspiracy theories that are contradictory.
““[T]he average person would feel that belief in conspiracies has gone up over time. But no, it just got louder.” ”
Is the web 3.0 notion of decentralization and community ownership the future of movements?
[Gal]: Some of those ideas seem really interesting to me because they seem to have the right motivations. I understand why people would approach the world that we have online today and want to create opportunities for people to have more control, control over the media that they use and the platforms on which they communicate with one another. I just think you need to create them with thoughtfulness and actually give it to people and not just in a way that it somehow funnels it back to central power.
[Yasmin]: I feel like, how can so many people that I respect be so skeptical about this new technological revolution and yet there is so much hype and money going into web 3.0? I do think blockchain can help solve some problems that Web 2.0 has, but I don't think that we're going to rebuild everything on Web 2.0. And I see a lot of financial speculation that I think is pretty dangerous.
How can we use the power of imagination to better leverage technologies for good?
[Gal]: I’m hopeful about what I think is a growing self-awareness. I see it in young people more than those of us who are still dazzled by technology or the new communications technology that came into our lives … So I’m looking specifically at how movements emerge and how new ideas emerge. And even if I think there is a kind of residual romanticism – that all you need is a hashtag to go viral and you can change the world – that, too, is beginning to diminish a little bit. And people understand that you need the right kind of forum. You need the right kind of room. You need the right kind of table to sit around to actually truly imagine new things. You need a place of vulnerability where you can share without feeling like you're going to be shamed. There’s understanding more and more of the importance of not just what we say online, but where we say it.