Samuel Hammond on gossip at scale

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Samuel Hammond writes,

Closed Facebook groups, subreddits, and Twitter niches are typically self-regulating or have formal moderators, and rarely cause problems. That all changes when one’s online interactions are allowed to propagate far beyond the boundaries of real-life or otherwise opt-in social networks.

. . .Facebook, for example, could easily dampen the tendency of high engagement, sensationalist content from going viral by restricting the visibility of posts that don’t originate from within your friend network or geographical area.

I am not sure how this would work. If it did work, it might prevent gossip from spreading as widely and rapidly as it does now. That in turn might attenuate the influence of gossip on our lives.

I think, though, that the key is getting people to recognize that large-scale society cannot operate by small-scale rules. A small group can adopt “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” A large, complex society cannot do so. A small group can choose not to live by liberal values and instead adopt a hard-edged moral code and live by myths and falsehoods. It works less well in large societies.

On line, people engage in small-scale social control in a large-scale setting. I suppose that trying to confine online activity to small groups is one approach for trying to stop that. I am skeptical that it can work.

16 thoughts on “Samuel Hammond on gossip at scale”

  2. One related reform that Trump can initiate unilaterally by executive order is to prohibit federal executive branch entities from creating social media accounts and from posting on them. Just about every federal agency has multiple social media accounts, none of which serve any useful purpose. There is no reason for the federal government to generate content for private, anti-democratic organizations. If the federal government wants to waste money on social media, let them buy their own platform and post there.

    The whole social media phenomenon though is beginning to seem so 15 minutes ago. Personally I have not had an account in years and more of my friends are disengaging as well. Would anyone even notice if the feds were off social media?

    • No poetry today?

      Separately, for me, you were on to something a few days ago when you referenced the current state of things vs. the old state (e.g. a constipated George Will).

      More precisely, I’m having trouble in understanding the difference between gossip and speculative analysis. Where is the line drawn? Example: is it not ok to discuss QAnon or George Floyd? Why not? And, is this really what ails us or this just a symptom of something larger?

      • Last came Anarchy; he rode
        On a white horse, splashed with blood;
        He was pale even to the lips,
        Like Death in the Apocalypse.

        And he wore a kingly crown;
        And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
        On his brow this mark I saw—
        “I am God, and King, and Law!”
        -Shelley

        You raise an excellent question. Framing is always a bigger issue. For most USA elites, history ended with the French Revolution. Fear of the commoners and the immutable law that the role of government was to keep the little people in their place is all that they have known ever since.

        But as a populist, I naturally would frame things differently. As of late the English Civil Wars, and in particular The Leveller movement with its message of peace and human equality, have been a source of inspiration. The ability of that movement to draw large rallies and to successfully pamphleteer are especially relevant today. As is An Agreement of the People: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Agreement_of_the_People_(1647)

        Elsewhere, the works of B.R. Ambedkar regarding the constitution of India are inspirational.

        Besides academic and historical books, there is of course Milton and Shelley writing for human dignity. And last night I finished The Children of the New Forest, a children’s book in a Rod Dreher vein about Royalist orphans learning to survive alone in the woods. Slashing anti-roundhead commentary, but sweeetly entertaining nonetheless.

        What separates a Glorious Revolution from a French Revolution might be one way to frame the bigger question. Another might be will the constitutional convention in Chile, if approved, promote human flourishing through peace, prosperity, and personal autonomy, or not.
        The horse is out of the barn on this business about the chaos of destabilizing gossip.

    • How about a rule that they can’t use accounts to evade public scrutiny?

      The feds (and FiveEyes, Japan, India) come out swinging against end-to-end encryption on the one hand, but on the other hand, it’s an open secret that all top leaders from both parties use Signal or WhatsApp or other end-to-end messaging apps to they can talk to each other and foreign leaders in very-hard-to-intercept and un-FOIAable ways.

      You might think Journalists would ask officials whether they do this, but then again, wouldn’t want to rock the boat, since otherwise, how are they supposed to chat and leak to journalists?

