Escape the echo chamber
April 17, 2018 8:16 AM   Subscribe

 
This article has some important implications for those of us who rely on MetaFilter for a large part of our political news diet. In fact, I think it would fit nicely into a couple of different MeTa discussions we've had on the topic - one of which I started. The thesis is: in an echo chamber, people work to undermine opposing sources of information, not just omit them. It behooves us to be on the lookout for those methods of argument, and to push back against them, not only here on the blue but in every realm of our intellectual lives. My impression is that we have a pretty solid epistemic bubble going on here, to use language from the article, but not so much an echo chamber, and I hope we can keep it that way!

It goes without saying that you can't trust anything anyone else says about this topic by the way, they're all involved in a pretty nasty conspiracy against me. Luckily, I'm a fast enough reader and quick of mind, so I was able to get the truth to you first before they show up with their lies and slander. {\}
posted by dbx at 8:56 AM on April 17, 2018 [17 favorites]


Whenever I read about echo chambers, filter bubbles etc. I always wonder how much both-sides-ism is about to come into play.

Say my echo chamber happens to think Donald Trump is a corrupt douchebag moron unqualified to be POTUS, almost certainly a criminal many times over, and probably a rapist. Any alternate view is clearly bullshit. Is there any value whatsoever in "escaping" that echo chamber?
posted by Foosnark at 8:59 AM on April 17, 2018 [62 favorites]


" My impression is that we have a pretty solid epistemic bubble going on here..."

Um, yes.
posted by jeff-o-matic at 9:00 AM on April 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


Is there any value whatsoever in "escaping" that echo chamber?

The echo chamber definition gets hard to work with when the group in question that is not trusted is specifically not trusted because its leaders, members, figureheads, and advocates get legitimately caught out in outright and embarrassingly easily disproved public lies every single day.
posted by poffin boffin at 9:05 AM on April 17, 2018 [52 favorites]


You can push back against it, though, by using different news sources, developing a healthy skepticism about what you see and read, and eliminating all sources of anything you don't like.

Works pretty well, and it's not as hard as quitting smoking, but it's close.
posted by disclaimer at 9:07 AM on April 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


A number of studies indicate that this supposed echo chamber or “filter bubble” isn’t nearly as real as is often believed (or doesn’t work in the ways that we often assume it does).

Also: doesn’t the existence of frothing Internet hate mobs that target minorities and women negate the theory that people are cocooned in safe bubbles when they use social media? From where I sit, the problem is that many people aren’t insulated enough from the views of people who hate them and want to hurt and kill them.
posted by faineg at 9:11 AM on April 17, 2018 [34 favorites]


The article is worth reading even though it's a long one.

This paragraph in particular stood out to me:

"And, in many ways, echo-chamber members are following reasonable and rational procedures of enquiry. They’re engaging in critical reasoning. They’re questioning, they’re evaluating sources for themselves, they’re assessing different pathways to information. They are critically examining those who claim expertise and trustworthiness, using what they already know about the world. It’s simply that their basis for evaluation – their background beliefs about whom to trust – are radically different. They are not irrational, but systematically misinformed about where to place their trust."

Having said that, the one gripe I have with the article: the conclusion about social-epistemic reboot ignores the fact that the people oppressed are often forced into or expected to be the "saviour" of people who are in echo-chambers that are actively oppressing them. Case in point, having a Jewish person put their life in quite literal risk to help a Neo-Nazi "recover". Though admittedly courageous this takes a lot of responsibility away from the surrounding society that is responsible for this violent echo-chamber being safe to form to begin with.

It's a profoundly difficult challenge to address once the echo-chamber has been established.
posted by slimepuppy at 9:16 AM on April 17, 2018 [8 favorites]


Both-sides-ism is itself an echo chamber. It involves a chronic distrust of all speakers outside the center/center-right of the local political spectrum.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 9:17 AM on April 17, 2018 [32 favorites]


I feel like the term echo chamber is right up there with fake news, in that they are both used by people to denigrate the truth when it benefits them.
posted by valkane at 9:19 AM on April 17, 2018 [29 favorites]


It's an interesting article, well worth the read.

