Wake up and smell the covfefe: how the internet shapes our beliefs and why experts need to adapt or die

Sometimes, when people believe things that probably aren’t true, other people die. Anti-vaccination rhetoric causes death by measles. Islamophobia kills refugees in the Mediterranean. Climate change denial may well destroy our planet and end human life as we know it.

The Bowling Green Massacre in the US, reports of Russians hitting Idlib terrorist warehouses, and stories about German soldiers assaulting teenagers exemplify the more insidious ways in which falsehoods can be weaponised. Flaws and biases in human reasoning can be exploited to turn countries and people against one another, undermining faith in democratic institutions, governments, elections, the media and civil society.

The internet, it seems, is making it easier to spread these kinds of ideas, and to get others to believe them. It’s not just an academic issue, but academic ideas can help us to understand where what’s happening, where we’re going wrong, and steps we might take towards remedying the problem. As someone writing their thesis about the ways in which people decide who and what to believe online, I’ve been trying to figure out how best to write about this for a while. This is the end result.

I want to talk about a few different things here. First, I want to question why you’re reading this at all. Why should you believe me? If we’re in the business of understanding why people read or believe some things or people rather than others, then it’s a good idea to start at home.

After that, we’re going to look at what’s new, and what’s not. The problems of “post-truth” and “alternative facts” are not new, and a lot of the reporting that suggests they are is sensationalist and unhelpful. But what is different about the internet? How does it change the ways in which we interact with knowledge, facts, data, and information? The problems haven’t really changed, but the media that we use alter the ways we encounter and navigate them.

Finally, we’re going to grapple with the problems facing experts trying to be heard online. Why can’t they communicate well? What’s the deal with “authenticity”? And how do you argue in a way that makes a difference?

I’ll be dropping in various ways in which we construct credibility and authority as we go. See those last three paragraphs? Those were signposting.

Why should you believe anything I say?

One of the only reasons that people are likely to read this or take seriously the things I’m saying is because I am a PhD researcher at a prestigious research institution. I also have a (relatively) shiny website filled with content curated to make me look like a Person Who Knows Things.

My chances of being read and believed could probably be improved if I hyper-specialised: got rid of the bits on the site about mental health and debating and academia more broadly construed, and slimmed the website down to a sleek set of pontifications on the concepts of expertise and authority, ideally limiting myself to the online arena. You would be less likely to believe me if my spelling or grammar were out of whack, or if this site were written entirely in Comic Sans, or if some of my other posts consisted of anti-Semitic screeds. 

This kind of ultra-specificity is what we’ve come to expect from our experts: the more niche your topic area, and the less you deviate from it in your self-presentation as an author, the greater the likelihood that you’ll attract an audience. Moreover, it builds your Personal Brand as an academic/expert/authority/Thought Leader. It makes you more likely to get picked up by journalists who will propel you to expert status on a topic by dint of being seen on the set of the BBC with your name and credentials displayed underneath.

If you want to be listened to and called upon by “accepted authorities”, branding yourself as someone who knows about or does a particular thing is really important. Academic friends of mine (and others who are just academics – though it helps me to say that I have friends who are academics and whom people might have heard of) often do this in their Twitter handles: there’s The Lit Crit Guy, Early Modern John, Philosophy Bro, Philosophy Bites, Nuclear Anthro, and so on. Their names tell you what they do, like intellectual superheroes. In turn, that helps (in conjunction with a lot of hard work, raw talent and other kinds of skill and achievement) to develop a following on that particular subject. The brand matters a lot. I probably shouldn’t have called this blog timsquirrell.com, but I like to think I’ve got a silly enough name that people will forgive that particular slip.

Expertise, and the ability to be listened to and believed on a topic, is constructed rather than inherent. We believe people who have credentials, who specialise, who are already recognised as experts, who have endorsements from other already-recognised experts, and who present themselves as being free of biases and vested interests in a manner that is eloquent and engaging. None of these things tell us that a person is right about a particular thing or should be believed in a given instance, but they’re often the best indicators we have. It’s important for us to be aware of how they’re being used, regardless of the platform we’re on. 

What’s new about the web?

The web’s form influences how we produce, consume and disseminate information. Those universal, indirect indicators of expertise I outlined above are remoulded and supplemented by the internet, its design and its affordances (the things that it allows you to do, which paths to doing those things it makes easiest, and the limitations it places on you).

This is true of any medium. We are beginning to come to terms with the problems that are exacerbated by the internet, but they are not new problems: people have always had to decide what to believe. And because the world is deeply complex and nobody has the time or other capacities required to learn everything directly by experience, what we believe in most domains will always be a function of who we believe. That in turn is influenced by a vast array of different factors, but it’s not something that is dictated by “logic” or “reason”.

So, what’s new about the internet? For a start, we’re going to be talking about two things that are separate but interlinked: the general affordances of the web, and the specific affordances of the platforms that exist on it.

General Affordances

1. Attention Economy

The internet is big. Really, really big. A site that I believed because it was one of the first results in my Google search told me that 500 hours of footage are uploaded to YouTube every single minute. 6000 tweets are made every second. Reddit has over 3 billion comments. We have to be discriminating about what we decide to attend to. Attention is the most important currency, and for us that’s important because it makes up half of the equation for belief. Belief is, essentially, exposure times credence. If you’re not exposed to something, it won’t shape your beliefs. In order to sway people, you first have to get them to see your content.

2. Hyperlinking 

One of the key things that differentiates the internet from other media is that different places can link to one another. This does a few things. (1) It means that one author or website can recommend another by linking to it (think of the “blogrolls” you used to see on the sidebars of pre-Web 2.0 blogs), and drive traffic to that site. (2) It also plays a huge role in search engine algorithms, and given that search engines are the go-to for finding content, that makes hyperlinks important. (3) It means that people can use links to build their own credibility. If you’ve ever been in an argument on the internet, you’ll likely have encountered Those People who send you fifty different links that purport to back up their argument and then berate you for not reading them (as if you have time to read all of them and find exactly what they’re talking about before dissecting it in order to win a Facebook argument). Citations can be weapons.

