I hear you saying, “Yes, Shamus, everyone knows what
confirmation bias is.”
Except, that’s not what this is. Confirmation bias is when I see a news story on television about someone from the Purple Team who got caught in a scandal, I think of it as an anomaly. Then I see an Yellow caught in a scandal and I think “Man, that’s just how they are, always doing scandals and being corrupt. Dang Yellows.”
Confirmation bias happens inside your head. It’s something you have to do to yourself.
Twitter is like owning a television that only shows me scandals by the Yellows, and acts of virtue by Purple. I no longer have to go to the trouble of fooling myself. We’ve invented software to automate and industrialize the process, and then added a scoring system so that the masses will constantly bring it fresh fuel. It’s a system of rules with the emergent property of creating a continuous flow of crowd-sourced propaganda. We’ve gameified tribal bigotry.
Shamus, you’re engaging in false equivalency here! One side is CLEARLY worse than the other!
How can you be sure of that? Do you hang out on the Yellow message boards, go to the Yellow news sites, follow the Yellow celebrities, and read books by Yellow thinkers? Or do you hang out with your fellow Purples and allow the group to curate your Yellow News for you?
And even if you are the sort of person who carefully balances their information intake to avoid social-media distortions, you have to remember that other people don’t. They are acting on the best information available to them, and from their point of view Yellows are great people with a few bad eggs and Purples are an army of vile jerks. In truth, it doesn’t matter which side is objectively worse because both sides are looking at conclusive evidence that their side is in the right and the other side is dangerous. It’s nice that your enlightened perspective enables you to see the truth, but it does nothing to stop the rage-war. Do you intend to convince the Yellows that they’re really the worst despite the evidence staring them in the face? Good luck with that.
There is indeed terrible injustice. I’ve seen people I love and admire as creative individuals endure horrible, vile abuse over the most innocuous things they said. I’ve seen people I respect say obnoxious and uninformed things about other people I respect. Yes, it’s nasty out there. But if both sides exaggerate the faults of the other while remaining blind to their own faults, then your virtuous behavior can do nothing to balance things. The feedback loop will continue to enrage them both.