The author spends some time bemoaning that people fail to properly distinguish epistemic bubbles and echo chambers. I think this is because the actual term "echo chamber" does not really evoke the concept he defines with it, which is a belief system in which people actively reject sources of information which contradict their beliefs and accept only sources of information from within the belief system. The term "echo chamber" evokes something much more like what the author calls an epistemic bubble to me, so I don't think it's surprising that these terms, and thus perhaps concepts, have become confused. Phrases like "conspiracy mindset," "epistemic closure," and "persecution complex" all seem to capture the concept better to me.

I thought this was interesting:
Most of the examples I’ve given so far, following Jamieson and Cappella, focus on the conservative media echo chamber. But nothing says that this is the only echo chamber out there; I am quite confident that there are plenty of echo chambers on the political Left.
(My emphasis.) He gives no examples of such left-wing echo chambers. Now, I don't necessarily think he's wrong; I've certainly known a few people who seem to operate within a left-wing echo chamber, but the depth and extent to which echo-chamber thinking has permeated the Right is qualitatively different. This kind of reflexive political both-sidesism is itself a kind of echo chamber. Anyone who points out that there is a real asymmetry in the openness of the political Left and Right to new ideas, contradictory information, and even basic critical reasoning about their own ideas runs the risk of being labeled a partisan, and having their arguments rejected out of hand. I'd suggest that the author is perhaps unconsciously recognizing that he must pay obeisance to this particular idea in order for his other arguments to be taken seriously.

(On preview: justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow beat me to it.)
posted by biogeo at 9:20 AM on April 17, 2018 [15 favorites]


Right-wing echo chambers get more funding and top-down imposition of structure. Left-wing echo chambers seem to form more organically.

This kind of reflexive political both-sidesism is itself a kind of echo chamber.

"is itself a kind of" isn't really all that different a statement from "is not really," when you think about it. OTOH, the linked article itself does a pretty good job of uselessly redefining the term "echo chamber," so we might as well consider it free-form and go nuts.
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:30 AM on April 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


Where I've noticed the epistemic bubbles acting most perniciously is in the "story about violent/stupid/execrable thing done by supporter of the Other Side", which is used to feed the assumption that everybody on the other side is violent/stupid/execrable. I noticed it a lot in the last American presidential election. Propaganda machines (formal and informal) on both sides were very good at identifying and amplifying individual incidents which illustrated the violent/stupid/execrable narrative. You could quickly identify which epistemic bubble someone was in by which "person in wheelchair pushed by ____ supporters" story they knew about.
posted by clawsoon at 9:31 AM on April 17, 2018 [7 favorites]


A number of studies indicate that this supposed echo chamber or “filter bubble” isn’t nearly as real as is often believed (or doesn’t work in the ways that we often assume it does).

Nguyen specifically addresses this point. He's using echo chamber and epistemic bubble to describe two different things, and the research you are referencing only addresses the bubble. It uses the terms echo chamber and bubble interchangeably, and therefore doesn't say anything about the particular phenomenon Nguyen talks about when talks about echo chambers.

There’s also been a rash of articles recently arguing that there’s no such thing as echo chambers or filter bubbles. But these articles also lump the two phenomena together in a problematic way, and seem to largely ignore the possibility of echo-chamber effects. They focus, instead, solely on measuring connectivity and exposure on social media networks. The new data does, in fact, seem to show that people on Facebook actually do see posts from the other side, or that people often visit websites with opposite political affiliation. If that’s right, then epistemic bubbles might not be such a serious threat. But none of this weighs against the existence of echo chambers. We should not dismiss the threat of echo chambers based only on evidence about connectivity and exposure.
posted by layceepee at 10:06 AM on April 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


By "kind of" I intended the strong claim "belongs to the type or category", rather than "resembles or is like." I could certainly be wrong, and I'm open to counterarguments, but I didn't intend any equivocation.
posted by biogeo at 10:08 AM on April 17, 2018


I am honestly surprised at reactions to this article making reference to both sides and implying some kind of unitary left wing (defined in opposition to the right). Even restricting ourselves to politics, doesn't hewing to the linear model erase mountains of legitimate criticism and coherent-ish wordviews? I just don't buy* that anyone's shit doesn't stink, at least in one significant area.

