by Clint Watts
The best intentions and perceived outcomes shine bright with each advancement in information technology. The internet’s open system led to niche repositories for highly specialized information appealing to smaller audiences distributed around the world. Chris Anderson of Wired magazine famously detailed this phenomenon from a business perspective in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Building from the research of Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, Anderson explained how online access creates not just lower prices but increased product variety. In the pre-internet era, where traditional local markets offered only a small range of high-selling goods, the World Wide Web offered an opportunity for things like books, music, and homemade goods to be sold at lower volumes over an extended period. The “long tail” referred to a high-frequency power distribution. Quite simply, the internet made it possible for those on the fringe to sell their products to larger audiences over longer time periods, because there were no costs to keeping products on the market. The audience would eventually find what they wanted somewhere on the internet.
The long tail didn’t just apply to products, but also to ideas. Remote-controlled airplanes, cross-stitch, fantasy football, brewing beer at home—somewhere in the world, someone was interested in the same topics, concepts, or even hatreds as someone else in the world. The internet removed the barriers between these people and dramatically lowered the costs of communication and, later, of the production of content.
The upsides were apparent, but in the euphoria of any new advancement, few calculated the downsides of anyone in the world being connected to anyone else in the world. Hackers and cybercriminals were some of the first actors to exploit the internet in pursuit of money and fame. They worked alone in the beginning, but over time they came together in their illicit pursuits. Beyond the technical trickery of hacking, hate groups and terrorists found the internet an anonymous playground for connecting with like-minded people. There were only a handful of extremists, or possibly only one, in any given town, but with the long tail of the internet, there were now hundreds and even thousands of extremists who used online congregations to facilitate the physical massing of terrorists in global safe havens or remote compounds.
Think back to jihadi militancy before al-Qaeda. It took the mujahideen a decade to raise awareness, radicalize, and recruit merely a few thousand international volunteers to fight in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. Cassette tapes, paper fliers, and rotating proselytizers roaming the earth connected with and brought in sympathetic supporters interested in pursuing violent jihad. Al-Qaeda—the Base—trained small groups to deploy as global evangelists for its cause among any and all wars in Islamic countries. Bin Laden’s indoctrination process certified fighters for his brand. A training camp graduate was an expert in both mind—ideologically adherent to militant jihad—and body: physically skilled and ready to conduct combat operations or terrorist attacks. In Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and Afghanistan, al-Qaeda’s reach before the internet remained limited to a few loyal, trained, and indoctrinated supporters who preached bin Laden’s vision and pursued his violent goals.
The internet provided a virtual safe haven for bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, allowing the small minority of Muslims inclined to jihadi extremism to connect with like-minded supporters in the “long tail.” Those thinking like bin Laden, or wanting to be like bin Laden, could hear his words, see his group’s attacks, and connect with his organization. As counterterrorists scoured the earth searching for al-Qaeda’s head shed, the internet provided enough cover, capacity, and space for the terror group to survive physically by thriving virtually. This made al-Qaeda bigger, but not necessarily better—more diffuse and elusive, but vulnerable to fissures and difficult to manage.
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The internet brought the world together, but, over time, social media has torn the world apart. There are many reasons why this has happened, but one factor stands above the rest: preference. Unbridled preference—man’s ability to make nearly endless selections on social media—when accumulated on a global scale, has torn the fabric of societies, crippled democratic institutions, and polarized audiences into virtual and physical bubbles. The relentless pursuit of preferences turns smart crowds into dumb mobs, leads to the selection of preferred fictions over actual facts, and creates an environment where humans have access to more information than ever but actually understand less about the physical world. The power of preference now haunts not only al-Qaeda as they’ve been outpaced by the social-media-savvy Islamic State, but America, the land that created social media. No barriers to entry and unlimited preference in the virtual world have overtaken compromise in the real world. Online, the pursuit of comfort and confirmation create an alternative reality.
Those researching the internet and social media didn’t expect this deterioration, and even the social media companies are just now beginning to understand what’s happening. In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson predicted that preference would lead to bliss. The heading of one of his chapters was “The Paradise of Choice: We are entering an era of unprecedented choice. And that’s a good thing.” Anderson was right about the internet bringing us together, but his optimism about preference has not been borne out. Unlimited variety and choice have somehow divided us, made us angry for reasons we can’t explain and bitter toward our own countrymen, friends, and family who don’t share our preferences.
Similarly, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, in their 2017 book Machine, Platform, Crowd, describe how modern crowds, empowered by smartphone technology, now contribute to the knowledge of society and can work together to identify solutions. They explain how, before barriers were lowered with the internet, societal elites and their institutions maintained collections of knowledge that they used to power their products and further their agendas. Trained professionals selected, arranged, and maintained information collections representing what they describe as a “core”—a set of dominant organizations, institutions, groups, and processes. The dawn of the internet, further accelerated by smartphones and social media, has generated an alternative they describe as the “crowd”—a user-generated library of free information creating vast amounts of knowledge at a breakneck pace. They assert that this online crowd now outperforms the core, upending businesses and entire industries and society itself.