3. Search engines

Search engines are the key way in which people tend to navigate the internet. That’s why search-engine optimisation (SEO) is such an important skill. Most people will never go beyond the first few results on Google, and their likelihood of going to the second page unless they’re a student trying not to get caught using the same sources as everyone else is practically nil. There’s a lot of speculation recently, for example, about the capacity of Google to influence elections purely by changing the order in which they rank search results. And the lack of realistic search engine competition (sorry, Bing) means that Google has a de facto monopoly on controlling what people click on when they look for things online.

Search engines also mean that people are able to instantly “fact-check” any statement. It might sound useful, but it’s treacherous: because we seem to have the capacity to check anything, we feel as though we’ve become empowered. We are the masters of our own beliefs, no longer beholden to experts telling us what to think. Doctors have come to dread patients coming in with print-outs and self-diagnoses from WebMD, and everyone’s little brother is now an expert on political theory because they read a couple of articles on Rational Wiki. But these two examples indicate the problem. We have the ability to search and find anything we want, but what we don’t have is the tacit knowledge – the know-how – to separate the good from the bad, and to figure out who and what is worth listening to.

4. Accessibility

For a long while, an area of intense scholarly focus was the “Digital Divide”: the idea that there was a separation between the kinds of demographics that go on the internet and the kind that do not. Those who were online were young, wealthy, white, western and so on. Whilst it is still the case that the majority of the world does not have access to the internet, access has become far more widespread in recent years. The panicked messages I received from my friend after their granny commented on my Facebook status, and the popularity of the subreddit “Old People Facebook”, would also seem to indicate that there is less of an age divide than there used to be. Pretty much anyone can make a website and get their voice out there.

The idea of the internet as a great leveller between elites and publics was predicated in part on this accessibility: anyone could put their views online, and the most articulate and interesting and logical would attract the most readers. Ha.

However, whilst you’re unlikely to be able to get your site to the front page of Google for any decent number of searches, you can still gain a sizeable following, no matter how niche your subject of interest. That means that researchers are able to put their material out there for a wider audience, and independent film makers can make really weird content like that horrible deep web video I watched with a man crying whilst eating soup. However, it also means that the kinds of people who used to write racist pamphlets now have websites, and they’re able to burnish their credentials in all kinds of ways (listing their subjects of expertise and the different places their writing has been featured, writing testimonials for themselves, and doing a lot of the other things that I’ve done on other pages on this site).

There are a number of other things that the internet changes (enough to fill a lot of books), but those listed above are probably enough to give you some idea of how our propensity to believe some things or people over others might be shaped by the medium we find ourselves using.

Specific Affordances

Let’s move on to specific affordances. These are the features of individual sites that influence our habits and behaviours. Because there are so many platforms, and they each have so many features to unpack, I’ll only cover them briefly here.

1. Facebook 

(1) Facebook has a hidden algorithm that influences what content you are shown. This tends to skew towards content that is like that which you have previously clicked, reacted to or otherwise engaged with. As such, it tends to reinforce our beliefs to some extent. This is also true of groups that tend to collect like-minded people. See, for example, “Leftbook”. (2) There’s a strong skew towards recency. That shapes the kinds of things you’re likely to be talking about, so you’re probably seeing things based on how recent they are and how salient Facebook thinks they are to you, rather than based on their quality alone. (3) You primarily see things that have been posted by those you are friends with, and so there’s a skew towards being shown and interacting with those that you have met and spent time with. (4) The like/react functions tend to be self-reinforcing. When you’re reading through a Facebook argument which is 100 comments long, you’re likely to primarily read those comments that have been most liked already as an indicator of quality, and from there you’re more likely to pile on and like those comments. People who are good at writing things that garner a lot of likes from the first people to read them are more likely to have their opinions seen and given credence by others later on. (5) Facebook’s governance structure is quite pro-“free speech”. A recent Guardian exposé of the Facebook moderation regime showed that moderators were instructed to allow through the net a lot of content that many people would find objectionable. Shocking or graphic content that is allowed on Facebook often becomes highly viewed as a result of the ease of sharing content on your own timeline.

2. Twitter

This is a platform designed in such a way that it is almost impossible to change others’ minds. Why? (1) The 140 character limit means that disagreements are famously confrontational: it lends itself to bon mots, reaction GIFs, snippy one-liners and insults more than discursive engagement. (2) The follower system means that you’re highly unlikely to be exposed to dissenting opinions unless you actively seek them out or someone you follow retweets them with a disparaging comment attached. (3) Changing someone’s mind usually means engaging with their core beliefs, rather than specific examples. So when alt-right commentator Paul Joseph Watson gets “schooled” by a historian on ethnic diversity in the Roman Empire, the core tenet of his argument (that political correctness has gone mad and is rampant in state institutions) hasn’t been challenged; rather, he might have been proven wrong on just one instantiation of that principle. (4) Any attempt to engage at deeper levels requires users to thread their tweets together, or link to longer pieces on other platforms. Twitter has a very low click-through rate to external sources, rendering this pretty ineffective.

The upshot of this is that Twitter has a tendency to reinforce pre-existing beliefs rather than challenge them in any meaningful way. Inside groups who share beliefs, those who have the most followers are likely to be taken the most seriously. That tends to privilege those with social status elsewhere, or those who are particularly good at manipulating the constraints of the medium to produce wit and humour within 140 characters, rather than, say, those who are best able to articulate arguments.

3. Reddit

For a full exposition of Reddit’s functionality and the way that its design influences its users, it’s worth checking out the work of Adrienne Massanari, who is thus far the only academic to have written a book about the site. Her recent paper on GamerGate and The Fappening is enlightening: it argues that Reddit’s design, algorithm and platform politics support the creation of “toxic technocultures”. How so? (1) It’s very easy to create an anonymous account and a subreddit, so barriers to participation are low. It took me about 2 minutes to make /r/Ivory_Tower. (2) Reddit’s “karma” system works in such a way that opinions which are popular with site viewers (who tend to be young, white, male, geeky/nerdy, Western, and reasonably educated) are the most visible on the site because they get upvoted the most; moreover, karma becomes a signifier of social standing (in the same way as points do in other gamified environments) and this further incentivises posting in such a way that lurkers on the site are likely to agree with you. (3) Reddit has a very loose governance structure. Administrators refuse to ban communities or users for anything less than flagrant violation of the few rules that reddit has (for example, against doxxing, inciting  violence, spamming, revenge porn, and a few other things that are either illegal or on the borderline). There are a number of communities which operate in a grey area where they are de facto breaking the rules, but with enough plausible deniability that they don’t get banned (e.g. KotakuInAction, home of GamerGate, and The_Donald, home of Trump’s fanbase).

