The internet’s capacity and role as an epistemic source is ever-growing. Endless evidence can be found to buttress both dystopian and utopian views of the internet. This paper in particular will focus on how Social Media Sites (SMS) as a medium of knowledge construction influences socio-political discourse. It starts with characterising what the ideal internet should look like in a democracy by relating Habermas’ concept of the Public Sphere with John Stuart Mill’s notion of liberty in democracies. Moving on, we problematise the nature of virtual testimony as a source of belief, information and knowledge. Lastly, we evaluate the epistemic grounds of action taken by the state and by SMS companies to promote epistemic virtue and their effectiveness in balancing power between the state, SMS and the users.
Section 1: The Virtual Public Sphere
The public sphere exists as a social realm construed in the structures of society. As Habermas notes, it is composed “of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state.” The resultant congregation of opinions and attitudes reflect the citizens’ affirmation or rejection of affairs, guiding the actions and policy of the state. In order to study the flaws of the internet as a medium of knowledge construction, we need to have in mind what the ideal public sphere looks like.
Section 1.1 Conditions of the ideal public sphere
Below lists 3 normative conditions for the public sphere to form (Graham 2009).
- Active participation by citizens in the political process, not merely through voting, but by actively discussing socio-political issues in their everyday lives. Informal political talk is integral to the public sphere. By lowering the barrier of entry into socio-political deliberation by, inter alia, casting more people to access and create knowledge, the internet increases participation in politics. (Lynch 2016)
- Freedom from state and commercial influence of media. The media ought to serve as a “critical eye” on all affairs, providing a large-scale communicative space on which the public sphere forms. It not only hosts discourse, it provides information to the citizenry from which beliefs are formed. The internet increases transparency, indirectly achieving this.
- The process of deliberation is integral to the public sphere. Habermas (2005, pp.288-289) puts forth that there are 2 types of political deliberation: the formal notion of deliberation within a formal, procedural framework such as in parliament, and an informal sense of deliberation which manifests in everyday political talk among citizens. The internet provides many more opportunities. While one could have reached hundreds of people by mail over months, a blog post can be viewed by thousands in seconds.
Section 1.2: The Public Sphere and Democracy
Assuming that the conditions of the public sphere are satisfied, we gain a free marketplace of ideas. This helps us make better decisions to solve socio-political problems.
This is Frederick Shauer’s “argument from truth” for free speech:
Just as Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” will ensure that the best products emerge from free competition, so too will an invisible hand ensure that the best ideas emerge when all opinions are permitted freely to compete. (1982: 161)
Similarly, John Stuart Mill noted that a nation becomes great by letting go, as there is much to gain by open discussion in On Liberty (1859). However, free speech alone is unproductive if the medium it travels upon is biased. A public sphere provides a sound platform for free speech and the exchange of ideas. Let us return to condition (3) — the requirement of rational deliberation in public spheres. Is this fundamentally possible?
Taking knowledge to be justified true belief (JTB), rationality then entails evaluating one’s own beliefs if they are justified and true instead of blindly embracing beliefs. Rationality also entails being able to defend one’s argument with an interlocutor with opposing views, and accept critique.
However, with there being much debate as to what constitutes knowledge in the first place the common epistemic ground for exchange of ideas seems small. The Gettier problem problematises JTB, and many other theories of knowledge have emerged. Given the complex nature of socio-political truths it becomes more difficult to be objective and certain. A post-modernist take on politics entails less regard for objective Truth; a positivist would beg to differ. Without shared epistemic principles, condition (3) is difficult to satisfy.
Furthermore, social and behavioural psychology reminds us that rationality is not the status quo of epistemic behaviour.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. (Kruger & Dunning, 1999) The Confirmation bias refers to the tendency of searching, interpreting and recalling information to buttress one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. (Armstrong & Plous, 1994) A cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning, difficult to overcome even with conscious effort.
These heuristics have deep epistemological implications. Even assuming Objective Truths are published and read, these biases prevent agents from believing those truths, or construe unsound justifications to justify unsound beliefs.
These epistemic and psychological issues pervade all aspects of thought. However, it is worsened by the internet as it is an exceedingly captivating informal sphere of discourse, with social media sites (SMS) not designed with sound discourse in mind. There are no chairpersons, procedures and structures designed to mitigate these issues, unlike formal spheres of deliberation.
In the next section, we analyse what goes on behind the free marketplace of ideas, to find out who is guiding the “invisible hand”.
Section 2: Changing the Way We Know
The internet is a large network of technological constructs which provides collaborative tools that aggregate information from its users using algorithms. SMS and search engines have to deal with the sheer vastness of the internet and keep users online as long as possible. Hence, they are not neutral inventions.
Section 2.1 What is the nature of knowledge construction online?
