Antisocial, page 40
These assumptions turned out to be partially correct. New platforms would continue to emerge (BitChute, Rokfin, Parler), but not every platform has an equal impact on the national discourse. The biggest social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, had been founded by brash young disrupters with plenty of capital, a high tolerance for risk, and a naïve faith in techno-utopianism. They had left their gatehouses mostly unguarded, a freedom that the amateur propagandists quickly learned how to exploit. Now the free-for-all days were starting to come to a close.
After more than a decade of invoking vague “free-speech principles,” the new gatekeepers, now businessmen in their thirties, were trying to flesh out exactly what those principles were. It was too little, too late, but it was something. They finally understood—or, at least, were starting to seem to understand—that their imagined utopia was never going to materialize. This realization may have been a sign of maturity; it may have been a calculated response to internal pressure from investors, or a strategy to stave off government regulation; or it may have been a simple defense mechanism, a reaction to being socially shamed. Within a few short years, the general public’s attitude toward social media had swerved from widespread veneration to viral fury.* The disrupters had no choice but to respond somehow. After all, they believed in the wisdom of crowds.
In November 2018, Mark Zuckerberg posted a note to his Facebook profile. “Many of us got into technology because we believe it can be a democratizing force for putting power in people’s hands,” he wrote. “I believe the world is better when more people have a voice to share their experiences, and when traditional gatekeepers like governments and media companies don’t control what ideas can be expressed.” He hadn’t abandoned his techno-optimism—he still asserted, in the present tense, that the postdisruption world “is better,” which was at best an arguable claim—but his self-assurance had clearly been punctured. “The past two years have shown that without sufficient safeguards, people will misuse these tools to interfere in elections, spread misinformation, and incite violence,” he continued. “One of the most painful lessons I’ve learned is that when you connect two billion people, you will see all the beauty and ugliness of humanity.”
The note received 41,000 likes, 4,000 loves, 852 surprised emojis, 160 angry emojis, 81 crying emojis, and almost 8,000 comments.
“Keep up the good work!” a stock trader from Michigan wrote. “Ignore the media, keep on improving.”
“do you think hell exist?” a Congolese Evangelical pastor wrote.
“yes, right here on earth,” an American woman wrote.
“Suckerberg,” a British woman wrote.
“let me guess,” a woman from Washington State wrote, “you guys never really thought of how explosive free speech really was did ya??”
* * *
• • •
On August 12, 2017, the Saturday of the deadly rally in Charlottesville, Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, spent most of the day on a plane. He kept refreshing r/Politics and r/News on his laptop, looking at image after image of his alma mater’s campus as it was overrun with torch-wielding white supremacists. “I got really emotional,” he said. “I wish I could say I reacted calmly and rationally, but it hit me in a pretty personal way.” He found the images disturbing not only as an American, a Virginian, and a University of Virginia alumnus, but also as the inventor of one of the most powerful memetic petri dishes in history. Just as Yishan Wong had hoped five years earlier, Reddit had indeed become a universal platform for open human discourse. Huffman knew that his platform’s openness had been exploited—was likely still being exploited at that very moment—by neofascist activists, maybe even by some of the ones who had brought the violence to Charlottesville. When his plane landed, he got on a call with a few of his top employees. “If any of these people are on Reddit, I want them gone,” he said. “Nuke ’em.”
This felt cathartic, but personal catharsis is not a good way to make policy. “Steve, you’re pissed off right now,” one of his employees told him. “Let’s talk about it more rationally on Monday.”
When they got back to the office, the first thing they did was decide to delete r/Physical_Removal. At the time, the most upvoted post on the subreddit was a celebration of Heather Heyer’s death; Reddit had a rule against content that “encourages or incites violence,” and the post violated that rule. By midday on Tuesday, r/Physical_Removal was gone, its frenzied memes and images of helicopters replaced by a scrubbed white page, an image of a gavel, and the words “This community has been banned.”
Already, this was more than the old Reddit would have done. r/Physical_Removal claimed to be a place for philosophical discussion. Hans-Hermann Hoppe was hardly Steve Huffman’s favorite philosopher, but in theory that wasn’t supposed to matter. The twenty-one-year-old Huffman might have worried about a slippery slope: if redditors weren’t allowed to discuss texts that endorsed violence under certain circumstances, then would Reddit have to start censoring all mention of Fight Club, and Common Sense, and the Bhagavad Gita, and the Bible? But the thirty-three-year-old Huffman was no longer paralyzed by such scenarios. “Communities like Physical_Removal are just bad for Reddit, and they’re bad for the world,” he said. “Every call involving free-speech issues is difficult, but this is a difficult call I am fine with making.” If you’re throwing a warehouse party, and one room of the warehouse is packed with bloodthirsty weirdos, you may have to kick them out.* Huffman was coming to accept his role as a gatekeeper; he wasn’t even all that reluctant about it anymore.
