Earlier this week I was looking at a WhatsApp group to which I belong for one of my sports clubs when I noticed a little message:
The thrill of power! Are there many words in the modern world that can send such a buzz through you as this?
Partly, this thought was prompted by listening to Helen Lewis’s new series on the BBC (and as a podcast), Helen Lewis Has Left The Chat, which is about how so much of the communication that we rely on is actually carried on through private social media channels such as WhatsApp, Signal, Discord, Slack and so on, rather than the public-facing ones such as Facebook, eX-Twitter, TikTok etc.
Lewis has an easy wit that at the same time does point out the bizarre nature of some of the things that we find people doing: “I have never felt older than I did when contemplating the etiquette of sadomasochistic text sex with a chatbot girlfriend,” she remarks in episode 4, when talking about a woman who, uh, married a chatbot which said it/she was into BDSM.
One of the most interesting points was her observation that a potentially terrifying thing to see on a Slack channel of similar is the phrase “Several people are typing…”
This, as she outlines in the third episode, can mean that someone (maybe you!) is about to be subjected to a colossal pileon which has the potential to be career-interrupting. It’s in circumstances like those that you’d really like to have previously seen those four little words above—“You’re now an admin”—so that you could head off that sort of drama at the pass. People disparaging you? Delete their posts or, even more simply, just chuck them out of the group.
Group dynamics, it turns out, are inescapable. For instance, the third episode focusses on a big internal blowup at Slate which took place principally on the staff messaging service, which was Slack—a blowup which had itself been triggered by a big internal blowup, on Slack, at the New York Times. The fifth episode deals with the leak of top secret documents on a Minecraft server, where once again group dynamics—in that case, the desire to earn peer respect—drove the undesirable outcome.
This was (drum roll) what surprised me somewhat in researching Social Warming: that while we think it’s all the public stuff which makes a difference, a lot of the real effects are seen on the closed ones.
Regular readers will know that one of the pieces of research I’ve consistently found most fascinating is Cass Sunstein’s 1999 paper, The Law Of Group Polarisation. From the abstract:
deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments. For example, people who are opposed to the minimum wage are likely, after talking to each other, to be still more opposed; people who tend to support gun control are likely, after discussion, to support gun control with considerable enthusiasm; people who believe that global warming is a serious problem are likely, after discussion, to insist on severe measures to prevent global warming.
Various scenarios were tried (having participants sitting in a room, or separated and working on computers where they could or could not see each other; one particular result emerged:
group polarization was greatest in the de-individuated/group immersion condition, when group members met relatively anonymously and when group identity was emphasized.
In other words, where you might not know the people involved directly, but you were clear what the group was for, the likelihood of “group opinion” heading towards a more extreme position was higher.
In the book, there are three particular examples of this. The first, and most distressing, is India—the world’s biggest user of WhatsApp.
The police in Muzaffarnagar thought they’d done enough to stop the unrest. The city of about half a million people is less than 100 miles (145km) north-east of Delhi, in India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh. In a shocking incident, two Hindu boys had argued with a local Muslim youth, and then knifed and killed him. A number of Muslim inhabitants had retaliated brutally, beating up and lynching the boys.
Tempers seemed to be cooling, until a few days later a video surfaced onYouTube, claiming to show the two boys being beaten to death. The video was actually two years old and from Afghanistan, but people viewing it believed the footage was current. The day after the video began being shared on YouTube, the police blocked access to it—only to find someone had downloaded and begun sharing it on WhatsApp. Within a week, thousands of people in the area had watched it, and the area exploded into four days of violence between Hindus and Muslims that left more than sixty dead.
The obvious retort is that it’s not WhatsApp’s fault that people are violent. And that’s absolutely true. (What might give you a slight frisson is that those incidents occurred in September 2013.) Let’s continue:
In June 2014, a 24-year-old Muslim IT professional was killed by an extremist Hindu mob furious at ‘derogatory’ images of their gods that had been put onto Facebook, and then spread on WhatsApp. The murdered man was unconnected to the images or their circulation; he was walking home when the mob identified him as a Muslim.
Again: the polarising effects of the group (which turns into the murderous mob) is mediated through an effectively non-public group which drives its opinion towards an extreme.