Virtual Testimony
The internet is, at its core, simply a network which connects people to other people. Truth is determined by consensus, via voting systems on social media and aggregation of knowledge on wikis. Information and arguments are transmitted by the network to various information containing nodes, which could be servers or other humans, via various rich mediums such as prose, speech, or video. Search engines enable the navigation within the vast networks on which information is stored on. This allows for great access to information, but at the same time inundates users with data.
Testimony is the main source of knowledge online. This requires trust in the source from which information is obtained, a highly subjective affair. As noted previously, confirmation bias results in people seeing what they believe. Testimony is unavoidable as a source of knowledge given the impossibility of ascertaining all of one’s beliefs empirically. By relying on testimony, more knowledge is obtainable in less time. However, this reliance on testimony further increases fragmentation and reduces the common epistemic ground for sound deliberation across opposing views. This is due to Testimonial Injustice.
Testimonial injustice, according to Miranda Fricker (2007), refers to the unjust determination that groups or individuals are no longer recognised as a possible credible source of information — even introspectively. She makes the central claim that there “is a distinctively epistemic kind of injustice,” injustice being “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower” (p. 1). Testimonial injustice manifests at what Fricker calls the “spontaneous, unreflective level” (p. 89). Testimonial injustice is resultant of “stealthier, residual prejudices, whose content may even be flatly inconsistent with the beliefs actually held by the subject. Certainly, we may sometimes perpetrate testimonial injustice because of our beliefs; but the more philosophically intriguing prospect is that we may very frequently do it in spite of them” (p. 36).
Testimonial injustice can manifest in credibility excess or deficit. In determining the trustworthiness of a source, one needs to “make some attribution of credibility regarding the speaker”(p.18).
When one’s prejudices and bias causes them to trust a testimonial source more than warranted, then an excess of credibility is allocated to that source; in that vein, a deficit refers to the irrational distrust of a particular source. This is coherent with confirmation bias previously explored.
Different people with different epistemic and political principles allocate different amounts of trust in the truth value of the same source, even though a source cannot be both true and false at the same time. Furtheromore, the quick retrieval testimony of the internet promotes the acquisition of superficial knowledge, or “Google-knowing”, which entails obtaining knowledge without properly understanding the basis of the belief and the process of justifying said belief. This hampers critical thought. (Lynch 2016)
For every political debate from affirmative action to gun law and LGBT rights, there exists statistics, social scientific studies and philosophical works for both sides of each argument, and the internet catalyses the retrieval and creation of this information. Whatever you want to believe, just Google it and you can find justification.
Let us consider 2 views of racial privilege and affirmative action:
- White privilege is a significant and pressing issue. Racial minorities are systemically oppressed, as whites have “an invisible package of unearned assets” (McIntosh 1989). Meritocracy is a myth, and affirmative action is necessary.
- White privilege is a myth. Racial oppression has long been eradicated from western societies, having no law which favours any race. Affirmative action is only reverse racism and is not fair societies where the best ought to be rewarded.
is premised on sources which (B) would likely denounce, and vice versa. Neither (A) nor (B) can offer arguments that the other will believe in, but both can easily retrieve volumes of statistics and academic works to support their claims using Google. By systematically allocating credibility excess and deficit to the sources in question, both parties are guilty of epistemic injustice, preventing sound deliberation. This is enabled by the architecture of knowledge. Within the two opposing beliefs and ideologies, the arguments exist as two separate coherent epistemic chains, leading to underdetermination despite both parties living in the same society. But in matters of governance, racial privilege cannot exist and not exist concurrently; both views are plausible, but only one is actionable. More fragmentation ensues.
While one could argue that Habermas’ notion of communicative rationality easily resolves this issue, the increasing socio-political fragmentation online hints that it is idealistic to hope communicative rationality takes place in an informal virtual discussion.
Again, the internet did not create these problems, but by equipping the masses with computers and SMS as platforms, it catalyses and exacerbates the issue. John Rawls noted that democracies ought to be “a plurality of reasonable yet incompatible comprehensive doctrines,” as but when both sides think that only the other side is unreasonable, what counts as rational?
Meme theory further illustrates how the “invisible hand” further tends away from rationality. Memes refer to idea or ideologies spreading within a culture much like how genes mutate and the successful dominate. As information spreads rapidly online, ideas organically become more viral as each individual modifies the meme, repackaging the same concepts or altering concepts themselves.. (Dawkins, 2016)
Berger & Milkman (2009) documented how content inducing activating emotions (e.g. awe, anger and anxiety) are more likely to become viral than content which does not induce emotions. The most successful memes are anger-inducing, reason clouding memes.
Section 2.2 Case study
The images on the following page show the “It’s okay to be white” meme, which was formulated on social media site 4chan.org
SMS seems provides a stage for shouting matches rather than bridging opposing viewpoints. Such behaviour is promoted by a shroud of anonymity and rapid information transition online. Again, behavioural psychology accounts for these problems, and the lack of epistemic common grounds leads to insults being hurled across instead of rational debate. The viral nature of these views causes more people to be exposed to these unsound political views, sowing seeds of prejudices in greater numbers. Prejudice is the basis of epistemic injustice. This creates a positive feedback loop, leading to perceived realities in the growing communities to deviate increasingly from the physical reality.