What’s going wrong, and how do we fix it?

The key takeaway from the above is that the medium on which we communicate influences the messages we’re able to send and how they’re received. When we think about why people come to and maintain certain belief systems, we have to think about the platforms on which they’re consuming information. They might be searching the web for themselves, but blindly reading PubMed abstracts to understand nutrition isn’t helpful unless you understand how to read a scientific paper, and you’re systematic about which ones you read.

With these issues in mind, we can have a slightly more focussed discussion about what the specific problems are right now.  I want to talk about three main things: the difficulty of communicating science and other academic-type information, the importance of authenticity online, and the difficulty of tackling core beliefs.

Communication

In science and academia, there are high premiums placed upon the ability to communicate your research to wide audiences, but how to do so effectively is still seen as fairly mysterious. Getting an article into a mainstream newspaper or onto a big site is lauded as an excellent achievement, but it tends to be a fairly small subset of people who do so consistently.

Social media is simultaneously seen as an important way to raise your profile, and also a waste of time that might make it difficult for you to find jobs in the future if you’re too outspoken. Most of the high-up researchers I know have very little social media presence, and without that they’re less likely to be approached by journalists (who are very engaged with Twitter in particular) asking them to engage with issues on a larger stage. Given that exposure is necessary to be believed, it probably behoves academics who are frustrated with the prevalence of “alternative facts” to cultivate a social media presence such that they can expose a wider audience to their thoughts.

The way in which research is presented in journal articles and conferences is often incomprehensible to all but those in the same field. That means that being heard and being believed by others necessitates writing and speaking in ways that are more accessible. In order to do that, you have to ditch some of the scholarly jargon and instead talk in terms that people understand. Our facility with technical language is helpful in academic contexts, but when you’re arguing with Brendan O’Neill on Radio 4, or trying to engage with the latest Alt-Right mouthpiece on Reddit, what matters more than academic precision is eloquence and the ability to articulate your ideas in a way that is rhetorically appealing.

It’s also important to learn to communicate within the restrictions of the medium. If you’re saying something on twitter, and someone else is saying the opposite, the tweet that is more likely to get picked up and believed is the one by the person with more followers, and the one that is more snappily written. Facebook privileges visual content over text, so you’re always going to get dwarfed by Britain First if you’re writing long-form Facebook Notes. If you post something to Reddit, you have to bear in mind that votes dictate visibility, and votes are weighted logarithmically, so the first ten count as much as the next one hundred in visibility terms. On YouTube, asking your audience to “Like, Comment and Subscribe!” is actually a vital prompt to push up the visibility of your videos, because each of those functions counts for a lot more than a simple view does. Your academic blog is much more likely to get hits from outside of your discipline if you use SEO techniques: link to other places and get them to link to you, make sure that your description texts have relevant keywords in them, and share it wherever you can.

The other thing to bear in mind is that often the people you want to persuade just aren’t the same people using the platform you’re on. Twitter, for example, is disproportionately populated by young people, journalists, politically active people and so on. Whilst your tweets might get picked up by Buzzfeed and peddled out to a wider audience, tweeting in and of itself doesn’t necessarily reach anyone but people who are likely to agree with you in the first instance (especially because engaging with people who disagree with you on twitter is the discursive equivalent of stick your face in a wasps’ nest). The successful dissemination of information is still primarily dictated by your social network. My most successful piece in quite some time, a guide to writing undergraduate essays, only ended up in the Guardian because a journalist Facebook friend of mine saw it on my Facebook and mentioned it to her journalist friend, who happened to be doing a piece of undergraduate essay writing. Branching out to platforms and outlets that you haven’t previously used is a fantastic way of reaching new audiences, but you have to make sure you frame your pitches and pieces in such a way that they appeal to that audience. Be aware of the demographics who read particular sites, the kinds of things they value, and what turns them off.

Some of the best examples of effective communication are in the natural sciences. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a master of using multiple mediums to reach bigger audiences, appealing to the geeks of reddit, the jokesters of Twitter, and a public that loves to be wonderstruck by the universe’s majesty. Richard Dawkins, for all his flaws, is very good at putting across his views in a persuasive way both in person and over Twitter, whether we like to admit it or not.

YouTube has exemplary communicators: Minute Physics, CGP Grey, and Vox are all doing it right, taking advantage of the affordances of the medium to produce content that’s shareable. On Facebook, it’s important to put closed captions on your videos so that people can view them without sound whilst they’re scrolling their feed. Vox does that.

In the podcast world, Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds’ Philosophy Bites and Philosophy 24/7 are excellent examples of good marketing and branding that gets exposure: reasonably short interviews with highly-regarded academics on specific, engaging topics.

What these all have in common is that they recognise the audience that they are going for, they have strong branding, and they turn the medium to their advantage. On the other side of the political spectrum, the Alt-Right are doing the same thing. Rebel Media, pre-downfall Milo Yiannopoulos, and Donald Trump give masterclasses in how to utilise the affordances of web platforms to your advantage. Milo, for example, used the 140-character restriction of Twitter as an outlet for withering put-downs and provocations, rallying anonymous followers around him and recognising that it was a medium designed for confrontation, not persuasion. They all take advantage of the recency biases of most platforms by consistently churning out content, engaging and energising their audiences and making sure they are never forgotten. I hate to say it, but academics could benefit from taking a leaf out of the alt-right’s book.

