Why WhatsApp drives MPs into a frenzy

Plus is ChatGPT poisoning Google faster than Google can handle?

Some of the antics seen in Monty Python foreshadow what we see among MPs now

Because it’s obligatory, you’ll know the Four Yorkshiremen sketch from¹ the Monty Python canon:

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Who'd have thought thirty year ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Château de Chasselais, eh?
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.

And from there of course it escalates, with each trying to outdo the other with the tales of how very, very hard they had it as a child (“We used to 'ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick road clean wit' tongue”).

It’s a classic; and—forgive the DJ-style segue—also a classic example of small group dynamics: a closed group which shares an opinion will, through discussion about that opinion, inevitably migrate to a more extreme version of that opinion. The four Yorkshiremen all want each other to know that they had it really hard. You’ve probably observed similar happening in other groups: the amateur sportsmen who want to tell tales of ever more derring-do. And when it comes to opinions, things can go a little haywire. There have been various studies on this, though the best is by Cass Sunstein, whose December 1999 paper “The Law of Group Polarization” is essential reading. As the abstract notes:

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. This general phenomenon -- group polarization -- has many implications for economic, political, and legal institutions. It helps to explain extremism, "radicalization," cultural shifts, and the behavior of political parties and religious organizations; it is closely connected to current concerns about the consequences of the Internet; it also helps account for feuds, ethnic antagonism, and tribalism.

Note how the effect is independent of political stance or even intelligence. It just happens again and again: football fans will gather in a pub after the match and come to agree that not only the referee but also the manager were not just mediocre, but complete rubbish and shouldn’t be allowed near a pitch.

Now, with modern technology, you don’t even need to be in the same physical space to get that same effect: we have messaging apps which let us create ad-hoc communities in just a few moments. And then, of course, we can see those same effects—the polarisation, cultural shifts, and extreme behaviour—take over.

Which brings us to a recent article by Katy Balls, political editor of The Spectator, in The Times newspaper headlined “How WhatsApp is ruining Westminster”.

The article is paywalled, but starts with a surprise:

During the pandemic, Sadiq Khan received a concerned message from Matt Hancock: the health secretary couldn’t find the London mayor on WhatsApp. Khan had to explain that he wasn’t on the encrypted messaging service. Other, more traditional, ways of communicating were soon established.

After the disclosures of the Covid inquiry, Khan’s approach appears to be the sensible one for any self-respecting politician.

In Social Warming, I wrote a whole chapter about the effects of social media on politics. In it I explained that you can think of political interaction via social media as a 2x2 grid, as below:

For politicians, WhatsApp has the great advantage of immediacy and rapid communication. But it’s also the internet, so there’s no holding back. Balls explains:

Often the more anodyne the title of the group, the more mischief it can cause. It was Andrea Leadsom’s “pizza club”, made up of Brexiteer ministers who enjoyed late-night carbs, that caused havoc for Theresa May in 2018. On the Labour side the innocuous-sounding “birthday club”, set up for Alison McGovern’s birthday, quickly became a “safe space” for MPs to complain about Corbyn. Eventually some in the group decided that others weren’t complaining enough and made a smaller more hardline offshoot. It formed the basis of Change UK, the ill-fated splinter group to Labour.

This is what the groups tend to do — divide and make cliques — whichever side you are on.

But she says that people are far ruder on the groups than they would be in person. (Fancy that!) “The MP groups are feral",” she quotes a ministerial aide saying. Also, it can lead to late-night panics as some comment or other, whether from inside or outside the group, gets passed around:

“It creates so many rows,” says a recent escapee of No 10. “One hour of bad messages and you have to stop what you are doing to deal with it.” It means the spats in the various groups tend to encourage short-term thinking.

And finally, Balls says, “it heightens factionalism. MPs find themselves spending time talking to those who share their views. If an MP disagrees with a group’s line, they’re often kicked out.”. Again: exactly what the premise of Social Warming would predict.

The Covid inquiry, too, is presenting endless examples of people who might appear civil in person, but who are absolutely vicious in text. (Dominic Cummings is probably the exception: he’s vicious in both.) Civil servants being very uncivil, four-letter words being flung around with abandon, people basically losing any sort of control once confronted with a few dancing electrons on a screen. It’s amazing what the tyranny of the empty message bar will do to otherwise responsible people.

In my book, I pointed to the example of how a few years ago the right-wing pro-Brexit European Research Group (ERG) WhatsApp group worked themselves into an absolute froth in a matter of minutes over a minor error in attribution by a BBC radio presenter (who said someone had been an MP, when in fact they’d been a minister for five years by virtue of being in the House of Lords). Yet by only the eighth message in the thread, Iain Duncan Smith, the failed former Tory leader, 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.” As an example of zero to outrage, it’s hard to beat. But it’s also exactly like the Four Yorkshiremen sketch above: in a closed group like that, you can’t be the one saying “oh, these things happen, it’s not really very important.” No; you have to insist that EVERYONE should LODGE A COMPLAINT, just as “when ah were a kid we ‘ad to get up two hours before we went to bed and lick t’road clean wit’ tongue.” The performative outrage is almost predictable. (Quite how many complaints were lodged with the BBC is lost in the mists of time.)