*And if you try to convince me otherwise, I'll need receipts fulfilling criteria I won't specify ahead of time.
posted by The Gaffer at 10:11 AM on April 17, 2018


There's some serious asymmetry going on here. Here's a picture of the incandescent ball of rage that Onion predicted so long ago.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 10:20 AM on April 17, 2018 [6 favorites]


The article acknowledges that there are sources that are actively trying to create echo chambers. These sources are presumably untrustworthy by definition, but there is no attention paid to how one might distinguish those sources from others. In fact, the article seems to indicate that we are poorly suited to evaluate any source. So, I don't see how going back to square one is going to help. Or is this just a long way around to say "keep an open mind?"
posted by He Is Only The Imposter at 10:32 AM on April 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


An ‘epistemic bubble’ is an informational network from which relevant voices have been excluded by omission.

Like the "liberal" media and actual leftism?
posted by Kitty Stardust at 10:34 AM on April 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


This article criticizes much of the current research on epistemic bubbles vs echo-chambers, claiming that this research lumps “the two phenomena together in a problematic way, and seem(s) to largely ignore the possibility of echo-chamber effects.” The author goes on to state: “We should not dismiss the threat of echo chambers based only on evidence about connectivity and exposure.”

I have a few quibbles with this. First, it assumes that there is an obvious, agreed-upon difference between echo-chambers and epistemic bubbles, but it doesn’t adequately back these strong claims up. For example: the author writes that epistemic bubbles “are rather ramshackle; they go up easily, and they collapse easily, too. Echo chambers are far more pernicious and far more robust. They can start to seem almost like living things.” These are strong statements, and they are very thought-provoking. But the author doesn’t cite any evidence that favors them beyond Jamieson and Capella’s work from 2010.

Second: if this evidence doesn’t exist, and we only have solid evidence on connectivity and exposure, we should ask why that is. If Jamieson and Cappella’s work from 2010 was the first empirical study into how echo-chambers function, where are the newer studies that reinforce and build upon that work? Is this lack of evidence due to a genuine oversight on the part of social media researchers working with quantitative methods (which is possible!), or is this because it’s more difficult to quantify echo-chambers vs epistemic bubbles? Or is there some other reason? What should research that takes more than “connectivity and exposure” into account actually look like?

I’m certainly not saying that quantitative methods are the only way to prove the echo-chamber vs epistemic bubble distinction - and I’m aware this is an article in a popular publication, not a scholarly paper. But I would still find this argument more compelling if it presented more evidence that this echo chamber/epistemic bubble distinction exists and is meaningful in the various nasty social phenomena we’re observing online today. It would also be more compelling if it offered more on what should be done to build that evidence base up.

Also: Cjelli raises some *excellent* questions about this article’s framing of “echo chamber vs not echo chamber” and how one goes about telling wrong and correct views from one another.
posted by faineg at 10:54 AM on April 17, 2018 [4 favorites]


The solution--build trust and demonstrate goodwill to the person in the echo-chamber--seems too individualistic. Unless the person has a motivation to begin questioning, it's pretty much impossible to move them, and impossible to reach every single person trapped in an ideological straightjacket. Humanity isn't going to last much longer if we keep putting our heads in the sand when confronted with global warming, resource scarcity, mass extinctions, global neo-fascism and more. I feel like we need solutions that can work at a larger scale than just inviting Nazis over for dinner. Have we already given up on education and culture as ineffective at producing subjects capable of critical thinking?
posted by Kitty Stardust at 11:09 AM on April 17, 2018 [5 favorites]


This essay puts me in mind of the "This American Life " episode about Homer, Alaska, where the town got swept up in a big debate about undocumented immigrants, even though there weren't any undocumented immigrants in their town. There was only one guy who didn't rush to judgment - he, very reasonably, was like, "I don't know anything about this issue! I should research it!" At which point he ended up on Breitbart, reading a ton of right-wing scare stories about murders committed by undocumented immigrants. His conclusion was basically, "Wow, undocumented immigration is a way bigger problem than I thought!" It was very disheartening.