Authenticity

The issue with social media and the constant exposition of large chunks of our lives to the scrutiny of others is that it means that nothing is forgotten, and maintaining a coherent self-presentation is incredibly difficult. It used to be the case that we could partition off different presentations of our selves for different contexts, such that the professional and the personal would never mix. Social media changes this, creating what danah boyd calls “context collapse”: you’re talking to everyone at once, whether you know it or not. That means you have to present yourself in such a way that you can talk to everyone at once without compromising the integrity of the narrative you’ve created about yourself for any given audience. It’s why people get scared about adding their family or colleagues on Facebook: they know a different version of you to the version that your friends know.

Because it’s practically impossible to maintain narrative coherence in your self-presentation, that makes an appearance of authenticity vital. Politicians do incredibly badly on Twitter when they’re seen as inauthentic, and they do very well when they’re seen as authentic: think post-2015 Ed Miliband, or Ruth Davidson, or even Donald Trump. Likewise, celebrities who do AMAs on Reddit are most successful when they’re seen as authentic, revealing themselves without the facade of screens and scripts and editing – Bill Gates would be a great example here, Woody Harrelson would be a terrible one. If you carve out a self-image of authenticity, then it’s easier to take the blows that inevitably come with using the internet, because you can hold up your hands when you’ve done wrong and admit it. This is part of why it’s becoming easier for politicians to admit to things like smoking weed, or using poppers – it’s not just because those things are becoming more acceptable, but because everyone has to be prepared to have their “embarrassing” secrets made public, and we are more forgiving of the mistakes of people who admit to them, or own them, as a result of that. 

Large chunks of the establishment – politicians, more mainstream journalists, scientists and academics and lawyers and so on – have real trouble presenting themselves as authentic online, and that makes it harder for them to connect with people. That means they are less likely to be engaged with, and consequently less likely to be believed or given credence. It doesn’t matter that Milo spouts nonsense that he manages to pass off as social theory. He’s believed over stuffy leftie academics because he engages with his fans in a way that tells them he is authentic, that he cares about them and can relate to them. Crucially, he relays his ideas in ordinary language that’s accessible and often (arguably) funny. 

Core beliefs

I think probably one of the key problems associated with arguing on the internet is that nobody wins. And I don’t mean that in the “ha ha, you’re all silly for arguing on the internet, what a waste of time, you’re all as bad as each other”, way. I mean that when you argue online, you’re primarily engaging over specific pieces of content or small things. If you imagine beliefs as trees, then the core belief (say, Islamophobia) is the trunk, the key concepts are the branches (Muslims are terrorists, Islam is taking over Europe, Muslims want Sharia Law in the UK/US/Australia/wherever), and the single news stories are the leaves. Those news stories are, more often than not, what we’re arguing over. Refuting the factual accuracy of some story in Breitbart does precisely nothing to take down the trunk of the tree, or even the branch. Questioning the credibility of Breitbart itself might help a bit, insofar as it’s an outlet that produces a lot of leaves, but it still doesn’t shake the core beliefs themselves.

A lot of internet platforms have a bias towards recency, using algorithms or other means to show us the things happening right now. That means we tend to be arguing over the news stories of the day, rather than necessarily the biggest/most important things. Because of that, we’re more often than not arguing over the shade of a particular leaf, or whether some branch might be rotten (I’m so sorry for this metaphor), rather than whether the tree itself could perhaps be cut down. That’s a real issue when it comes to trying to prevent the propagation of beliefs that we might consider to be actively harmful, like anti-vax or climate skepticism or anti-Semitism. When you just engage with the data given, you’re not attacking the core issues: things like distrust of establishment institutions, which is often caused by other forms of disenfranchisement or simply a failure to explain why those institutions merit trust.

The way to combat this is to engage with the trunk of the tree. A good example here is Vox: they produce videos that are short, but which manage to take a relevant recent news story and spin it into something that informs a broader idea or argument. Their videos on the South China Sea and the rise of ISIS are great examples of the purely educational, but their takes on the Trump administration are wonderfully shareable bits which highlight and analyse the central issues created by this government, rather than just reporting on a particular story.

Conclusions

As well as the specific suggestions above, I have a few tentative, broad-stroke suggestions for the direction we should take to resolve some of these issues. I think it’s incredibly important to educate our educators in such a way that they’re able to engage effectively, using accessible language and eloquence and rhetoric and analytical rigour. I think that we need to have a serious think about the ways in which the platforms we use might encourage or discourage critical thought and engagement. I think that scientists and academics need to be encouraged and given the tools to build social media profiles that will allow them to reach wider audiences and be heard over others who might claim to be experts (and who are always going to be ready and willing to speak, no matter they lack of qualification). But the main thing I’m trying to do with this piece is to gently nudge people in the direction of thinking about how the platforms we use shape the kinds of discussions we have, and how those discussions influence our beliefs. We’ve always been living in a post-truth world, but we’re more aware of it now. To turn that to our advantage, we have to understand how it operates. This is the first step on that journey.

4 things I learned in a year of PhD work

N.B. this post would more accurately be titled “5 things…”, but the fifth thing I learned is that nobody ever reads the preamble on list posts, so let’s get straight to it.

1. School life is a delicate balance

I wrote last year about the potential loneliness of postgraduate life. This was a particularly big issue for me doing a masters at a new university, away from most of the friends that I’d made over the past four years. I’m happy to say that my social situation has improved, and I find myself a lot more contented with life in the PhD than in the research masters. This is partly because of simple things: I have a desk in an office in my department now, which makes it easy to feel part of a community; I teach quite a lot, which means I get (a kind of) regular social interaction; and I just know more people and have more stable relationships with them. The transition from undergrad wasn’t easy, and life as a postgrad is always going to be different – less emphasis on knowing lots of people, more work, less partying, more work, less vegetating in bed, more work – but it can be every bit as (or more) fulfilling.

One way of making it fulfilling is to get involved in school or department events. Helping to run things is a useful way of getting to know people, getting your name and face around the school, and earning the academic equivalent of brownie points. If you’re lucky, you might even get paid. Just going along to coffee mornings, seminars and so on is a really useful way of making sure that people are nice to you when they see you around the department building. It might also allow you to know that other things are happening in the event that you get left off the departmental PhD mailing list for 8 months (…). Even without all that, it’s a good opportunity to talk to interesting people who do interesting things, and maybe even get a few ideas for your own work. You also get the chance to explain what you’re doing at the moment to other people who are likely to understand it, which can help you to work through issues you might be having (academic or pastoral) and get new ideas or references that you might never have heard of otherwise.

