We have failed to rein in social media's misinformation

Monday, 14 February 2022

Three men were arrested after attempting to push through police at a protest against vaccine mandates in Wellington on February 9.

Verity Johnson is an Auckland-based business owner, writer and columnist.

OPINION: The moment that summed up the ongoing parliamentary protests for me was last week was the sign, “hang ‘em high” painted on Parliament’s forecourts near smiley faces and a heart emoji.

Now on the surface, that’s a mixed message. Like an episode of the Teletubbies where they’re preparing ritual human sacrifices to the baby-faced sun god. Do they want peace and technicolour love? Or blood?

And yet on a deep level, this sign is totally understandable. It’s written in a familiar tone of furious vitriol and sickly kitsch. It’s the voice of the internet, the kitten-with-a-Kalashnikov language of all social media.

And it was one of many, many examples last week when you could see social media’s power smeared all over the protesters like the layers of hardened mud.

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Large social media and internet-based content platforms could be fined for breaching rules designed to tackle harmful content under proposals released on Thursday.

From people repeating misinformation about Covid they’d read online, to the live-streamed extremism TV on everyone’s apps, to the faux-internet-intellectual vocabulary protesters used when answering questions. (They all have the comments section syntax of using overly complicated words to sound smart – but don’t make any sense.)

The influence of the online world was so real and ever present that I half expected to see Mark Zuckerberg in the soggy crowd. Standing there, watching and waiting, like the most physically underwhelming Terminator model imaginable.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think social media created the genuine fear, grievance and disenfranchisement that you feel underneath all the noise.

Instead, I think social media has become a vast, terrifyingly powerful way of connecting isolated vulnerable people with hardened extremists. People whose sole mission in life is to sniff out the vulnerable and convert them to their twisted cause. And watching the protests was like being slapped with the cold, clammy realisation we let this all happen.

Verity Johnson: Voters are looking for hope, not managerial meh-ness.

We’ve known for a long time that Facebook is spouting crap into the heads of our loved ones. These last few years have felt like living in a Star Trek episode, where aliens crawl down your loved one's ear canal and coil around their brain stem. Suddenly they’re going on about how they get their news from social media because they don’t trust the “mainstream media”.

And this information is spread by dedicated manipulators. A study last week suggests Facebook is heavily influenced by a handful of super users, who are also super abusers. Most of them use their disproportionate influence to push extreme, inflammatory content and misinformation. And Facebook seems to not regulate them that heavily. They’re its stars.

It’s not just Facebook, though, Instagram has long been a recruitment ground for QAnon through #wellness content. And Youtube’s algorithm was found in 2018 to be driving users to conspiracy content - even when they weren’t interested in it.

And yet, historically, we’ve failed to force these companies to be held to editorial standards around misinformation. We’ve just let them get away with, “hey we’re just a platform not the publisher!” The Christchurch Call feels more like symbolism than structural change. Even its members admitted they need to ‘better understand’ how algorithms drive people to extreme content.

And when you put it like this, it’s hard to explain why we’ve been so lazy.

Until we remember the majority of generally unengaged users have always shrugged, yeah, it’s whack, but who’s dumb enough to believe the stuff on here?

We forget, time and again, that believing misinformation is not about intelligence. It’s been about fear, vulnerability and feeling ignored. But extremists don’t forget. So they get out their phones, and pull vulnerable, forgotten people into deeper, ever more dangerous waters.

And we’ve just watched, too arrogant to do more to protect them.