WhatsApp groups and MPs go together like dynamite and matches, sometimes. The most recent example of this phenomenon came just a couple of days ago, after Suella “Hold My Beer, I’ve Thought Of Something Even More Offensive To Say” Braverman, the Home Secretary, wrote (apparently) a piece for The Times suggesting the police were frit about banning a pro-Palestine march planned for Saturday. Within a Conservative WhatsApp group calling itself “Home Team”, Richard Graham MP pointed to a tweet he’d written criticising both that and Braverman’s previous outrage nugget at the weekend, when she suggested that being homeless was a “lifestyle choice”. Graham’s tweet was trying to address the public by pouring oil on troubled waters…

…except that in the opinion of the Home Team, he’d set fire to the oil by calling Braverman’s language “unhelpful”. The WhatsApp group lit up, and inevitably part of the exchanges leaked² to Natasha Clark, LBC’s political editor, who was happy to publish them.

The “Home Team” Conservative MP WhatsApp group gets grumpy with fellow Tory MP Richard Graham for his tweet critiquing Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s language around the homeless and marches

Note that none of those in the group is a minister; only Lee “Was 50p, now £1,870 for the BMA” Anderson has any formal role in the party (he’s deputy chairman, amazingly). Being accused of self-promotion by Jonathan Gullis must be like being savaged by a dead sheep that is wearing fluorescent antlers.

As I write, Braverman’s position seems to hang in the balance: No.10 Downing St has gone oddly quiet on whether it thinks any more needs to be done about her article on the police, which it says wasn’t sanctioned—in direct opposition to what Braverman’s anonymous aides were suggesting earlier on Thursday. Lacunae like that are where political stories emerge.

What you can be sure about, though, is that whatever we’re seeing on TV and hearing on radio via political reporters and actual appearances, the WhatsApp groups will be boiling over this. It will consume them, and opinions currently held will shift incrementally but certainly towards a more extreme version of what they were before: Braverman must go! Alternatively, Suella is our saviour! This will naturally widen the already Grand Canyon-like divisions in the Tory party. We, meanwhile, watch from the sidelines.

• As a coda, one point that I’ve not been able to establish, but maybe American readers in the know could enlighten on: what messaging app do American politicians and their aides use? Now that BlackBerry BBM is dead, it can’t all just be iMessage. (Can it?) WhatsApp use is tiny in the US, so that seems unlikely. My suspicion, based on some limited experience with American political operatives, is that they use Signal, but I’ve had no wider confirmation.

The odd thing is one never hears of WhatsApp (or iMessage or Signal) group messages leaking in US politics. Do Americans just not do this stuff? Or do they get all their leaking done the old-fashioned way, by talking/texting to journalists? If you know, please let us all know with a well-aimed comment.

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Glimpses of the AI tsunami

(Of the what? Read here. And then the update.)

• Asked the question “What is an African country beginning with K?”, Google’s top response was a “featured snippet” which read “While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter ‘K.’ The closest is Kenya, which starts with a ‘K’ sound, but is actually spelled with a ‘K’ sound. It’s always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this.” Hm, yes, certainly is, but that isn’t a fact; it’s a ChatGPT-generated hallucination which appeared on the Emergent Mind site as an example of how the chatbot gets things wrong. And now Google too, of course. Very worrying, as Caroline Mimbs Nyce notes at The Atlantic.

• Judge dismisses copyright claims against AI image generators. Three artists in the US brought claims against Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DeviantArt, and got thoroughly knocked back:

Judge Orrick writes that it is “unclear” as to whether Stable Diffusion holds “compressed copies” of the images and points to the defense’s argument that the training dataset, which contains five billion images, can “not possibly be compressed into an active program.”

Which is what I’ve been thinking all along. The images aren’t “inside” the program any more than they’re “inside” my head if I draw something in another artist’s style.

• AI negotiates NDA contract without involving humans. Only a demonstration. Let the computers talk to each other. Only a bit of side-eye on this one.

1. Except! It isn’t originally a Monty Python sketch. It predates Python, and was written by Tim Brooke-Taylor, Marty Feldman, John Cleese and Graham Chapman, and was performed on At Last The 1948 Show, which also predates Python.

2. The obvious suspicion is that the leaker is Graham or perhaps Danny Kruger, who is sympathetic to him in the discussion, but they don’t appear as the author, so can’t have been. Unless LBC ran up a quick fake to swap them out.