With that said, it’s easy to make yourself too available and have all of your time sucked up through your department. Sometimes it’s necessary to shut yourself away and just work, and it’s important to make sure that you’re able to do that. You could probably, if you wanted, go to so many events – academic development workshops, careers opportunities, seminars, inaugural lectures, department drinks, lecturer try-outs, etc – that you would have no time at all to actually do your research. Probably don’t do that. Having a free day or two every week or so is a really helpful way to plough through some reading or writing, provided you don’t end up on a Netflix and Guilt binge.

2. Teaching is the best

Honestly, the best thing I’ve done this year is get into tutoring. There are actually very few opportunities to teach in my own subject area, as Science and Technology Studies has a fairly small undergraduate presence and postgrad courses are usually small enough that they don’t require extra tutors. Instead, I’ve been teaching Sociology and Social Policy, both at the first year level. I have no formal qualifications in the latter, but I’ve spent a lot of time engaging with politics through debating, and a once-over of the reading list was enough to get me to the point of being able to teach it (I would hope) reasonably well. Very little of my undergraduate was sociology, but most of my PhD and second masters was sociologically grounded, so teaching that has been a bit easier. It’s also given me the opportunity to (re)learn sociological fundamentals in such a way that I feel the rest of my knowledge has become a lot more grounded.

First year students in subjects like these are an eclectic mix of those who are taking it as their major, those who are really interested in it as an outside course, and those who don’t really care but are there regardless. The hope is that you can stimulate the first two sets, and engage with the third in such a way that they end up enjoying it. You can’t always succeed in all of these objectives, but tutoring at the first year level allows you the unique opportunity to colour those students’ perceptions – for better or worse – of university and teaching at undergraduate level. I think that’s quite a gift, and it’s one that I’m really grateful for. I’m working on producing some extra resources (explainers in video and text form of some of the trickier topics) for next year, and I’m heading up the Sociology 1A tutoring team as Senior Tutor next semester, which is another really exciting challenge.

Whilst marking gets a really bad rap, it can also be incredibly rewarding. Often students will have very little experience of essay writing at a high level, and you get to shape the way in which they’re going to approach future writing projects. That’s important, because so many students come in with surprisingly few essay writing and analytical skills, and ameliorating that is absolutely key to achieving further down the line.

Depending on where you are, teaching can also be pretty well-paid, and it’s likely to pay dividends further down the line with respect to employment opportunities. 10/10 would recommend to a friend.

3. It’s never too early to write

One of the common horror tropes I heard about the PhD was of the student who spent two years reading, researching, revising their research questions, analysing their data and faffing around with fonts, only to find that they only had six months left to write the actual thesis. Invariably they would go over time and end up scrabbling around for extra funding or dipping into their savings to tide them over until they could get the damn thing submitted, all whilst trying to crack out thousands of words every day for months on end. 

That’s one way of doing the thesis. But aside from the obvious stress-related problems and potential time issues towards the back end of your allotted time, I think that it exacerbates some of the other more tricky parts of the process. Specifically, it’s very easy to feel lonely, disconnected and like your work has very little merit and isn’t anchored in all that much if you haven’t written more than a couple of sentences since you began.

I think writing from day one helps. For some this might mean writing a small amount every single day, just charting what you’ve done and what you need to do and so on. For me, it tends to mean taking a couple of days every few weeks to crank out a decent quantity of words. I’m a reasonably quick writer when I have an idea of what I want to do, and I can usually get about 5k done in a day or two of set-aside writing time.

Now obviously I haven’t finished yet (and fingers crossed I will one day), and I only have my own experience of doing this to write from, but I think this has been helpful. When people (inevitably, invariably, infuriatingly) ask how the thesis is shaping up, it’s a lot less demoralising when you’re able to say that you actually produced some words for it last week. It’s unlikely that they’re going to be the final words of the thesis itself, but it’s much easier to refine arguments that you’re already produced once, later on, than it is to come up with those arguments from scratch. Moreover, those words let me feel like what I’m doing has some shape and substance, and mentally clocking up the amount I’ve written since last August is a helpful way of bolstering my confidence against the periodic tremors of impostor syndrome.

Nothing terrifies me more* than the idea of coming up on the submission deadline with nothing more than a nicely formatted title page. Regardless of whether it actually helps speed up the process, it’s comforting to know right now that I have a cushion of words to fall on when academic insecurity periodically defenestrates me through the fifth floor window of the mental health hotel.

*exceptions include the inexorable approach of oblivion, and wasps.

4. People will start listening to you – maybe too much, but it probably still won’t feel enough

One of the stranger things that’s happened over the past year or two is that people have started taking my ideas seriously. When I go to seminars or summer schools or even parties (say a little prayer for the people subjected to research chat at parties), people treat the things I say as though they have some weight. Sometimes, if they’ve read anything I’ve written previously, they might ask me my opinions on nutrition. This is an odd one, because I’m not an expert in nutrition;  if anything, I’m in the business of questioning whether such a thing exists, what it would look like if it did, and understanding what people think it takes to be considered one. It’s strange to be put in a position where that kind of research renders you a potential nutritional expert in other people’s eyes. Do I put it down in my thesis? If so, how does that work, reflexively? Is it questions about expertise all the way down?

My response to the kinds of questions I get asked – stuff like the relative merits of the paleo diet versus the ketogenic diet – is usually to carefully state that I’m not an expert in the science, and to briefly explain what it is I actually do, and then give my understanding of the subject from there. I used to qualify these answers less, until my partner pointed out that I might accidentally be misleading people into thinking I’m an authority when I’m not, and causing them to make potentially quite large lifestyle changes on that basis. That’s not really something I want on my conscience.

