All the truth in the world

This is not a problem that can be solved by bringing better facts to bear.

On January 19, we hosted a panel conversation with eight CITAP faculty and affiliates to discuss the attack on the U.S. Capitol and what that moment meant more broadly for our politics, information, media, and society.

This week’s Direct Message offers up highlights from that conversation. Don’t have two hours to listen in on what Meryl Alper called “a master class on participatory culture run amok”? We’ve got the Reader’s Digest version right here.

How did we get here?

The dark side of participatory culture

Generally when we've studied the internet, we really overly focused on the positive elements of this online community building and we really neglected to understand the negative aspects of this online community building. And what I found from my work on QAnon is that allowing people to connect and create community around these kinds of issues, it really fundamentally increases the importance of them to the person's identity expression.

Alice Marwick

These concepts of media literacy have been used within the right-wing media ecosystem to manipulate media and are being exploited. The practice of media literacy has been weaponized to make people think that they're out there doing their research…

Francesca Tripodi

Democratic backlash

You see lots of concerns over things like social media and polarization as if polarization only happens through the affordances of platforms, and does not have underlying political group power and status roots that play out online. In particular I think you see polarization as an inevitable outgrowth of a struggle for justice, particularly people who don't have democratic equality.

Daniel Kreiss

Mainstreaming white supremacy

What was happening outside of Capitol Hill last week was also happening inside of Capitol Hill. And that is really important for us to consider that not only do we see this amalgamation of these extreme white identity groups, but we saw a legitimization and a mainstreaming of white racial framing of political discourse and identity expression that has become mainstream politics.

Tressie McMillan Cottom

You have folks of that outwardly declaim racism, but are actually benefiting from that and making common cause with folks that are open racists. And so this is something that people really should not lose sight of. Even when some of the folks that are involved in these kinds of activities are not explicitly racist, the fact that they don't seem to have too much of a problem standing next to people who are…

Deen Freelon

What we found with kind of YouTube celebrities and even the far right cable news channels, they are often responding to audience demands for more and more extremist content, and so it's actually often the audience that is demanding this and the media sources that are shifting to meet that demand.

Becca Lewis

Where do we go next?

Journalistic revival

Black journalists have written and spoken about how much they very much saw this coming… I think if we had a different power dynamic in our newsrooms that a lot more Americans would have seen this coming because they would have taken Trump and these ideas seriously over the last four or five years.

Shannon McGregor

Doing your own research often involves looking at other people's creative product, which could be like a YouTube video… or at what Joan Donovan and her colleagues call an evidence collage, which is those kind of like crazy Microsoft Paint-looking diagrams with lots of like red lines and like circles, which kind of walks you through somebody else's point of view. So by the time you done consuming this content you, you’ve followed a thought process that gets you from something that is like only mildly unusual to extremely crazy right?

College professors have been like, don't use Wikipedia. Go read the original sources, like figuring out for yourself, but sometimes you want a smart gatekeeper to interpret all this stuff.

Alice Marwick

So much research that has shown how important local news is for civic participation, for people's political educations. And it seems to me that a lot of people are looking for a way to participate. But the news right now is, it’s you know, it’s focused on the gameshow elements, the spectacles, all of that.

Becca Lewis

Regulating platforms

People with power need more, not less, moderating on social media. Social media is not a flattening where everyone has the same amount of power, because they can all produce something and everyone can tweet.

Shannon McGregor

Politicians shouldn't be allowed to undermine their own accountability at the ballot box, right? So if they want to embrace a clear democracy-worthy policy those things have to be bright lines and they have to be consistently enforced. At the same time, I do think that all these platforms can do a much better job integrating hate speech frameworks into their policies to consistently enforce them in the countries that they operate in around the world.

Daniel Kreiss

I don't think that platforms can be counseled out of understanding their role in the reproduction of some of the uglier impulses of public life unless they are made to do so through regulation, governance, and probably fundamentally structuring the economic incentives for them not to do so.

Tressie McMillan Cottom

There's been a huge call around platform accountability, and what are platforms’ responsibilities in redressing racism? I think then there's this broader conversation, where with what happened on January 6, that people are calling for like more enforcement of hate crime legislation, and also right of like domestic terrorism enforcement… we do need to steer away from this idea of like law and order on our platforms. Because actually what those have been good at is identifying activists of color as extremists.

Rachel Kuo

Recommitting to democratic principles

We can have a range of legitimate political disagreement. But this is where political institutions should really function to say that they are committed, ultimately to democratic equality into playing the electoral game into the future. And we, I guess, one place to just end my comment is to simply say we also need as a country to have a very clear-eyed understanding of our history. This is why the 1619 Project is so important. This is why efforts to tell a much more historically accurate history of the U.S. to place our problems and our issues in much clearer view I think is essential to moving forward.

Daniel Kreiss

the question of what should we do about the disturbingly large number of people in this country who apparently reject the bedrock principles of democracy. And I think we should look at deplatforming as only the digital version of what should be a society-wide process. In other words, we're going to turn the heat up on these people, right? So, you know, deplatforming is one aspect of this right? Another is rejection at the ballot box. Another is the cancellation of political contributions. Another is the pulling of corporate sponsorship, social ostracism, celebrities speaking out like this is like a whole social and cultural and economic and political process.

Deen Freelon

Recent publications and appearances

“We are trained to listen to some voices and not others. And part of that process happens in the public domain—about who becomes the default voice of authority and expertise.” Tressie McMillan Cottom appeared as a guest on the Speaking of Racism podcast. She was also a speaker on Ohio State University’s Provost’s Discovery Themes Lecture series and a UNC event on race, democracy, and the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“One doesn’t have to go all the way down to the darkest parts of 8-chan to get into a space where people are willing and eager to commit these acts of violence...That’s right there out in the open.” Graduate Research Affiliate Becca Lewis appeared as a guest on the Tech Won’t Save Us Podcast to discuss YouTube’s history of incentivizing extremist content.