How social media companies thrive off online toxicity - Bill Carmichael

Things got so bad a few years ago that I vowed to stop posting and tweeting entirely and it is a resolution I have stuck to, and I feel better for it.

I kept my accounts dormant and occasionally log back in just to see what the lunatics were screeching about this time. This week it is Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who is apparently a total Nazi because she, erm, paid a fine for a speeding offence.

My view is not so rose-tinted to suggest that political discussions never became heated in the past.

I was brought up in Liverpool when ‘Degsy’ Hatton and Militant Tendency were laying waste to the city and the Labour Party, and I have witnessed at first hand more than my fair share of nasty rhetoric.

But I get the impression that things are even worse today and that often even the last vestiges of rational debate seem to have been stripped away.

Perhaps, it is partly because these battles happen in cyberspace, rather than in the physical world, that people feel uninhibited enough to say vile things to people on Twitter that they would never dream of saying to someone standing next to them.

And, of course, many of the worst offenders are anonymous accounts.

Certainly, if you walked into a pub and started screaming that everyone who disagreed with you is a fascist, someone would punch your lights out.

But there is another reason that I find more than slightly sinister. If you are asking why is everyone so angry all the time, it is because the system is deliberately designed to keep you angry, because there is money in it.

If you have ever done online shopping, and looked up prices for example for a pair of walking boots or a vacuum cleaner, you may have noticed that every website you visit subsequently is covered in adverts for walking boots and vacuum cleaners.

That is the work of something called algorithms that track your online activity and send you more of the same.

With shopping it is relatively benign, but the same goes for politics and it leads to horrible polarisation and an inability to understand opposing points of view.

Worse of all it leads to a conviction that people with views opposed to yours are not just wrong, but positively evil.

For example Trump supporters in the US, who read pro-Trump opinion pieces and follow pro-Trump social media accounts, will be sent more of the same by the algorithms, until they believe that pretty much everyone halfway sane agrees with them.

Exactly the same process happens with anti-Trump people, and you end up with two mutually uncomprehending, hostile groups who hate each other and reject any possible compromise.

Much the same happened here in the UK with Brexit. I am convinced that many Remainers didn’t even bother to vote because everyone they knew online was voting to stay in the EU and they thought they didn’t need to bother.

And when these online fantasies crash up against reality it inevitably leads to weird conspiracy theories to explain it away. So, according to these conspiracists, the real reason for the Brexit decision was not that 17.4 million people voted to leave, but because of the impact of dark Russian money or some other preposterous nonsense.

In other words you only see what you want to see. The algorithm predicts what information the user wants based on their digital footprint. That information confirms our existing biases and insulates us from different points of view.

And more engagement, more anger, more rage equals more clicks and more money for the big tech companies.

My advice is to log off, take a digital detox, consider carefully the arguments you disagree with, accept the possibility you might be wrong, take a deep breath … and think.