“It felt good to get rid of them, I have to say,” Huffman continued. “But it still didn’t feel like enough.” r/Physical_Removal was just one subreddit, after all. The site now had more than a million subreddits—an endless hallway of rooms in need of inspection. Over the next few weeks, Huffman had a series of conversations with his general counsel, his top engineers, and his head of policy. “We all had the same goal: We don’t want Reddit to be an incubator for horrible stuff,” he said. “The only question was how to do it in a way that didn’t cause more problems than it solved.” First they would start getting rid of the unapologetic neofascists; after that, they could start dealing with more ambiguous cases.
“Encouraging or inciting violence” was a narrow standard, and Huffman and his team decided to expand it. Four words would become thirty-six: “Do not post content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people; likewise, do not post content that glorifies or encourages the abuse of animals.” The new rule raised new questions, and the team drafted a nonexhaustive list of exceptions (“newsworthy, artistic, satire, documentary”).
Jessica Ashooh, the company’s head of policy, has a doctorate in international relations, and she’d spent four years as a policy consultant in Abu Dhabi. “I know what it’s like to live under censorship,” she said. “My internal check, when I’m arguing for a restrictive policy on the site, is, Do I sound like an Arab government? If so, maybe I should scale it back.” One high-ranking Reddit employee, who grew up in Communist Eastern Europe before making his way to the United States, said, “You don’t want to be so in love with oversight that you become the Stasi, and you don’t want to be so terrified of oversight that you become a breeding ground for Nazis. It sounds simple, but it’s unbelievably hard to get right.”
They decided to announce the site’s new antiviolence policy on a Wednesday in October. “We’ll probably hear from a few of the free-speech, how-dare-you-ban-anything-ever people,” Huffman said. “But honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if the more common reaction is, ‘What took you so long?’”
On the morning of the announcement, Ashooh sat at a long conference table with a dozen other employees. Before each of them was a laptop, a mug of coffee, and a few hours’ worth of snacks. “Welcome to the Policy Update War Room,” Ashooh said. “And, yes, I’m aware of the irony of calling it a War Room when the point is to make Reddit less violent, but it’s too late to change the name.”
She went over the plan for the day. All at once, they would swap out the old policy for the new policy, post an announcement explaining the change, and take action against a few hundred subreddits. Some of these were borderline cases, subreddits that were probably in violation of the new policy; their moderators would receive a warning and be given a second chance. Others were subreddits that were flagrantly, irredeemably in violation; these would be banned immediately. “Today we’re focusing on a lot of Nazi stuff and bestiality stuff,” Ashooh said. “Context matters, of course, and you shouldn’t get in trouble for posting a swastika if it’s a historical photo from the 1936 Olympics, or if you’re using it as a Hindu symbol. But, even so, there’s a lot that’s clear-cut.” I asked whether the same logic—that the Nazi flag was inherently a glorification of violence—would apply to the Confederate flag, or the Soviet flag, or the flag under which King Richard fought the Crusades, or the flag of the U.S. Marine Corps. “We can have those conversations in the future,” Ashooh said. “But we have to start somewhere.”
I glanced at a spreadsheet on an employee’s laptop: an alphabetical list of the 109 subreddits that were being banned (r/KKK, r/KillAllJews, r/KilltheJews, r/KilltheJoos), along with the reason for each ban (“mostly just swastikas?”) and the name of the employee who would carry it out. r/The_Donald was not on the list. “The_Donald’s mods know we’re keeping an eye on them, and they’ve gotten very careful about playing by the rules,” Huffman said. Besides, “their anger comes from feeling like they don’t have a voice, so it won’t solve anything if I take away their voice. That’s the call I’ve made, at least so far. I know some people feel strongly that it’s the wrong call, because I hear from those people a lot—including people in my personal life.” This, too, was part of being a gatekeeper.
At about 10:00 A.M., the purge began. “Thank you for letting me do Dylann RoofInnocent,” one engineer said. “That was one of the ones I really wanted.” He obliterated the subreddit with the push of a button.
“What is ReallyWackyTicTacs?” another engineer asked.
“Trust me, you don’t want to know,” Ashooh said. “That was the most unpleasant shit I’ve ever seen, and I’ve spent a lot of time looking into Syrian war crimes.”*
The new antiviolence policy was posted, and a few hundred redditors commented on it. The comments included sarcasm (“this’ll work out swell”), cynicism (“If you think this is anything more than theatre I’ve got a bridge to sell you”), and several requests to ban r/The_Donald, which were ignored. One employee, a young woman wearing a leather jacket and a yacht cap, was in charge of monitoring the comments and responding to the most relevant ones. “Everyone seems to be taking it pretty well so far,” she said. “There’s one guy, freespeechwarrior, who seems very pissed, but I guess that makes sense given his username.”
“People are making lists of all the Nazi subs getting banned, but nobody has noticed that we’re banning bestiality ones at the same time,” Ashooh said.
Or maybe people had seen it, an engineer suggested, but “no one wants to admit it. ‘Guys, I was just browsing r/HorseCock and I couldn’t help but notice . . . ’”
The woman in the yacht cap said, “OK, someone just asked, ‘How will the exact phrase “kill yourself” be handled?’”
“It all depends on context,” Ashooh said. “They’re going to get tired of hearing that, but it’s true.”
“Uh-oh, looks like we missed a bestiality sub,” the woman in the yacht cap said. “Apparently, SexWithDogs was on our list, but DogSex was not.”