Complete human rationality is a pipe dream — an untenable ideal. It does not take an expert social scientist to see how the internet polarises the masses and leads to rather unfriendly exchanges empty of reason.
Section 3: How can Rationality Prevail?
Accepting the irrationality of human behaviour is the starting step to creating a system which doesn’t require rationality, and instead accounts for irrationality. In this section, I evaluate the grounds of individual and institutional measures in promoting a rational virtual public sphere.
Section 3.1 Embracing irrationality
To improve the epistemic state of affairs, Fricker prescribes the inculcation of epistemic virtue, adopting a social psychological approach in supporting her claim. Instead of proposing that humans simply overcome the subconscious fallacies and heuristics to become rational, she points to Monteith et al. (2002) model of programming subconscious virtuous behaviour for individuals. This involves:
- Act of epistemic injustice in response to A.
- External feedback to (1) (e.g. social condemnation)
- Introspection/reflection based on (2)
- Establishing new response when A
- Alternative response when A reoccurs
Fricker acknowledges that there is a limit as to what virtue on the individual level can do to alleviate the root cause of epistemic injustice, due to unequal power distribution and the systemic prejudices they generate. Curtailing epistemic injustice requires not only individual epistemic virtueuse but also collective socio-political shifts.
Furthermore, it is impossible to make the above feedback loop occur for everyone. Education and media literacy campaigns will also only have limited impact if the medium itself is problematic. One tangible, but extreme, solution would be to accept that SMS such as reddit.com and facebook.com are simply not a place for socio-political deliberation. This solves all our problems — at huge opportunity costs. Cases where the internet made the world a better place exists too. A prominent example is the Arab Spring, where the extensive aid of SMS — particularly twitter — allowed protesters to organise and raise awareness despite the host countries locking down on traditional media outlets. Truth prevailed.
At the same time, we see in China how the government clamping down on SMS and censorship resulting in an epistemic state of affairs probably unwelcome by most western democracies.
As it is, we cannot do without the internet. In the final section, we discuss the various measures that can possibly make rationality prevail.
Section 3.2 Weaving the Internet
It is important to acknowledge that the internet is entirely a human construct.
Every line of text, the position of the line of text on the screen, and whether if a link is even on the screen is resultant of another human’s decisions.
Recently, an Iranian influence operation targeting the U.S., U.K., Latin America, and the Middle East has been identified by FireEye. This operation uses inauthentic news sites and clusters of associated accounts across SMS to further political narratives aligning with Iranian interests. In response, reddit.com banned the suspected accounts and remove their content, but declined to reveal the process in which they identified them.
In response to his controversial activity Apple, Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify also banned the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his Infowars from their platforms, effectively censoring his online presence.
CEO Steve Huffman of reddit.com also modified comments onsite to reflect anti-trump sentiments and accusations of Facebook employees censoring conservative stories, revealing his ability to modify any users post on the site.
The companies behind internet technology have tremendous power over the users and even nations. The big platforms are not part of the internet, they are the internet — controlling the “invisible hand,” knowledge, and hence power intentionally or otherwise. Yet, there seem to be no real consequences for the firms because content is “organically” selected by algorithms, unobservable by the users themselves. We need more legislature —both domestic and international — from governments such as the Honest Ads Act and other laws punishing epistemic crimes such as propagating fake news.
Malaysia’s controversial Anti-Fake News 2018 bill was recently scrapped. Breaking it entailed a fine of up to $123,000 and six years imprisonment with fake news defined —in an undeniably vague and circular manner — as “news, information, data and reports which is or are wholly or partly false”. Such a definition is unacceptable. The process of legislation has to be done as a society to tread the thin line between censorship of free speech. To do so, we need to find epistemic common ground to determine what constitutes “fake” —for the complex and normative nature of political knowledge leaves opens up multiple conceptions of truth in the same reality.
Such legislation can create direct widespread changes to the virtual medium to account for human irrationality. Together with encouraging individual epistemic virtue and combatting epistemic injustice, legislation has to potential to realise the “invisible hand” from its chains. This will yield a truly free marketplace of ideas — the ideal virtual public sphere.
Conclusion
Can rational discussion prevail online? While impressive, the internet —particularly SMS — has never been designed with facilitating socio-political discourse in mind. This led to unprecedented issues — in nature and scale — and both welcomed and unwelcome influences in shaping the way we know, what we know and hence the world we live in. As the internet and technology take on greater roles in our lives, let us tread cautiously and responsibly to find common ground. Will the internet become a society-improving tool in the real world, or entrap us in nonsensical simulacra far detached from reality? Only time will tell.
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