Drowning in disinformation? Can we train social media to meet our needs?

Posted on: 18 October 2024

An election is coming, and the stories about social media write themselves. Russian bots, racists on X, disinformation campaigns, the list goes on.

These stories are grounded in real concerns about how online speech has been corralled into a few billionaire-owned platforms, how it has been poisoned by malicious actors who overwhelm us with conspiracy theories and lies and how algorithms have channelled us towards extremism and conflict.

The underlying fear is that social media is undermining any chance of open democratic debate grounded in respect and reality.

But on a proper balance sheet, social media’s ability to encourage democratic participation and information-sharing also needs to be recog­nised. This was originally understood to be social media’s role – a means to overcome information bottlenecks and a top-down monopoly on news. To an extent, it maintains that role.

In Israel’s war on Gaza, online sources have been far more likely than traditional media to expose government untruths – whether they be Israeli government narratives on bombing hospitals or Irish ones on the transport of weapons to Israel. Beyond this, social media was recognised as a means of counteracting flaws in the democratic process, such as the decline of public space or the way decision-making has been removed from debate and scrutiny.

So, how well is social media doing in opening up public space for democratic debate and organising? In researching the campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment in 2018, my co-researcher Aileen O’Carroll and I found it was doing a pretty good job. Strangely enough, it was as much through campaigners refusing to use all the features of social media that they successfully harnessed it.

While Facebook had no such block features, similar efforts were made to maintain a positive online space

In terms of widening participation, Facebook was vital in building up the Repeal campaign in those areas where there were sparse populations, showing otherwise isolated people there were others interested in the campaign. It was key in drawing in non-traditional activists.

In addition, Irish campaigns have long been criticised for their Dublin-centric nature. To counter this, the Abortion Rights Campaign (ARC) tried to distribute decision-making around the country. One of the most important ways was by investing in online technologies to allow remote participation – something explicitly undertaken to facilitate the equal participation of rural delegates and ensure inclusivity.

Just as importantly, campaigners were well aware of the downsides of social media and came up with ways to lessen them. Damaging conflict was minimised.

On Twitter, campaigners created Repeal Shield, which enabled users to automatically block a list of, as they termed it, “pro-life trolls, online abuse”. This reduced personal attacks and dampened online misinformation.

It also gave campaigners the space to hold conversations with the public without being derailed by the intrusion of aggressive disruptors.

While Facebook had no such block features, similar efforts were made to maintain a positive online space, through not engaging with the No side, not getting into personal arguments and minimising negative imagery. Their success shows that while social media may tend to push users towards conflict, campaigners were able to counter this by consciously deciding to restrict its communication functions.

It was the same story with other negative effects of social media. Take the problem of drowning in too much information. In resp­onse, some regional groups established rules such as using WhatsApp as a siphon to draw all the clutter and chatter away from other platforms that could then be used as organisational spaces. Other groups maintained a dedicated WhatsApp group for canvassing and nothing else, and yet others established a curfew for posting.

Not all of these strategies worked – efforts to minimise internal conflict had mixed results. But they show how people can collectively and consciously shape the way they use social media to their own ends – in this case, to the ends of building a successful grassroots democratic campaign with widespread participation.

Behind this story of campaigners navigating social media lies the wider lesson that people aren’t sociological dopes. This term was coined by the sociologist Harold Garfinkel to ridicule how many of his colleagues saw people as unreflective idiots encased in social structures they’re not aware of and aren’t able to change.

When it comes to social media, people aren’t “sociological dopes”, blindly reacting to online prompts and unable to understand and change their own behaviour. Far from it. 

They’re able to recognise and work together to lessen the ill effects of social media. They repurpose platforms, use them selectively, and when that doesn’t work, they exit them – something we’re now seeing with the exodus from X. So, just as there are grounds for fears, there are also reasons for hope and cause to nurture our coll­ective skills to train social media to our needs.

David Landy is assistant professor at Trinity College Dublin’s sociology department. 

The article first appeared in the Irish Independent

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