Browsing our bias

Should we curate our feeds for community or for challenge?

Paula Duncan

Paula Duncan is a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, researching OCD and faith.

A woman stands between two table, one of friends and the other more argumentative.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

“Would you like to continue using this app?”

I stare at the question on my phone screen. It’s there by design – I have it set to prompt me every five minutes so that I don’t fall into the trap of endless scrolling. Often, it’s enough to make me close the app and move on with my day.

Today, however, I’ve been doomscrolling - endlessly flicking through the discussions around the General Election. I have already told my phone I’d like to keep this social media app for another five minutes, and another five minutes, and another. I didn’t open X with any real hope of finding answers to my many questions about the upcoming election (the crucial one being: “who should I vote for?!”). From there, I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole. There is simply too much information, and I can’t always tell what is real or true. I can’t make it more than two or three posts before I stumble across yet another logical fallacy or false equivalency.

When my phone prompts me again to close the app, I pause. I have suddenly realised that I’m upset. It has taken the pop-up box on my phone to make me pause and notice that that I’m overwhelmed and helpless but I still feel like I need to speak, say something, anything useful. But maybe there is just nothing I can say. Maybe I can’t usefully add to this debate. Or perhaps I can’t usefully discuss it in this format.

There is little nuance in the discussion – people are simply yelling at one another.

I close the app to leave this angry space.

I’m not sure I have gained any real insight into the debate from this experience. I can’t help but think that many people are here only to assert their opinion. Nobody is here to listen. Nobody is here to learn. This sort of platform encourages us to speak, to be seen speaking, but doesn’t promote discussion and debate in a way that is constructive. Let alone create a safe well-lit space for it. It doesn’t take long to find someone supposedly invalidating another’s argument by pointing out a grammatical mistake. There is no grace here.

I’m wary of following or subscribing to users who have completely different viewpoints from my own because I am concerned about my own digital image.

I find this online space a difficult one to occupy. My feed is mostly friends and a couple of carefully chosen pages. There’s nothing that is going to particularly challenge me there. I don’t particularly want social media to challenge me. It’s comforting, more than anything – a way of staying in touch with friends and family (particularly during the pandemic) and keeping up to date with organisations I’m involved in.

I don’t tend to go on social media to engage in discussions or debates. I know that this leads to something of a confirmation bias. If I get all of my information from the same sources, and from the same people all the time, I’m not going to learn about other perspectives. If I follow the trade union that supports my workplace, it’s obvious that I will only receive information supporting one particular party. If the only people I follow are people who share similar views as mine, I will simply find myself with my own opinions and feelings being validated.

It’s also worth noting that, perhaps shamefully, I’m wary of following or subscribing to users who have completely different viewpoints from my own because I am concerned about my own digital image. I worry about someone opening my page and making assumptions about my views simply based on those I follow online. I know others share this concern. Public social media accounts are sometimes a delicate exercise in personal branding. I am likely confirming someone else’s bias with my social media presence. I’m almost definitely part of that cycle.

I find myself torn between wanting to use social media more effectively to learn from other people and wanting to make it literally a pastime.

There are certainly arguments to be made about whether this approach to social media is good or bad. It’s certainly comforting though. At the end of a long day, a video of my friend’s dog is going to improve my day just a little bit more than trying to pick apart the truth from the lies in social media and in politics more generally. It’s important that I remain conscious that this is the way I have chosen to use social media. I can’t be complacent.

If I engage with other perspectives and debates, I have to do so more consciously and deliberately. I try and drop in and out of those spaces through the news tabs, tags, searching specific people who I know hold different viewpoints, or looking up specific topics. It always runs the risk of falling into the trap I’ve found myself in today – scrolling through seemingly endless perspectives that I don’t agree with, people wishing harm on another for having a different perspective, a vicious “us and them” narrative that follows through every other post. I need to learn where I can find the most accurate and reliable information. More importantly, perhaps, I need to learn how to close apps when I find myself in angry spaces where debate cannot flourish (and I’m almost never going to find that in a comment section.)

Ultimately, I don’t think I’ll stop carefully curating my social media feeds – mainly as an act of self-perseveration. It’s not that I don’t care – it is never that I don’t care. Just that the 24-hour news cycle becomes too much when there is little that I can do. I’m not going to figure out who to vote for my scrolling arguments on X or Facebook.