Next up is the way that WhatsApp took over British politics. Lewis does get into that in her second episode, which includes an interview with Dominic Cummings, he of the extremely strong language. In the context of Downing Street, and especially the Covid emergency, the usefulness of WhatsApp is obvious: Cummings describes an establishment where NHS Covid data was arriving by fax machine. By contrast, being able to get immediate decisions from ministers in a situation where you cannot all be in the same place seems like an obvious win. Sure, the Labour administration of 1997 had pagers and mobile phones that could send texts; the difference here is that you have a group who are all in effect hearing what is being said.
What’s not clear from the programme, or the interview, is whether this hothousing changed the dynamics of decisions. I suspect Cummings wouldn’t notice if they were, and wouldn’t have the context to know if they were; for that reason, I’d have liked to know what someone more experienced (Simon Case, the former Cabinet secretary, for example) thought.
But again, I do offer an example in Social Warming of Tory MPs in the Brexit-positive European Research Group (ERG), a sort of caucus within the Tory party, getting wildly overheated through the group dynamic.
At the end of 2017, one posted a message to the group complaining about the ‘disgraceful inaccuracy’ of a factual error during a Sunday-morning news discussion programme on the BBC. A cascade of angry support followed. By the eighth message, the hardline Brexiter Iain Duncan Smith was insisting that ‘everyone on this [group] should lodge a complaint with the BBC.The editors of the programme will have known what was said and they should have corrected it.’
So what was the appalling error? In an off-the-cuff remark, the radio presenter had wrongly ‘corrected’ one of the guests by saying that the Labour peer Andrew Adonis had previously been an MP. As Adonis had previously worked for five years as a government minister, a job usually carried out by an MP, the presenter’s momentary lapse was understandable, and probably not noticed by more than a few listeners. But to the Brexiters, whether or not they had heard it, the mistake was a sign of ‘disgraceful inaccuracy’, over which the programme editors should have immediately intervened.
(The story is told by Alex Spence in more detail at Buzzfeed.) Looking at the messages, all you can think is that these people really need to get a life, but of course that’s not going to happen while they’re still in possession of their phones—or while they’re members of the group. (On that, stay tuned.)
Finally, WhatsApp’s popularity in Brazil meant that during the 2018 election, in which the populist Jair Bolsonaro sought power, colossal amounts of misinformation were surging through the many, many groups, usually originating on YouTube. WhatsApp itself was powerless to stop it, because it can’t see inside groups.
The echo chamber of WhatsApp groups, the lack of moderation, the dominance of a few louder voices, and the challenge for data-poor users to check claims (even if they wanted to) was just as effective as an amplification algorithm. Poorer and less literate Brazilians were the ones who shifted to vote for Bolsonaro, an ex-soldier whose racist, misogynist and homophobic comments, and admiration for the country’s former dictatorship (which ended only in 1985) were shocking to so many voters who opposed him.
And we know what happened: Bolsonaro won. Though, encouragingly, he lost the next election; so the influence of WhatsApp and group misinformation isn’t eternal.
Even so, it’s always worth considering that a group you’re in has the potential to head towards an extreme position on a topic. It’s almost a dynamic you have to fight against.
Still, there is one way to guard against it. In March 2023 Steve Baker, the admin of the ERG WhatsApp (who had by this time been made minister for Northern Ireland, rather than being a troublemaking backbench MP), began removing MPs from the ERG group. When nobody was left but him, he deleted the group. The ERG, it’s worth saying, has not had the same political force since.
Glimpses of the AI tsunami
(Of the what? Read here. And then the update.)
• Pink Floyd competition upset by AI-generated video. Predictably enough, given the chance to create three-minute video, one entrant chose to rely on AI, and also predictably, that one won.
• James O’Malley discovers Udio and creates Keir Starmer, The Musical. (He also got a poster made for it, using Dalle3). Unsure if this means more jobs for actors since the grunt work of writing librettos is now done, or less because people can just imagine it. Maybe the next step is for Sora to generate the film of the musical?
• You can buy Social Warming in paperback, hardback or ebook via One World Publications, or order it through your friendly local bookstore. Or listen to me read it on Audible.
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I wonder if Bolsonaro lost because his social media support groups had waned in strength/numbers/influence or if Lula’s had grown and become more influential.
Suspect this also has implications for the US in the run up to November (god help us)
Fascinating read - thank you