Can we all get along to getting along?
Social media isn't the best place for discourse and deliberation, it turns out
The newsletter goes out a little later than usual today, which may seem inauspicious for the Chinese New Year, but all signs (as well as all efforts) point to the next ones being on time.
One thing to know about trolls, at least the type we commonly see and sometimes argue with on social media, is that they are regular people like you and me.
They do not, for example, wake up each morning thinking: "Why, yes, I think I'll spend my day spreading disinformation and being uncivil online for fun."
When I was a newly hired editor at Philstar.com, I used to engage with particularly angry commenters and try to explain that no, we weren't being paid to discredit the government nor are we in league with drug syndicates or terrorists.
One commenter, who initially wanted all of us to die, turned out to be a seaman who had been away from home for months and as anxious about how things were in the Philippines.
In "Information Dystopia and Philippine Democracy," Dr. Nicole Curato, a sociologist and an assistant professor at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra, writes that “social media is meant to facilitate social conversations that build emotional attachments to groups" and is not supposed to be part of the news and information ecosystem.
Social media, she also says, has become a lifeline for Filipinos across the globe to keep in touch with their families and friends.
"It is not an accident, therefore, that the platform designed for interpersonal connection makes the political personal. Our political identities are constructed by stylized expressions of what we feel using simplified cultural content like emojis and selfies, and personalized identifications of politicians like Bernie and Joe, and indeed, Tatay Digong and Inday Sara."
If social media users identify more with Tatay Digong and his more popular supporters, that is because they feel heard, as they should be.
"There has long been a demand for sites of listening in the Philippines—a country where voices of disadvantaged communities have often been dismissed as uneducated, stubborn, and corruptible," Curato writes.
While that role is still played by some in media — she mentions the Tulfos — social media has allowed users to bypass traditional media and air their grievances on, for example, pages dedicated to a particular town or city, or to listen to someone else who listens to them.
RELATED: The Tulfos are the face of Philippine Justice, and that should bother us
Although those social media pages serve as a means for the public to be better heard by local government officials, these can be targeted by "systematic attempts to sow doubt and seed disinformation in these private groups, through posts pretending to be casual comments but with malicious intentions and tactics."
"That these groups merge the social with the political makes these sites particularly vulnerable to disinformation," Curato writes.
A YouTube channel run by one of the president's supporters also runs on listening — of the host to his commenters, and of the audience to the host's attacks on the president's perceived enemies.
Curato describes the channel as "an unmitigated site of disinformation, commanding a large enough committed following to co-create and amplify falsehoods produced [there]."
Interestingly, one solution to this may be to take discourse offline since social media is not the best platform for it, nor was it meant to be.
My interaction with the angry seaman was memorable to me because it actually went somewhere.
"Twitter Discourse Mapping and Patterns of Disinformation: The Case of SEA Games 2019," a study led by Mary Joyce Borromeo-Bulao of Ateneo de Naga University, highlighted a "series of tweet exchanges [that] demonstrates how misinformation was corrected through a calm and open discussion online" precisely because it was the only one that went that way on what some have taken to calling a "hell site."
The rest of the tweets surveyed were "mostly curses, personal attacks, labelling, and strongly negative expressions" that were answered with "assertive tweets, usually personal attacks, insults, sarcasm, or harsh curse words."
Citing a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Curato says that "in response to political polarization, mistrust of experts, and the spread of disinformation, policymakers at both local and national level have conceded to the need for carefully designed and independently run inclusive deliberative forums to better connect ordinary citizens to democratic decision-making."
Although not yet a widespread practice in the Philippines, there have been attempts in Naga City, where a people's council of sectoral groups and representatives can help with policymaking.
"There are many other examples of participatory innovations outside of Naga City, all of which point to the fact that ordinary citizens are willing and able to process complex information and deliberate on technical issues when they are given the opportunity to scrutinize evidence and discuss their ideas with their fellow citizens and decision-makers," Curato writes.
An attempt at deliberation among residents of a community affected by killing in the "drug war" also showed promise, with participants finding value "in a careful, facilitated, and structured discussion, to hear each other's stories, to overcome the temptation to make quick judgments, and to go out of their bubbles and engage with others."
Disinformation, she says, may always be a problem, but can be "managed with a combination of large-scale political reform and micropolitical cultural shifts."
Possibly among those is not automatically assuming that someone on the opposite side of the political fence is doing it for the money—or because they are too dumb to know better.
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UP Visayas in Iloilo is hosting the 3rd National Conference on Democracy & Disinformation, a virtual gathering of mentors, media personalities, and experts in health and law, on February 22, 24, and 26.
Please sign up for "New Normal, New Media: The Emerging Challenges of Disinformation" through this link.