Jimmy Wales: belief

Transcript context

…He might have been a little bit shitty, the reporter might have been a little bit shitty, but you fed into the shitty with a snarky funny of response, “Not for sale,” and where do you… That’s a funny little exchange, and you can probably after that laugh it off and it’s fun, but that kind of mechanism that rewards the snark can go into viciousness. Yeah. Well, and we certainly see it online. A series of tweets, sort of a tweet thread of 15 tweets that assesses the quality of the evidence for masks, pros and cons, and sort of wear this, that’s not going to go viral, but a SmackDown for a famous politician who was famously in favor of mask, who also went to a dinner and didn’t wear a mask, that’s going to go viral, and that’s partly human nature. People love to call out hypocrisy and all of that, but it’s partly what these systems elevate automatically. I talk about this with respect to Facebook, for example. I think Facebook has done a pretty good job, although it’s taken longer than it should in some cases, but if you have a very large following and you’re really spouting hatred or misinformation, disinformation, they’ve kicked people off. They’ve done some reasonable things there, but actually, the deeper issue of the anger we’re talking about, of the contentiousness of everything, I make of a family example with two great stereotypes. One, the crackpot racist uncle, and one, the sweet grandma. I always want to point out all of my uncles in my family were wonderful people, so I didn’t have a crackpot racist, but everybody knows the stereotype. Well, so grandma, she just posts sweet comments on the kids’ pictures and congratulates people on their wedding anniversary, and crackpot uncle’s posting his nonsense. Normally, it’s at Christmas dinner, everybody rolls their eyes, “Oh, yeah, Uncle Frank’s here, and he is probably going to say some racist comment and we’re going to tell him to shut up, or maybe let’s not invite him this year.” Normal human drama. He’s got his three mates down at the pub who listen to him and all of that, but now grandma’s got 54 followers on Facebook, which is the intimate family, and racist uncle has 714, so he’s not a massive influence or whatever, but how did that happen? It’s because the algorithm notices when she posts, nothing happens. He posts and then everybody jumps in to go, “God, shut up, Uncle Frank. That’s outrageous,” and there’s engagement, there’s page views, there’s ads. Those algorithms, I think they’re working to improve that, but it’s really hard for them. It’s hard to improve that if that actually is working. If the people who are saying things that get engagement, if it’s not too awful, but it’s just, maybe it’s not a racist uncle, but maybe it’s an uncle who posts a lot about what an idiot Biden is, which isn’t necessarily an offensive or blockable or bannable thing, and it shouldn’t be, but if that’s the discourse that gets elevated because it gets a rise out of people, then suddenly in a society, it’s like, “Oh, we get more of what we reward,” so I think that’s a piece of what’s gone on. Well, if we could just take that tangent. I’m having a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg second time. Is there something you can comment on how to decrease toxicity on that particular platform, Facebook? You also have worked on creating a social network that is less toxic yourself, so can we just talk about the different ideas that these already big social network can do and what you have been trying to do?…

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