Up to the dawn of social media and in its early years, the crowd did outperform the core, powering unprecedented economic change and altering the way societies and governments communicate. The right crowds are definitely smarter than the core. But we often forget, as I did when crowdsourcing terrorism analysis, that the “core,” the technological and academic elite, dominated the internet and were the first to arrive on social media. The initial members of the crowd were those privileged enough to have internet access and afford a smartphone. An early crowd member—from the mid-1990s until the late 2000s—needed some education and training to create and moderate content on forums, blogs, and chatrooms. Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook at Harvard, after all, not in the failed state of Somalia. The first crowds on the internet and social media were more educated, experienced, and privileged—collectively smarter than the core. The experts at the core still held a repository of experience, reasoning, and knowledge to effectively harness the crowd’s energy for discrete tasks and specified disciplines, determining what insights and innovations were outpacing existing pre-internet libraries and industry practices. They were able to judge the merit of new discoveries and employ them. But today’s crowds are anyone and everyone with a cell phone and a Facebook account, very different from the limited and much smaller virtual crowds of only a decade ago.
My experiences with the crowd—watching the mobs that toppled dictators during the Arab Spring, the hordes that joined ISIS, the counterterrorism punditry that missed the rise of ISIS, and the political swarms duped by Russia in the 2016 presidential election—lead me to believe that crowds are increasingly dumb, driven by ideology, desire, ambit
ion, fear, and hatred, or what might collectively be referred to as “preferences.”
Eli Pariser, the head of the viral content website Upworthy, noted in his book The Filter Bubble the emergence and danger of social media and internet search engine algorithms selectively feeding users information designed to suit their preferences. Over time, these “filter bubbles” create echo chambers, blocking out alternative viewpoints and facts that don’t conform to the cultural and ideological preferences of users.
Pariser recognized that filter bubbles would create “the impression that our narrow self-interest is all that exists.”1 The internet brought people together, but social media preferences have now driven people apart through the creation of preference bubbles—the next extension of Pariser’s filter bubbles. Preference bubbles result not only from social media algorithms feeding people more of what they want, but also people choosing more of what they like in the virtual world, leading to physical changes in the real world. In sum, our social media tails in the virtual world wag our dog in the real world. Preference bubbles arise subtly from three converging biases that collectively and powerfully herd like-minded people and harden their views as hundreds and thousands of retweets, likes, and clicks aggregate an audience’s preferences.
When users see information that confirms their beliefs, they like it, share it, and discuss it. Social media subtly creates large-scale confirmation bias—the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms previously existing beliefs or preferences. When users see information that challenges their beliefs and desires, they may block the disseminator of the content. Or if they want to challenge the disseminator, they’ll seek out and promote content directly disputing it. The information employed to settle such disputes may or may not be true, but what is important is the validation received by the person pushing it. Confirmation bias gets worse when users get emotional, triggering their instinctive fight-or-flight tendencies. Competitions, disasters, and defense of our core values make users reach for this preferred information that helps them feel secure.
Social media amplifies confirmation bias through the sheer volume of content provided, assessed, and shared. But social media also connects users to their friends, family, and neighbors—all people who, more often than not, think like they do, speak like they do, and look like they do. Social media users see news, information, and experiences contributed by their friends and followers. They naturally tend to believe this information as a result of implicit bias—the tendency to trust people we consider members of our own group more than the information of an outside group. Users trust the sender and transitively trust the information being sent, regardless of whether it’s accurate or not.
Confirmation bias and implicit bias working together pull social media users into digital tribes. Individuals sacrifice their individual responsibility and initiative to the strongest voices in their preferred crowd. The digital tribe makes collective decisions based on groupthink, blocking out alternative viewpoints, new information, and ideas. Digital tribes stratify over time into political, social, religious, ethnic, and economic enclaves. Status quo bias, a preference for the current state of affairs over a change, sets into these digital tribes, such that members must mute dissent or face expulsion from the group. Confirmation, implicit, and status quo bias, on a grand social media scale, harden preference bubbles. These three world-changing phenomena build upon one another to power the disruptive current bringing about the Islamic State and now shaking Western democracies.