So, people have started listening in some sense, What’s perplexing is that it tends to be about the sorts of things that I feel less qualified to talk about. Things like nutrition, or teaching (of which I have a lot of experience, but I don’t have a formal education in Education). When it comes to the stuff I spend most of my time researching – expertise, authority, why people believe some things/people/institutions over others – I’m rarely asked for my opinion. It might be because it’s more abstract, or because everyone has their own opinion on it, or perhaps because I haven’t been particularly effective in communicating that this is what I do. Regardless, it’s occasionally frustrating, but I’m sure it’s something that will change with time and publications and experience. The takeaway here is probably to be wary of people seeking your opinion on things you know a bit (but not the most) about, but… enjoy it, I guess, if you’re into that sort of thing?

Overall, first year of PhD: 9/10. Not as well-paid as you might like, but intellectually fulfilling. Excellent way of staving off existential dread. Would recommend to another meat-sack on a rock orbiting an exploding fire ball.

 

 

Slurred Lines: How “cuck” took over Reddit

I first came across the word “cuck” in mid-2015, when a video of a speech I gave at the Oxford Union on the topic of freedom of speech and the “right to offend” received a modicum of negative attention and garnered a number of comments calling me, among other things, a cuck. At the time, I assumed it was simply some new term that the right/libertarians/4chan users/redpillers had come up with as a way to mock people who supported broadly progressive causes, much like “SJW” or “snowflake” (both of which I was also called (quite a lot)).

But the term has a more complex history and spread than that. The Wikipedia article suggests that the word is short for “cuckservative”, a term of abusefor conservatives who have bought into key premises of left liberalism. The Southern Poverty Law Centre says that it is meant to “depict conservatives who don’t kowtow to ultra-right political views as inept traitors to the conservative base that elected them”. They argue that cuck has racist undertones, implying that compromise on immigration and multiculturalism is analogous to a white husband surrendering his white wife to a black man. They point out that cuckold pornography, which features men being aroused by the humiliation of their wives having sex with other men, often features black men specifically.

Whilst many sites claim that the origins of the word are shrouded in mystery, an article on Mel Magazine details its journey from a 12th century poem, through to Shakespeare’s Othello, and then finally its appearance in the relative mainstream during GamerGate. The article goes on to argue that the word reached common parlance around July 2015, just after Donald Trump announced his candidacy, primarily drawing on data from Twitter. They note that it is commonly used on /r/The_Donald, probably the largest pro-Trump community on the web.

At the Digital Methods Initiative Summer School, we wanted to ask the question “where did the word ‘cuck’ come from, and can we trace its usage and spread over time?”. The results, described below, I think provide flesh to the bones of the argument coming out of the one interview and Twitter data in Mel Magazine.

Who says “cuck”, and why?

We are lucky enough to have access to a database of every comment ever made on Reddit. This is an incredible resource that takes a little bit of know-how and some persistence to extract data from, but it’s worth persevering. I used Google’s Big Query tool to query the database and retrieve all instances of the word “cuck” appearing in any comment in any subreddit, from August 2014 until May 2017.

Initially, I only looked at comments that had over 100 upvotes. The search returned ~11,000 items. I first performed a manual inspection of the first 100 returns in order to understand the broad thrust of sentiment behind them. The data suggests that there are only an extremely limited number of subreddits in which the word “cuck” is used as a serious slur. The_Donald is the primary actor here, along with associated alt-right subreddits (though exactly which subreddits these are is to be the subject offurther inquiry). In nearly all other instances, “cuck” was used ironically, or tongue-in-cheek, or as a means of deriding those who might use it seriously. This provides necessary context to the figures which follow.

 

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“Cuck” across all subs, from August 2014 to May 2017

Full size image available here

The graph above shows a non-normalised view of the frequency of “cuck” appearing in comments from August 2014 (around the very beginning of the GamerGate controversy) until May 2017 (the most recent dataset available). 

The_Donald emerges as the clear leader in the “cuck” table, immediately beating out all other subreddits for the highest volume of cuck-comments in the first month it became big (February 2016, after Trump won the New Hampshire primary). The volume of comments steadily increased until the end of 2016, following the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency, and has diminished since. This could be in part because the comments from that period have had longer to be subject to mass upvoting, but it could also reflect diminished activity on the subreddit since then. I would favour the latter hypothesis, on the basis that Reddit’s algorithm rapidly reprioritises showing comment threads based on how long they have been active, such that the vast majority of upvotes tend to come within a few days of a post being live.

Instead what appears to have happened is that there was a huge jump in anti-progressive posting in November 2016. This is corroborated by another analysis I performed of the term “SJW”, which shows a similar bump.

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“SJW”, from January 2012 until May 2017 (where “SJW” appeared >150 times in a subreddit in a given month)

Full size image available here.

You can see from this excerpt that The_Donald is far and away the largest user of “cuck”, followed by SubredditDrama, 4chan, CringeAnarchy, politics, TheRedPill and KotakuInAction. Of these, SubredditDrama, politics and EnoughTrumpSpam (not pictured) tend to use the term ironically or to deride those who use it, whereas the others use it as a serious term of abuse (for the most part).

Looking at the graph below in which The_Donald has been excluded and the use of the term has been normalised , you can see the steady spread of the word “cuck” from subreddits associated with the Alt Right into more mainstream subreddits. This doesn’t suggest that it has become a popular term of abuse; the story is a little more complicated than that.

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Relative frequency of “cuck” in all subreddits except The_Donald and its derivatives

Full size available here.

If you’re wondering why “AskReddit” is so high up in here, it’s because (i) it’s one of the largest subs and so tends to have a large usage of any word, and (ii) “cuck” is queried for as a string rather than a complete word, which means we pick up “cucks” and “cucked”, but also “cuckoo” – it just so happens that a lot of people respond to the question “what’s your favourite movie/book?” with “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”.

From whence the cuck?

The_Donald only came about in 2015, and “cuck” was already in frequent use at this point. This left us with the question of where it came from before then. Our initial hypothesis was that it had emerged from /r/coontown, a now-banned expicitly racist subreddit that existed primarily to vent hatred of black people. With that in mind, I pulled every instance of the letter-string “cuck” (including “cuckold” and so on) from coontown. This was the result:

 

The graph above maps the whole of coontown’s lifespan, from its inception in November 2014 to its banning at the beginning of August 2015. The lines tell three different stories:

1.  The frequency of the letter-string “cuck” increased fairly rapidly over the course of the subreddit’s lifespan. See the graph below:
 

Frequency of “cuck” in CoonTown, January-July 2015

2.  However, this coincided with a very large increase in the number of subscribers to the subreddit, which reached just over 22,000 by the end of July 2015.