I find myself torn between wanting to use social media more effectively to learn from other people and wanting to make it literally a pastime. There is certainly potential for learning - I can access real-time perspectives on almost anything. On the flipside, it is becoming increasingly difficult to discern what is real and what is fake news, or simply AI generated. On the flip side, sometimes I just want to find out if anyone else was as confused by the answer to a TV quiz show as I was or just see a picture of a friend’s cat sunbathing on a windowsill.

How might we find this balance? Sadly, it seems that this is a conversation that’s now only worth having offline.

Column

Comment

Middle East

War & peace

2 October 2024

4 min read

‘The silent stars go by’, mocking the Middle East peace process

Where are today’s witnesses to peace in the Holy Lands?

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Dots of light, caused by missles, fall across a night sky above the city

Iranian missiles above Jerusalem.

BBC News.

The evil shooting stars of ballistic weaponry over Jerusalem would have been clearly visible from Bethlehem, just to the south of the capital in the occupied West Bank, last Monday evening.

“Above thy deep and dreamless sleep/ the silent stars go by” goes the children’s Christmas carol. Nothing deep and dreamless about sleep in the little town of Bethlehem just now. Those deadly Iranian-dispatched stars were silent enough, until their alignment with Israeli ones in the Iron Dome. Then “Whump!” as each star collapsed, leaving a black hole in the night sky.

How depressing that these shining stars of violence and hatred should hang in the same sky that, it is said, hosted the star to mark the birthplace of the Prince of Peace. Depressing but not surprising. The Christ child grew up to foretell to Jerusalem that “the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you.”

He predicted his own death in Jerusalem. And, for sure, the Christ is still being crucified there, every time a man, woman or child loses their life to that violence and hatred, there or in the surrounding region.

Where are wiser counsels this week, witnesses to peace in the Holy Lands? The legend has it that magi followed the messianic star to the stable. Who looks to these different stars in the night sky this week and asks what they mean?

Iran’s hardliners, under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, can’t countenance a dove with an olive twig.

It’s a bit of a stretch to apply the status of magus to Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s new reformist president who had just been sworn in when he watched the rockets launched. His only similarity with the magi may be that he watched those travelling stars in the sky from an eastern perspective.

But Pezeshkian has, at least, tried to talk of the possibility of peace, among a Middle-Eastern cast who can only speak of war. He arrived back in Iran from the UN general assembly, where he had declared that Iran is “ready to lay down its arms if Israel lays down its arms.” He added: “We want to live in peace.”

Even if it’s not the wolf living with the lamb, or the leopard lying down with the kid, it does at least envisage a time when an Israeli wolf may lie down with the Iranian leopard. But Iran’s hardliners, under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, can’t countenance a dove with an olive twig. They’re consumed with vengeance for Israel’s killing of their putative military leader, Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, in Lebanon. And death must always be followed by more death in this scenario.

Followers of the Nazarene into Jerusalem committed to something very different, a defeat of death as a weapon of despair. Two millennia later, we might expect leaders of a western world founded on the principles of those first followers to speak to peace as the overriding priority for the lands from which their religion derives.

To draw the West into a war with Iran in defence of Israel. A re-elected president Donald Trump would be a useful dupe for this ploy...

Not a bit of it. Peace in the Holy Lands doesn’t even sound like a strategic aim for the West anymore. On the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US Army general David Petraeus asked: “Tell me how this ends?” No such foresight today. The all-consuming desire seems solely to show that we’re on Israel’s side, come what may.

President Joe Biden responded to Iran’s aerial attack by saying that the US is “fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel”. For his part, prime minister Keir Starmer declared that “Britain stands full square” with Israel and supports its “reasonable demand for the security of its people.” Admirable sentiments, but they don’t point to peace any time soon, so long as they encourage Israel (or anyone else) to escalate conflict.

In some quarters, this is held to be deliberate Israeli policy: To draw the West into a war with Iran in defence of Israel. A re-elected president Donald Trump would be a useful dupe for this ploy, abetted in part by the more extreme ends of the US Christian Right, for whom Israel must be protected at all costs as the locus for the second coming of the Christ. So, war with Iran is Armageddon, the great conflict of the End Times.

These are truly terrifying prospects. For the time being, it’s possibly enough to note that the president of Iran speaks more about peace than the West currently does. Given that the West is supposed to represent the legacy virtues of Christendom, that is in turn alarming.

That Bethlehem carol goes on to note “How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given.” As we raise our eyes to the fearsome lights in the night sky over Israel, we might wonder whether, when it comes to peace, silence from Christian nations is really enough.