It's not easy to distinguish between good sources and bad sources, to tell propagandists from people arguing or reporting in good faith. We don't teach our kids to do it in school, and it's not a skill we're born with. And just because other people are worse off, information-wise, than we are (i.e., people who get all their information from Fox News) that doesn't mean we should be smug and assume we're not subject to those same kinds of mistakes. Hell, I donated to Jill Stein's Michigan recount campaign, because I figured anyone who was Anti-Trump must be basically on my side, and now it seems highly likely that was a piece of fucking Russian discord-sowing propaganda. It's easy to point fingers, but a lot harder to look inward. None of us are immune from this, at all.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 11:09 AM on April 17, 2018 [20 favorites]


I feel like the essence of this article was basically, "be nice to Nazis/insertotherhategroup member" to help them see you as a person, and form new facts to break their current world view. Perhaps I am a bad person (reader, I am), but I don't wanna be nice to Nazis. If I'm going to invite one to dinner it's going to be because I've taken up the Santa Clarita Diet.
posted by Gyre,Gimble,Wabe, Esq. at 11:37 AM on April 17, 2018 [10 favorites]


Once again this seems like a systemic problem brought about by failures in education, civic life, media, and public discourse, yet the only solution offered is individual action that is both emotional-labor-intensive and time-consuming.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 11:48 AM on April 17, 2018 [16 favorites]


There's some serious asymmetry going on here. Here's a picture of the incandescent ball of rage that Onion predicted so long ago.

That article and graph are quite remarkable. On the left of the graph, you have a large, diffuse sea of blue, red, and purple (Twitter accounts following only Clinton, only Trump, and both, respectively), and on the right you have a tightly clustered ball of red nearly isolated from the rest of the graph. The mixed group is, for reasons not clearly given, labeled "Clinton supporters", and the only-red group is labeled "Trump supporters." Annotations in the graph note that the Clinton-labeled group is "not as cohesive" and that "they interact more frequently with users who follow both or neither candidate," while the Trump-labeled group has "little mutual follower overlap with other users and are a remarkably cohesive group." But the figure is titled "Clinton and Trump supporters live in their own Twitter worlds." This is absurd. If we take the graph at face value, and if we accept the idea that following only one candidate is correlated with supporting that candidate, then what the graph actually says is "a large subset of Trump supporters live in their own Twitter world, disconnected from the broader network in which Clinton supporters, Trump supporters, and apolitical individuals interact fairly heavily with each other." The rest of the article makes some gestures at the fact that Trump supporters appear specifically to have isolated themselves, but the overall tone gives a strong "both sides" flavor.

So yeah, I agree with Jpfed's characterization of this showing serious asymmetry, but it's remarkable that the article characterizes this same dataset according to a standard "both-sides" narrative, and blames journalists (who, as has been noted frequently on this site, seem to have an obsession with finding stories about the White Middle-America Working Class Trump Voter) for not engaging with the isolated Trump cluster. This kind of phenomenon is at least as important as the "echo chamber" phenomenon: that of forcing any new information through an acceptable, pre-conceived narrative, regardless of whether it fits. Unlike the echo chamber, the researchers and journalist aren't rejecting information from a source they disagree with, they're simply incapable or unwilling to see it as contradicting their dominant viewpoint in which political divisions are the fault of both the left and right equally.

Of course, there is good reason to doubt the entire conclusion of the dataset as well, because no mention is made of whether bot and troll farm accounts were excluded; I presume they were not. If they were not excluded, then it's very likely that the tight "Trump" cluster actually represents only or mostly this propaganda machine, and the majority of real Trump-supporting Twitter users are represented by the red and purple elements that are generally fairly tightly connected with the rest of the network, undermining the entire argument that stark political divisions are revealed by the structure of the Twitter network graph. In fairness, this issue had not received as much attention in December 2016 when this article was written, but neither was it exactly an unknown problem. Unfortunately I don't see a link to methods that might have described whether they addressed this problem, and the MIT Media Lab group doesn't seem to have followed up with anything since the article was published.
posted by biogeo at 12:09 PM on April 17, 2018 [15 favorites]


Mod note: One deleted; let's not get into "Mefi is like *this*" stuff, that's a thread unto itself and belongs in Metatalk.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 12:11 PM on April 17, 2018


I feel like the term echo chamber is right up there with fake news, in that they are both used by people to denigrate the truth when it benefits them.