  3. Diversity is our weakness.

    Those small groups work because they lack the kind of ideological diversity that the coping mechanisms originating in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War were developed to handle. How do we agree to disagree, live and let live?

    The Peace of Westphalia said, “That’s what different countries are for, but within a country, you must agree.” That is, a country as a scaled-up small group.

    The British and Dutch took a more ambitious path and grasped toward a system of “Coexistence In One Country” that we recognize as ‘liberal’. This turns out to be really hard to sustain. The British eventually took a mingled, individualistic approach, while the tolerant Dutch had de facto segregated “pillarisation” which was maybe halfway to legal apartheid, Lebanese consociationalism, or Ottoman ‘millets’, (or the Venetian-invented ghettos.)

    Recently, people were complaining about this ‘lack of diversity’ feature of small groups and self-sorting, as a bug, not a feature: ‘epistemic closure’, ‘echo chambers’, ‘information ghettos and bubbles’.

    That is, to the extent they ‘work’, it’s not in the way we might hope (at least in terms of providing a model or example), and that ‘feature’ is often a consequence of like-mindedness and a limited range of opinion tending to reduce the frequency of major friction.

    I mean, the old Usenet had a lot of white-hot debates in small groups that worked about whether Kirk or Picard was the better Starship Captain, but these people were *not* arguing about whether Star Trek was an awesome franchise, on that they shared common ground.

    But how do you have any mingling institutions which recruit individuals from these different groups without inviting all kinds of hot conflict and controversy (a new big complaint about employers), and indeed, a struggle for domination over the institutions themselves, precisely so as to make them merely a scaled-up small group (like having a common religious orthodoxy does)?

    The thing is, group-size isn’t the issue. Diversity is the issue. This blog may not have a large readership, but neither is it in any way confined to a small group: it is not opt-in, it broadcasts to everyone who can share at will.

    A small group can easily be non-diverse, but a big group can have an ideological monoculture too, and both ‘work’ just as well. Small groups that have too much diversity and unstable can and do split up. What about big groups that can’t be split up this way, or shouldn’t be split up, like an “enclosure of the commons”?

    The liberal answer is not to pick size or scale, but freedom and tolerance, fairness and neutrality, and penalties for only a narrow range of expression traditionally recognized to be harmful and malicious under common law: defamation, incitement to violence, criminal conspiracy, threats, fraudulent misrepresentation, obscenity, child pornography, breaches of peace, tortious interference, sedition, unauthorized disclosure confidential information, and copyright violations.

    If you look at that collection, you will see that the common law has already generated the list of harmful gossip, which are kind of “terms of service violations” for a free country and liberal society, and all the case law that goes with it that helps professional adjudicators decide whether or not something crosses the line, the right to prosecute and adjudicate those matters probably best being kept as a purely sovereign prerogative.

    The state makes the rules, and if you think someone has broken the rules, you complain to the state in asking for justice about it, and all the common carrier public forum platforms’ hands are tied.

    • This was a good system as long as it worked, but as you’d mentioned the other day, rules don’t enforce themselves. The corollary seems to be that the system worked while the people at the top constituted an ideological “small group” with regard to this system. This looks unusual to us because we are used to political groups being constituted around economic and religious issues rather than whatever they constituted around. They might have had disagreements about taxes and some cultural issues and this and that, but it was at the level of disagreements between Star Trek fans about which captain is better. They didn’t think to weaponize the system itself, even when they did bend the rules (mustn’t forget that America got most of the way to where it is now before the current madness started less than a decade ago) the very fact of bending acknowledged the rules. This doesn’t seem to describe the present situation.

  4. Arnold, yesterday Tyler was wrong about Hayek. Tyler wrote

    “In my vision of Hayekian behavioral economics, people draw excessively upon local information, because they did not evolve with technologies that sometimes allow them to see global or at least non-local considerations. The properties of the price system mean this often works just fine, but the corny recommendation to “expand your horizons” is nonetheless often good advice. Also along Hayekian lines, people apply small group norms (atavism!) to large groups settings (Twitter!). “Don’t be so neurotic!’ is thus also at the margin usually good advice.”