3.  This led me to create the third line, “Density”, which indicates the number of comments containing “cuck” divided by the number of subscribers to the subreddit. This should give some indication of the proportion of posts in which cuck is used**.

The quantitative data create an interesting picture of coontown, showing that the “cuck” string was present from the very beginning. Drilling down into the actual context of its usage, I found that both “cuck” and “cuckold” were used within the sub initially. This suggests that the term was being used both in its racialised context (deriving from cuckold pornography) and also in the sexualised way popularised by GamerGate (see below).

Cuck genesis

Following my exploration of coontown, I realised that I would need to look further back in order to find where cuck really came from. I pulled every use of the word from 2010, and after spending half an hour or so skimming sexually explicit comments of varying stripes realised that it was at that point really only used regularly in the context of a number of BDSM communities. Deciding instead to work backwards, I pulled every instance of cuck from 2014, and then started at the beginning of the year. Relatively early on, I noticed that the first instances of its use as “cuck” rather than “cuckold” appeared to come from the 4chan and TumblrInAction subreddits. The latter has (I believe) a fairly significant crossover of userbase with the former, which in turn has (as one would guess) a shared userbase with 4chan itself. This leads to the conclusion that “cuck” in its shortened form was popularised on 4chan or a similar imageboard, corroborating the argument made in the Mel Magazine article.

From there, I wanted to see when it became a popular term. As anyone with a superficial knowledge of the GamerGate saga might expect, it exploded in popularity in August 2014, primarily in subreddits like KotakuInAction (ground zero for GamerGate), where it was used as a term of abuse for Eron Gjoni, who had published a 9000-word rant about Zoe Quinn, his game developer ex-girlfriend whom he accused of sleeping with other games journalists.

My suggestion here, then, is that “cuck” was popularised as a misogynistic term, indicating the disempowerment of men who “allow” women to cheat on them without (much) protest.  Its popular use as a racialised term within coontown and other racist subreddits and sites appears to postdate its use as a misogynistic slur in GamerGate, as does its use in political contexts.

This is corroborated by the graph below, which shows a normalised view of the appearance of “cuck” over time, such that absolute frequency of use is taken out of the equation and we can see where it is most common in any given month:

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“Cuck” from August 2014 to May 2017, normalised

Full size available here.

 

Return to The_Donald

The final piece of the cuck puzzle comes from going back where we started, requiring a return trip to The_Donald. Following my adventures in coontown and elsewhere, I pulled every instance of “cuck” from The_Donald and mapped their appearance in the same way as I did for coontown.

 

This graph, again, has three stories to tell:

1.  The frequency of use of “cuck” in The_Donald increased hugely around February of 2016 (when the sub exploded in popularity after Trump won the New Hampshire primary), then again in November 2016 (the election of Trump). Ignore the spike in January 2017; it’s caused by a flaw in the data.

2.  Again, though, this has been offset by a massive increase in the number of subscribers, which has not tailed off over time (even after the election was over).

3.  In order to attempt to compensate for this, I divided the cuck frequency by the number of subscribers in any given month in order to get a crude measure of cuck density (with the same methodological caveats as applied to the same measure in coontown). This showed that even taking into account the increases in numbers of subscribers, “cuck” saw huge spikes in popularity in February and November 2016, and January 2017.

Cucklusions (sorry)

The story, then, is this:

Cuck began its life as cuckold, and when exactly its shortening became de rigeur will likely remain a mystery unless any intrepid data adventurer can scrape the entire log of 4chan from 2013/14 without losing the will to live. Looking at the normalised graph above, you can see that the misogynists of TheRedPill have been using “cuckold” since their subreddit began, and that it appears to have been shortened to “cuck” in 4chan at some point in 2014. The term emerged in the manosphere, and its misogynistic connotations have stuck with it ever since.

It became popular during GamerGate as a kind of misogynistic slur, levelled at one man who appeared to have “allowed” his ex-girlfriend to sleep with other men. From there it quickly morphed into a catch-all term of abuse for men that might otherwise be referred to as “betas” (though that term has another history behind it), with connotations of disempowerment and adherence to feminist or progressive ideals that rendered them traitors to mankind.

At roughly the same time, it became popular in racist circles to refer to white men who allowed themselves to be cuckolded by black men, and it’s likely that in these contexts it also became used as means of describing the cuckoldry of the white race more generally construed. This can be seen from one comment, posted in December 2014, to describe the entire nation of Sweden as “cucked”:

Good i fucking hate those cuckold Swedes. What happened to them? I think 200 years of peace has shrunk those men’s balls. Maybe importing hajiterrorists is a good idea. Might wake up those leftist feminazi loving faggots. Vikings must be puking in Valhalla as we speak

The term went mainstream with the rise of The_Donald, which propelled the alt-right as we know it into significance. The idea that “cuck” primarily means “cuckservative” within T_D and other alt-right havens, then, appears to be mistaken. This is corroborated by the fact that a casual observance of its usage today would suggest that it is used to describe anyone who does not conform to alt-right values, not just conservatives. Cuckservatives constitute a subset of all cucks.

Since the inauguration of Donald Trump as POTUS, the term has become far more popular, but this is not to say that it has retained its original venom in all contexts. In most non-alt-right communities, it is used solely in ironic terms or to deride the people who might use it in a serious fashion. It might have gone mainstream, but it might have become a victim of its own success.

 

 

*on the basis that there are ~3 billion comments in the database, and returning all instances of the word cuck would create a spreadsheet of ~300,000 rows, which is unmanageable and not necessarily that helpful on a first pass, given that it would include a lot of comments which nobody sees, rather than only those which have been given some measure of credence.

**It is worth noting that this is not a perfect proxy for the actual density of cucks in coontown; as subreddits become larger they tend to attract a large number of lurkers (subscribers who do not post), but it would be relatively difficult for resource reasons to actually map the number of cuck comments per contributor to the sub. The density measure may not be as useful as I would like.