That's just what the Demiurge wants you to believe!
posted by XMLicious at 12:27 PM on April 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


This strategy is very similar to what they recommend for cult deprogramming. Get them used to your presence, talk about topics other than the cult. But that is a matter of "I want this particular person to leave this cult" and does not easily scale to taking down the cult as a whole.
posted by RobotHero at 2:14 PM on April 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


but the depth and extent to which echo-chamber thinking has permeated the Right is qualitatively different.

Funnily enough, the depth and pervasiveness of echo-chamber-induced intellectual poverty on The Left is a major topic of discussion among groups that self-identify as The Right. I'm thinking specifically of the podcasts put out by the Cato Institute and the Federalist. However, I can't point to any specific episode at this moment.

See what I did there, where I added a second sentence giving an example of the thing that I was talking about, and a third admitting that it wasn't a very good example? That's the sort of thing that happens in the sources that I trust, and tends to be omitted in the sources that I mistrust. It helps that I personally have the skill to follow such sources, even into technical literature, and that in doing so over the past couple of decades I've followed sources to all four permutations of trust vs. mistrust and confirm vs. debunk. But even so, I came within a whisker of posting the first sentence of this reply as an unsubstantiated gripe about what "they" do. Believability is hard work.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 3:31 PM on April 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


What I mean is: I wonder constantly whether I am deceiving myself, I try hard not to be deceived or to be play a role in anyone else's echo chamber, and it's fucking exhausting.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 3:33 PM on April 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


I thought the article was really worthwhile, and its core arguments more surprising than I expected them to be.

Fundamentally, if echo chambers are about clusters of information transfer designed to mistrust outside the transfer, then reworking/redefining trust networks is important.

To me, this isn't saying "try to trust Neo-Nazis", this is saying "if you reject neo-nazis, don't do it because you categorically distrust conservatives who support neo-nazis. Instead, do it because you have arrived at thoughtful judgments without too much pre-conceptions who you trust. Trust, too, needs to come understanding the goodwill of others, not domain knowledge. Only then, do we have the possibility of not continuing fractured echo chambers."

The focus on good will is interesting. Because, with goodwill and trust -- if we're wrong together as a society, at least we were trying to be right, and there's some hope that we'll see the error of our ways and switch together. I would much rather trust the opinions of those who are trying to make a society/community better, than those who are trying to win with what they consider a correct argument.

--

Is it possible to have a nation-state so geographically sprawling and diverse that it ceases to understand itself as part of the same community?

Currently it seems that there is a slow move towards splitting into two communities, barely co-existing within the same economic system, very much unwilling to merge.

Part of this is probably because currently business/trade/collaboration doesn't require political/trust synchronizing. You don't have to agree with the politics of your plumber, bus driver, post office clerk's, pilot in order to do business with them. Thus, it seems that business/commerce is one of the easiest and most developed modes of national synchronicity. In business we trust; in business, we don't really clash in our values as long as you're trustworthy within business-terms.

I think this is the product of our times: the sense that money speaks more than ethics, or that profit-driven businesses are accepted to be amoral, essentially to have no ethical or value-oriented duty other than increasing shareholder value. The United States of America has essentially ceased to be a nation that upholds communal and society values of democracy, tolerance, freedom and is now an essentially neoliberal economic infrastructure, a global convention center for businesses to hook into and exploit.
posted by suedehead at 3:46 PM on April 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


This is definitely a central concern in my life nowadays, since it makes sense that as mass media gets better and better, more and more effort gets expended to try to attract my attention, so I will have to work harder and harder to counter-attract it to serve my own values. I take responsibility for actively deciding how I can have accurate beliefs about things that matter to me and then adopting an information diet that I endorse based on that. Examples of things that I do that I think are pursuant to the goal:

- As much as is practical, I block all advertising and all sources of information that are powerfully optimizing information delivery for anything other than me learning true things (e.g. feeds biased towards popularity or engagement, spokespeople who are being paid to spread predetermined information, publications who depend on maximizing engagement to survive.) Garbage in, garbage out.

- I look for writers who seem good at thinking and who seem like experts in some fields, and then I make them a focus of my everyday non-fiction reading: I read them on RSS, pay attention, and if they say something I disagree with, I flag it as something interesting that I might want to drill down into to understand more about our disagreement. By focusing on people who are good thinkers and writers independent of specific beliefs, I hope to avoid epistemic closure problems. (Of course, being smart and a good writer probably correlates with some inaccurate beliefs. This is kind of a known bug in my system.)

