We have to challenge ourselves

"Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work." -- Adrienne Rich After the 2016 election, pundits blamed social media companies -- especially Facebook -- for corrupting the system by feeding divisive content to the populace through algorithms that favor salaciousness over substance. Pundits, too, blamed Russia for feeding disruptive propaganda through those same social media channels to sow disunity among the electorate. I have always thought that blame missed the mark. Not that Facebook shouldn't be a more responsible publisher or that Russia shouldn't be held accountable for interfering in our election. They should. But we as a society share the blame because we allowed that content to pull us apart. Now comes a study providing some evidence that changing our news and information diet does not alone change our worldview. Researchers, relying on Facebook parent company Meta to provide data and run experiments, in fall 2020 changed the feeds of thousands of people on Facebook and Instagram to provide those users content they wouldn't normally see. Typically, Meta feeds content to users through algorithms that push to the top of feeds posts that have the most engagement from your from your network or that feature more emotional key words. Researchers instead fed users content chronologically, limited viral posts in the subjects' feeds, and tailored feeds to show less content with which users already agreed and more content with which they disagreed. While the changes made test subjects less engaged with their social media feeds, it did little to nothing to change people's political attitudes, beliefs, or level of extremism. The caveats abound on that research. For one, Meta's involvement calls into question -- rightfully or not -- the independence of the research findings. For another, the research happened over only a three-month span, while people's political identities have been built through years of incessant diets of like-minded ideas. "This finding cannot tell us what the world would have been like if we hadn't had social media around for the last 10 to 15 years," one of the researchers, Joshua Tucker, co-director of the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University, told the Washington Post. So you have to take the findings with a grain of salt or two. However, that research shows that we the users have to change the way we ingest ideas. Too many of us -- or maybe all of us, at least sometimes -- merely discard things we don't like or that make us uncomfortable or that challenge our beliefs. Evidence is not evidence, then, unless it proves what we think we already know. So maybe the problem is not what's available for us to see -- after all, throughout this age of disunion and disinformation, reliable sources of unbiased truth have continued to exist -- but how we see it. If that's the case, it's no wonder that changing our Facebook and Instagram feeds would have no impact on our politics. We think we know what we know, and it's too easy to throw away that which doesn't confirm our so-called knowledge. There's a better way to tackle the problem. In journalism, we work every story off the "five W's" -- who, what, when, where, and why. The most important of those, I tell my reporters, is "why." If we really want to change political extremism and division in this country, we must ask not just what information people see, but why they're choosing to see it. We must understand each other's motivations, which really don't differ all that much from person to person. Everybody wants a good, safe, prosperous life for themselves and the people they love and wants the government to work for them. To understand each other's motivations, we have to do more than just reading and watching content we don't normally read or watch (though I do think that's important). We also have to talk to one another, listen to one another, commune with one another. And we have to ask not just who, what, when, or where. We have to ask why. And then we have to challenge ourselves -- really challenge ourselves -- to understand what they have to say -- understand, even if we can't agree. We won't necessarily change each other's political beliefs that way. And, quite frankly, that shouldn't be the goal, because a melding of different ideas tends to make the best policy. But maybe by understanding one another we can figure out how to actually do that melding and cut back on the yelling. Justin A. Hinkley is publisher/editor of The Alpena (Michigan) News.