 

Digital Methods: when data could be dangerous

For the last week, I’ve been attending the Digital Methods Initiative Summer School at the University of Amsterdam. It’s a conceptually interesting project that attempts to use the digital to study the digital. The theory behind it is that there is a lot of work which uses traditional methods to study the internet or the digital (e.g. interviews, ethnographies, surveys, and so on); likewise, there’s quite a bit that uses the digital to study the “real world” (digital archives, interviews conducted over Skype or email, OCR programmes etc). However, there’s comparatively little academic research that uses the digital to study the digital, and that’s the gap in the market that DMI attempts to fill.

This looks like using digital tools and Snowden’s data leaks to study mass surveillance, using content analysis to study climate change, or studying Wikipedia as a site of cultural heritage. In the case of the group I’ve been working with, we’ve been collaborating with the British Home Office and using various tools to study the Alt-Right. Others in the group have used tools that scrape data from YouTube, Twitter and Facebook and allow them to map the networks that result from this.

As my own PhD primarily uses Reddit as its site of analysis, and I wanted to get some methodological skills out of this summer school, I decided to join the project and help to map the origin, spread and use of the language of the Alt Right across Reddit. To that end, I’ve been using Google’s Big Query API, along with good old Microsoft Excel, to look at the words “cuck” and “kek”, and use that as a window to study the social dynamics of Alt Right communities.

Methodological Reflections

I’ve already written quite a lot on my empirical findings, which I’ll publish in due course, but here I just wanted to take some time to reflect on the things I’ve learned about methodology so far. For my own research, I primarily use qualitative methods: I look at all of the new posts published on the Paleo subreddit, and then I categorise them by topics of conversation and use that categorisation and my own readings of the posts and comments to try to draw inferences about the nature of discourse in that community, focussing on how authority is negotiated and contested. In September, I plan to start seeking interviews with members of that community and the wider paleo and nutrition communities in order to better understand what it is that drives people towards believing and practising one set of nutritional precepts over another. These are all reasonably tried-and-tested qualitative methods that provide rich understandings of interactions between people and the dynamics involved in the communities one studies. 

But there’s always been this nagging sensation that I could be doing something different and better. The people who do quantitative methods produce these firm conclusions that they can make inferences from, right? And they always have these cool, pretty graphics that let them display their research in a way that just invites people to click and read. They get to write things that make headlines. Their research has impacts. They get to make GIFs showing the most used words in /r/The_Donald in every month of its existence:

So I wanted to dip my toe in this other academic pool and see if it could resolve some of the anxieties about my research that I’ve been feeling. Perhaps what I’m doing right now is just intrinsically less worthwhile than a different methodology that would allow me to say more things, process more data, be more interesting. 

If you’re reading this in the tone that I’m trying to give off, you’ve likely already concluded that the above is not an accurate reflection of what this research has been like. In reality, just because I’m typing something in a fancy programming interface and using SQL syntax that I’d never heard of before Tuesday, doesn’t mean that what I’ve been doing has produced any more significant results or been any better than any of the traditional methods I’d been using up until last week.

When looking at words, and trying to understand where they’ve come from and how they’ve spread, being able to query a big database and get a picture of when they have and haven’t appeared is useful. But it doesn’t tell you all that much: you don’t know anything about the context in which the word was used. It doesn’t give you the complete picture, in the same way that getting the metadata about someone’s phone calls gives you an incomplete picture of who they are and what they’ve been doing. That picture can be filled in with more knowledge of that person, in the same way that my picture could be filled in with background knowledge about the events that have driven the rise and spread of the Alt Right. But without that knowledge, and without the ability to theorise, it’s pretty useless. Worse than that, it’s dangerous, because it gives you the false impression that you’re finding interesting things when you might not be.

The dangers of data, even with theory

To pin this down with an example: the other day, I was trying to understand who gets labelled a “cuck” and who gets labelled “based” in The_Donald, the biggest Alt-Right community. A cuck is someone who is emasculated and inferior and so on; someone who is “based” has accepted the dogma of the Alt Right and is generally considered a good egg. You can see my findings below:

 

You can see that the words that tend to come up with “cuck” are those you might expect: globalists, Macron (this data was from May 2017, when they were quite upset at France’s failure to elect Le Pen), liberals, “betas”, and so on. Likewise, Sean Hannity and Poland are based, as are patriots.

But then I fell afoul of not having the complete picture, because I started to look at the other associations with “based” and saw words associated with rationalism: logic, science, data and so on. That made me assume they were talking about “based science”, “based logic”, etc, and that they just thought that these things were really cool and were fetishising a certain conception of knowledge.

Now, they do fetishise science and data and a certain conception of logic, but they don’t call those things “based”. They were obviously saying things like “making decisions based on the science”, but because I had no context to how the word was being used, my own understanding of what the word was being used for in this context was blinding me to its much more commonplace usage.

This is the danger of powerful tools: they give you false confidence in your results. I could explain the data in front of me with the theory I had, and I could make up an incredibly convincing argument about it. But because I didn’t have the complete picture, I was actually just making things up without even knowing I was making them up.

We’re often warned about the dangers of data without theory: “p-hacking” and other dodgy statistical methods have become commonplace terms in the scientific and academic communities recently. We rarely talk about the dangers of data with theory when that data is incomplete.

I’ve really enjoyed getting to grips with digital tools. I like the way that they can guide me towards new places to explore, and point me in directions I didn’t previously realise were relevant. They certainly produce some really cool pictures. But when it comes to research significance and impact, I no longer feel inferior because I don’t use numbers and software as much as some people. What I do might not be perfect, but I think I’ll stick with it.

Three Minute Thesis – Video and reflections

Just over a week ago, I competed in the University of Edinburgh Three Minute Thesis final. Spoilers: I didn’t win. However, I learned a few things, and I want to share some info on the competition and reflections about my experiences and the concept as a whole.

First off, the video of my presentation is online here. It’s called “Going against the grain”, but unfortunately the full name was too long for the video title so they’ve just used the much more abstract second part of the title to name the video.

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