- I apply an anti-echo-chamber bias: if my sources are treating some beliefs as obviously ridiculous, then I try to be more curious why anyone would believe those things, and I go seek out strong representatives of the opposing beliefs that I can try to make sense of. I find this very fun, to be honest, but it's also hard work, because I end up having to evaluate primary sources myself a lot if I want to feel like I can draw a confident conclusion. What happens often is that I just realize how little I know with high confidence (because there are apparently reasonable arguments for different beliefs) and I refrain from claiming to know things which weren't important enough for me to really investigate.

I hesitate to preach any of these practices, because they smell of a kind of privilege. I am fortunate to have the luxury to be able to not use information delivery services that I don't like, and I am also fortunate that nobody is out to get me, so to speak; if someone is critical of me or my beliefs, I can almost always just accept that and be curious. I don't have to suffer. Those certainly aren't true for everyone. But, if they are true for you, then I recommend these tactics.
posted by value of information at 5:49 PM on April 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


(I also basically don't care about current events, which is where the hostile attention optimization effort seems to be focused most strongly. I honestly have no idea what practical strategy would suffice to form accurate beliefs quickly about current events. I would be curious if any other people feel like they are doing a good job at that.)
posted by value of information at 5:59 PM on April 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


I wanted to like this article. I really did. Then I got to this:
And, in many ways, echo-chamber members are following reasonable and rational procedures of enquiry. They’re engaging in critical reasoning. They’re questioning, they’re evaluating sources for themselves, they’re assessing different pathways to information. They are critically examining those who claim expertise and trustworthiness, using what they already know about the world. It’s simply that their basis for evaluation – their background beliefs about whom to trust – are radically different. They are not irrational, but systematically misinformed about where to place their trust.
This makes the fundamental error of ascribing rationality to various patterns of groupthink, which almost all social media reinforces regardless of intent. The fact that the writer goes on to compare it so bluntly with Orwellian Doublespeak underlines how poorly they understand the communication dynamics at work. This is not the only way cognitive biases get reinforced, and there's no end of solid literature on why it's so much more common among conservatives.

What's happening on the Left is the opposite of echo-chamber behaviour. It's a free-for-all in a power vacuum, fuelled by conflict and and destabilised by fake news. It's a business model that works best by driving a wedge into rational discourse and promoting conflict in the guise of crass tribalism. Argument and disagreement drive clicks, empirical investigation and sober debate do not. People who should be working together collapse under the weight of corrupted identity politics.

The cult we can't escape isn't our echo chamber, it's theirs. We need to stop talking about it as if it is and get real about how it's happened, why it's different and what we can do about it. If we can't manage that, we're fucked in both directions.
posted by Elizabeth the Thirteenth at 7:55 AM on April 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


The Myth of the online Echo Chamber BBC Just more information not an endorsement
posted by rmhsinc at 9:53 AM on April 18, 2018


It's not easy to distinguish between good sources and bad sources,

Ehhh, sometimes. Anytime I talk to friends about flat-earthers, I usually throw out the idea that when they went to "study" the idea they didn't immediately look for verifiable scientific explanations, but instead went directly to crazytown youtube videos and somehow are content with the info they got.
posted by P.o.B. at 10:38 AM on April 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


The whole essay is rendered uselessly hermetic, as ultimately in order to truly "understand the author" we are supposed to eat dinner with him. The approach taken was less of "take the reader along the journey of puzzling this out", and more provoke and use dubious claims like:

Similarly, accounts of people leaving echo-chambered homophobia rarely involve them encountering some institutionally reported fact. Rather, they tend to revolve around personal encounters – a child, a family member, a close friend coming out. These encounters matter because a personal connection comes with a substantial store of trust.

I have aunts and uncles who have said homophobic things. So if I come out to my extended family, who's to say they won't react by shunning me? Then what? And for the case of a non-adult child, this comes across as exploitative.
posted by polymodus at 2:54 PM on April 18, 2018


He gives no examples of such left-wing echo chambers. Now, I don't necessarily think he's wrong; I've certainly known a few people who seem to operate within a left-wing echo chamber, but the depth and extent to which echo-chamber thinking has permeated the Right is qualitatively different.