“Did you go to DogSex?” Ashooh said.
“Yep.”
“And what’s on it?”
“I mean . . .”
“Are there people having sex with dogs?”
“Oh yes, very much.”
“Yeah, ban it.”
“I’m going to get more cheese sticks,” the woman in the yacht cap said, standing up. “How many cheese sticks is too many in one day? At what point am I encouraging or glorifying violence against my own body?”
“It all depends on context,” Ashooh said.
I understood why other social media companies had been loath to let me see something like this. Never again would I be able to hear a lofty phrase about a platform’s shift in policy—“open and connected,” or “optimize for user value,” or “modern public square”—without imagining a group of people sitting around a conference room, eating free snacks and making fallible decisions. Social networks, no matter how big they get or how familiar they seem, are not ineluctable forces but experimental technologies built by human beings.*
Once, Steve Huffman and I had dinner in New York. He wore a T-shirt, jeans, and Adidas indoor-soccer shoes. I asked him about his response to the violence in Charlottesville: Was he spurred into action, at least in part, by his personal connection to the place?
“I’m sure that was part of it,” he said. “And I can see how somebody, even a former version of myself, would be creeped out by that.” He took a sip of beer. “Honestly, all I can say is, I don’t see a way around it. Is it better if I see a Nazi rally and go, ‘I have no feeling about this, I leave it all up to the algorithm’?” A few minutes later, he thought of something else to say, but decided against it. Then he took another swig of beer and said it anyway. “I’m confident that Reddit could sway elections,” he said. “We wouldn’t do it, of course. And I don’t know how many times we could get away with it. But if we really wanted to, I’m sure Reddit could have swayed at least this election, this once.”
In a perfect world, of course, no one person, much less a thirty-three-year-old computer programmer in soccer shoes, would have the power to manipulate a presidential election. And yet this is the world we live in. For too long, the gatekeepers who ran the most powerful information-spreading systems in human history were able to pretend that they weren’t gatekeepers at all. Information wants to be free; besides, people who take offense should blame the author, not the messenger; anyway, the ultimate responsibility lies with each consumer. Now, instead of imagining that we occupy a postgatekeeper utopia, it might make more sense—in the short term, at least—to demand better, more thoughtful gatekeepers.
* * *
• • •
In the fall of 2017, I landed in Chicago, rented a midsize car, and started driving west toward Kewanee, Mike Cernovich’s hometown. I asked Google to send me on the most efficient route, because there was nothing to see along the way—or so I thought, until I noticed a sign for a small town called Tampico, the birthplace of Ronald Reagan. I pulled off the highway. On Main Street—next to a bank, a funeral parlor, and a general store, all closed in the middle of the afternoon—was a metal plaque bearing Reagan’s face, and his words: “Whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears.”*
When I got to Kewanee, the light was starting to fade. Mike Cernovich was sitting on a porch with his father and grandfather, both of whom are also named Mike. Mike’s father had silver hair and a beard, and he wore work boots and a Carhartt T-shirt. A TV, audible through a screen door, was tuned to CNN. “He’s always listening to this liberal stuff,” Mike’s father said of his father, without a trace of rancor. “Even Fox is too liberal for me. I’d rather go watch one of Mike’s videos on Facebook or wherever, or some Bible-believing videos.” He’d just come from a twelve-hour shift operating a crane at a local junkyard. “At work, when I’m baling cars or whatever, I’ll put in my headphones all afternoon and listen to Infowars,” he said. Like his son, Mike’s father considered himself a freethinker; unlike his son, he was irrepressibly cheerful. “I don’t get mad when people believe different,” he said, smiling. “They can do what they want.”
Shauna walked outside holding Cyra, who was almost ten months old. “Andrew!” she said. “How’ve you been? Michael, did you ask Andrew how his flight was?”
“Yeah, babe,” he said, falsely, looking down at his phone.
“Michael,” Shauna said, adopting a chiding tone that was roughly half sincere. “Remember what he wrote in that article about you. He said you don’t make enough eye contact. Which wasn’t wrong.”
“He said ‘less eye contact than on camera,’” Mike said. “I didn’t mind that, though. The low blow was ‘fleshy.’” He kept his eyes trained on his phone while he talked.
The Cernoviches decided to meet for dinner at a chain restaurant called Happy Joe’s. Mike’s father went to pick up Mike’s mother and younger brother; I got a ride in Mike’s rented minivan. I sat in the back with Cyra, who was watching a Persian music video on an iPad. “Mike tells me you’ve got a kid now!” Shauna said. “That’s so awesome. I’m gonna need to see some pictures.” I handed over my phone, and she oohed and aahed. It was one of the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, a period traditionally devoted to repentance and reflection. The whole way to Happy Joe’s, I had a silent argument with the God I don’t believe in, justifying my decision to spend this time with Mike Cernovich’s family instead of my own.
Mike’s father ordered for the table: hot wings, garlic bread, a couple of pizzas. Mike ordered a salad with dressing on the side. “Sit next to your mom,” Shauna whispered, but Mike sat next to me instead.*
