Changing minds on social media

Ages ago there was this really interesting article on how social media can be used to combat polarisation on highly divisive issues. The main key there was to avoid any kind of political labelling and focus on the issue rather than who was saying it, since normally we evaluate who as much as what. While Google Plus was great for attracting good faith debates with those outside your ordinary social circle, it still had its share of flamewars. This article describes a more dedicated project. It works - or at least it appears too - largely due to very common sense policies.

Reddit’s Change My View forum, founded in 2013 by Kal Turnbull, is an online space that promotes respectful conversation between people who disagree with each other. Its mission statement says that the subreddit is “built around the idea that in order to resolve our differences, we must first understand them.” Turnbull says that he created Change My View because of what he saw as a lack of places to turn to if you wanted to discuss an issue with people who took the opposite perspective. 

Change My View’s success largely rests on its strict rules and the dedicated team of moderators who enforce them. The rules are one of the main things that users like about the forum, both because they mean that anyone who is behaving in a disruptive way is removed and because they set expectations about the environment that mean that users can operate under an assumption of good faith. Change My View’s rules system works because it is consistent, intuitive, and transparent. The moderation is predictable, and users modify their behaviour accordingly.  

Change My View’s most important lesson is one that applies beyond its moderated walls, one that anyone who has tried to engage in a productive political argument likely already knows. If you want to convince, meet people where they are rather than where you want them to be. “People respond better if you don’t start out guns blazing, accusing them of being dumb or nefarious,” Weeks says. “The most important thing you can do is listen to people,” says another moderator, Brett Johnson, a project manager in Houston who is 36. “If people feel heard and understood, they are more likely to listen to what you have to say.” 

“People feel that changing their view is somehow losing … that it’s this embarrassing thing,” he says. “We are trying to change that perspective.” To an impressive extent, he has succeeded. Johnson says that this attitude is what initially intrigued him about Change My View when he came across it three years ago. “I found it to be a unique place,” he says. “Most places on the internet, most places in the world, they reward you for being right. But this was a community that celebrates being wrong.”

Of course the most obvious question is how much of a selection effect is at work, both in terms of visitors and those who are removed. It seems plausible that if you're going to visit such a site, you're more likely to be receptive to having your mind changed anyway - you'll be more receptive to reasonable arguments than if you encountered a stranger on the street or dark alleys of the internet. And if all the people who don't cooperate get banned, wouldn't that also increase the perceived level of success ? There are more subtle aspects to this too :

Some of them view the conversations they have there as a game; these users tend to be law students practising for the bar exam, or former high-school debate stars who think of argument as a sport. 

I'll take this opportunity to repeat my arguments against rhetoric. Learning rhetorical techniques is a fine thing, but if you don't actually understand the arguments at hand, they're at best distracting and at worst dangerous. This is my problem with politics at the moment (or at least more so right now than in recent years). Watch the UK House of Parliament in a debate and you will witness politicians deftly dodging and parrying each others' verbal swipes. You'll see them unfazed by attacks and turn their defensive postures into aggressive ones. All this requires oratorical skill and argumentative experience... but what you will see precious little of is them actually answering the f*"!@ing question. They have learned to be rhetorical rather than analytical, fixated on - to use a horrible cliché - style rather than substance. They've learned how to slander and discredit their opponents, not address their arguments. Learning rhetoric is valuable, but as Plato pointed out at length, it does not make one more critical or engender a more sincere desire to get at the truth.

A final point :

“But at the same time, the more people see those views being surfaced, they become normal. Are we contributing to an atmosphere where really terrible views that previously would have had no place to go are given a little bit of sunlight?”

Without knowing that much about the site, my gut instinct would be, "no". One internet forum is not nearly enough to legitimise views so I doubt it could significantly contribute to growth, especially with strict moderation. Discussion of views is also very different to promotion. If people really are engaging in truth-seeking dialogue, then terrible views ought to come out thoroughly discredited. As they say, such views might otherwise find safe harbour elsewhere where they will be actively encouraged rather than challenged. And if you don't at least provide counter-arguments to a claim, then anyone searching for that claim will inevitably only find arguments in favour of it.

The difficult part is how to implement such forums as the norm rather than the rule.

Civil Discourse Exists in This Small Corner of the Internet

The subreddit Change My View is built on the proposition that we've at least got to listen to people we disagree with. Imagine a place on the internet where a post that begins with "I'm not a feminist" is met with comments quoting Virginia Woolf and asking serious, clarifying questions.