I noticed this too, and then was surprised to see an off-hand mention to Robert Lifton. I've read one of Lifton's books, and what I found useful about it was that it approached the question from a very different perspective: what behaviours are characteristic of what he describes in the book as a 'totalist' belief system? Arguing that one particular political philosophy or another is captive to an echo chamber is easily argued against. Arguing that particular behaviours are inherently abusive and that any healthy ideology shouldn't have them is a lot easier.

As far as I can tell, the only one of Lifton's behaviours that occurs with any regularity on the left is what he calls the 'demand for purity'. You know what this is from the name: because someone supports gun rights, they're a bad leftist, or if you don't care about immigration reform, you're not a feminist. Apart from the obvious fallacies, spreading good ideas with people we have significant differences with helps them spread into places where we're too alien to be persuasive. As long as we're not expecting people to compromise on the marginalised having value, that difference of opinion is important and valuable.

The other one you occasionally see is what Lifton confusingly calls 'sacred science', after the insistence amongst Chinese communists that their ideology was 'scientific'. This is the idea that the in-group's ideology (which I'm calling fiction for convenience) is entirely true in every respect, and also complete - it explains everything, it answers every question, and questioning it is akin to questioning the thing it's based on. You do see this on the left, particularly used to defend bad takes, but it's rarer that it's allowed to stand without an expert in whatever it's using as a shield noticing.

What I've only seen amongst the left when things are obviously wrong in other ways is what Lifton calls 'loading the language': redefining words to have multiple meanings amongst the in-group. This is very common amongst the right, particularly driven by Rush Limbaugh redefining 'liberal' and 'Democrat' as epithets, but the only comparable word I've seen from the left is 'neoliberal' and there's no real consensus about what that meant in the first place, so it's less of a loaded term and more of a shibboleth.

I don't recall ever seeing the 'cult of confession' on the left, and I've gone looking. This is a particular feature of totalist belief systems where they encourage their believers to share their stories, with the emphasis being firmly on reinforcing the fiction of the group rather than honesty or the catharsis of the confessor. This was a key part of the Satanic Panic of the 80s, for instance. Project Veritas is somewhat similar, in that they're using cameras to show what their ideological out-group is 'really' doing, and have to edit misleadingly to get it to line up with the fiction. The key here is the insistent emphasis on crowd-sourced truth, the wildly exaggerated confirmations of the in-group fiction, and no concern for the conflict between the two.

So, yeah, there might be echo chambers on the left, but the difficulty naming them is probably because they're small and weak as opposed to the metastasised one that Rush Limbaugh started and Fox News inherited.
posted by Merus at 9:50 PM on April 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


Off-topic comment here but 'neoliberal' is a specific constellation of meanings to me, and it's used in academic texts across many disciplines as well as by very different political leaders. The IMF's famous letter in 2016, for one, uses it in a straightforward way. And each of those usages is not necessarily the same as lay usage. The reason I don't like spelling out the meaning of it, is that it's like spelling out the letters of Voldemort. In many places, the ideas involved come across as accusations and people don't like talking about that stuff and get really defensive. But the definition of the term does exist and across expert discourse it is pretty consistent.
posted by polymodus at 11:32 PM on April 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


My impression is that we have a pretty solid epistemic bubble going on here... but not so much an echo chamber

Oh I beg to differ. When 95% of the participants share the same view and dismiss any dissenting opinion as unworthy to even contemplate, how do you call it, if not an echo chamber? It is precisely this tunnel vision that has people always surprised when the results of any vote doesn’t align with their views. How come, they wonder, since 95% of the people share their views.
posted by Kwadeng at 3:02 AM on April 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


In many places, the ideas involved come across as accusations and people don't like talking about that stuff and get really defensive. But the definition of the term does exist and across expert discourse it is pretty consistent.

Good to know. If it has a meaning, but it's being loaded with emotional responses, that absolutely counts as the kind of thing Lifton was talking about: it becomes hard to talk about neoliberalism or whatever without those primed emotions interfering with the discussion. I'm annoyed I didn't read closer and notice it earlier.

But then, that's why this framework is so useful: if you accept the validity of Lifton's observations, you can (with work) identify yourself as potentially being in a bubble - no trusted marginalised person heroically reaching across the gap required.
posted by Merus at 6:48 AM on April 19, 2018


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