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“I wasn’t the best because I killed quickly. I was the best because the crowd loved me. Win the crowd and you’ll win your freedom.” So declared Antonius Proximo, the fictional mentor to Russell Crowe’s Maximus in Gladiator. Maximus responded, “I will win the crowd. I will give them something they have never seen before.” Proximo understood crowds and mobs, and he would have dominated today’s social media. Clickbait populism—the promotion of popular content, opinions, and the personas that voice them—now sets the agenda and establishes the parameters for terrorism, governance, policy direction, and our future. Audiences collectively like and retweet that which conforms to their preferences. To win the crowd, leaders, candidates, and companies must play to these collective preferences. Leaders aren’t born or made today; they are accrued through the sum of clicks on iPhones and searches on Google. Those who give the crowd what they want will gain what they need to advance their agenda. The more a person plays to the crowd’s preferences, the more they will be promoted and the more power they will gain. Power, once attained, can then be used to issue preferences back to the crowd, as the crowd will want to champion and sustain that which it has created, whether it be the caliph or the president.
Clickbait populism drives another critical emerging current: social media nationalism. Tribes and clans for centuries have been delineated by common descent, history, culture, or language, as defined by the physical territories they inhabit. Flags, symbols, slogans, speech, dress, and traditions characterized nations in the real world, mobilizing societies under the banners of shared values and common enemies. But with the advent of the internet, many people now spend more time with others online than in person, connecting with like-minded virtual personas who increasingly reside outside the physical terrain where they live their daily lives. Each year, as social media access increases and virtual bonds accelerate, digital nations increasingly form around online communities where individual users have shared preferences. Social media users now reside in virtual social media nations, where they identify their allegiance through the employment of hashtags, similar biographies, and symbolic photos. These virtual cues allow users to connect with members of their social media nation, feel reinforcement for their beliefs, and shape collective digital values, regardless of whether they exhibit any of the virtual nation’s principles or behaviors in real life. Social media nations (i.e., competing preference bubbles) fight in persistent information wars on digital battlefields—social media platforms—as they advance their nation, real or imagined, against their digital adversaries. This social media nationalism provides its virtual citizens with shelter from reality and replaces real-world compromise with the collective virtual pursuit of shared preferences. The more people live in the online world, the more their online world defines who they are. As places increasingly come to look similar through corporate franchising and cookie cutter communities, people may be inclined to identify as being from the #TrumpTrain or the #Resistance rather than from Texas or New York. Which social media nation someone identifies with provides more information about someone than the state or country they are from.
Social media nationalism and clickbait populism have led to a third phenomenon that undermines the intelligence of crowds, threatening the advancement of humanity and the unity of democracies: the death of expertise. As the barriers to internet access got lower and lower, anyone, regardless of education, training, or status, could explore information and voice their opinion in debate. This would seem, on the surface, to be good for democracies, as increased information, awareness, and voice would seem to encourage more civic engagement and debate and better collective outcomes. Instead, social media users, in their relentless pursuit of preferences, have selectively chosen information and expertise they like over that which is true or even real. Social media users participating in the crowd have chosen to be happier and dumber by not just challenging McAfee and Brynjolfsson’s core but also by seeking to destroy it.
Tom Nichols, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, articulates the third phenomenon in his 2017 book The Death of Expertise. Nichols describes how the internet opened the doors of information to anyone, and, through social media, users have cherry-picked data and opinions to support their preferred belief. He argues that in the modern era, “any assertion of expertise produces an explosion of anger from certain quarters of the American public, who immediately complain that such claims are nothing more than fallacious ‘appeals to au
thority,’ sure signs of dreadful ‘elitism,’ and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle dialogue required by ‘real’ democracy.”2 Social media users, in their relentless pursuit of preference, believe that, with only a few clicks on their phone and a Google search or two, they are as smart as or smarter than a medical doctor, a college history professor, a physicist, a dietitian, or their elected leaders.
Social media makes everyone believe they are an expert on everything, highly informed because they can access so much information, and verifiably smart based on their aggregation of a large number of friends, followers, views, retweets, and likes. Today’s social media nations seek not only to challenge the core but to rewrite history, quash science, and alter governance to conform to their preference bubble. Clickbait populism, social media nationalism, and the death of expertise have created two shocking preference bubbles that, within only three years, have upended international security and the world order: the #IslamicState and the #TrumpTrain.
The Islamic State of Iraq’s rebirth and ultimate triumph in establishing a state resulted from playing to its supporters’ preferences. For social media audiences, the modern Islamic State cherry-picked bits of Islamic history to create the justifications for traveling to Syria and Iraq. This preferred apocalyptic narrative led zealous foreign fighters, from Europe to the Philippines, to die in droves in pointless battles such as that of Kobani, Syria, in 2015—a historically significant town in the Koran but a futile military effort on the modern battlefield. The Islamic State never truly governed in line with the days and times of the Prophet Muhammad, but that didn’t stop tens of thousands of men and women, entire families in some cases, from traveling to a war zone to pursue this social media fallacy.