    Hayek was well aware of how “small-scale” societies have been transitioning to “larger-scale” societies, including the “epistemological” consequences of such transition. The example of “small societies” applying the rule “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” was relevant for families and to a much lower degree for tribes, as Hayek acknowledged (sorry I don’t have time to find the exact reference but I’m sure you can ask Peter Boetkke). Hayek was not a lawyer but knew well about the law as shown by his writings (in particular, see Law, Legislation, and Liberty). His main point was that the history of law reflected that transition to “larger-scale” societies.

    Are we approaching the end of ALL societies and the start of just ONE BIG society? No. We are far away from that regardless of how the “one big” society is defined. We are still trying to find the few places where we can live free from others meddling into our business and the noise of the crowds (read this https://www.aier.org/article/the-death-and-life-of-the-great-third-place/ ). We know our places are not as safe as new generations of indoctrinated graduates from colleges want because we know that coexistence and tolerance for others imply taking risks. We know that social networks are not a threat because we can cut off others –yes, there is a price to be paid for preventing others to invade our privacy, but it’s not clear that this price is higher than ever before (my grandmother used to close the windows not to hear the crowd, and we can do the same). As usual, we’d like the price to be much lower, but protection is and will continue to be costly (just read any good account of who will guard the guardians).

    • It’s not gossip. The barbarians have taken over the press and social media. You better be ready for them. They will come after you too. They will use Pelosi and other D-lackeys to get you piecemeal.

      • I see three likely possibilities.

        1. Things go on as they are, and non-cutting-edge-woke messages will be driven entirely out of academia and news and into non-mainstream online ghettos, until even these are denied when internet service providers and payment processors exclude them too. If you think things are crazy now, wait until that’s a fait accompli.
        2. The state intervenes to insist on common carrier status, that is, companies must act as if they are operating under the same constraints as the state, a minor extension of what we already do in other areas.
        3. Prison gang politics, which means that the right organizes in a kind of solidarity quasi-union (just short of RICO liability) but using the same “just private people and companies acting within our rights to collectively discriminate however we like,” cover, and punches back twice as hard with boycotts, excommunication, cancellations, intimidation, deplatforming, and discrimination and selective enforcement, leading to a escalation of force until the cold civil war reaches a tense equilibrium or one side just gets crushed after a lot of pain and suffering and wasteful destruction.

        Now, it’s an interesting question how different kinds of non-progressive would rank these three outcomes.

        My rank is 2, 3, 1. A lot of establishment conservative types seem to favor 1, 2, 3. I think it is kind of bizarre for anyone to favor 3 over 2, but I think one has to admit that is the logical implication of the commonly defended notion that regulation of private companies in this particular way (even just to take away the government subsidy of their regulatory exorbitant privilege) is a line which must never be crossed … but just in this one area which happens to pose a problem severe enough that it is going to run our society off a cliff, and not in the thousand other areas the left approves of and we have apparently accepted as facts of life. That is, this logic says that it would be better to watch another “””private””” association of a political movement take the conflict to a whole other level with no guarantee of non-violent containment, than to tolerate the state telling socially-natural monopolies to be neutral so we can all coexist together secure in the understanding that we will be afforded equal voice and dignity despite our differences.

      • Some people say that the Republicans are throwing Libertarians under the bus.

        And maybe so, Oren Cass, call your office.

        But this kind of thing is Libertarians throwing all non-progressives under what an overloaded Routemaster.

  6. Isn’t Japan an example of a large complex society that lives by fairly strict codes and social norms that are enforced by the collective, as well as a cultural and educational system that emphasizes the group over an individual? They have adopted many liberal norms although some quite superficially. And the core of non-liberal values they hold would not be sustained in virtually any other large (>30 million person and medium area) country.

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