Why Facebook arguments are the worst

Today I woke up frustrated and angry about yet another Facebook argument.

This seems to happen a lot in the era of Coronavirus. At the start of this year I dragged myself away from the cesspit and the extra time I had up my sleeve was miraculous. The world was lighter, I was able to attend to more important things — like my research and my writing — and I was no longer captive to the pursuit of that little red notification.

Fast forward a few months to the virus, and the world is in lockdown and social media lures us back in. It’s not just a side effect of everyone isolating at home. That’s actually a reasonable use for social media. But with the deluge of information from epidemiologists and the massive salience of politics and public policy, people are suddenly debating public issues again.

Regrettably, I posted about vaccination: I find it silly that people are ‘antivax’. You probably know all the arguments I would use (public health, herd immunity, smallpox, rigorous medical expertise), and you’re probably aware of the things my opponents might say (heavy metals, dangerous substances, government compulsion).

That post led to the usual argument (at first I tried to keep it light), but then it descended into farce: ‘vaccines are fascist’. My god. And it dragged on, and on, and it distracted me from my reading because psychologically I couldn’t take myself away from it. I wake up the next morning, there’s more posts. Unbearable.

And utterly, utterly meaningless.

I’ve been lured into a number of other arguments on Facebook recently as well. Annoyingly, when I agree with people on a huge range of matters, the second I try to put a nuanced, qualified argument, the tiny point of difference blows out into a huge debate.

People hunt for disagreement on Facebook. We don’t mean to, but I think it’s unconscious conditioning: where’s the fun in furious agreement? So an otherwise straightforward discussion turns into a slinging match — and people lock into ever-heated positions that ultimately don’t matter.

Let me give you an example.

At the moment in New South Wales, there’s a bit of debate about when and how teachers will return to the classroom given the virus situation. My personal view is that if teachers are able to deliver lessons from home, give them the certainty of planning and let them do it from home. Teachers know best how to do their jobs and what their students can do — they deserve trust and faith in their expertise.

BUT…there’s room for nuance here, because some students might not be in a position to learn from home. And some parents might not have the luxury of working from home. So for teachers who are able, it is reasonable to make some form of schooling available for those cases.

So I ended up in a conversation about this on Facebook with a bunch of teacher friends with whom I did my teaching degree. And as part of the ‘nuancing’, I pointed out that most of the public health experts think the virus doesn’t affect children as much as adults (having already agreed that teachers deserve planning certainty and if that means working from home, so be it). Teachers should be listened to for their professional judgement, as should public health experts.

This conversation degraded into me trying to explain epidemiology to some participants, who were suggesting they were at increased risk. I’m not a public health expert, and neither were the people I was arguing with. But for some reason this argument had reached a point where — I think — people were defending their right not to be exposed to a disease, which is not something that I was arguing against in the first place.

Any chance of nuance was lost because emotion and misinterpretation got added into the discussion, and the tiny sliver of disagreement (about a topic on which none of us were experts) became the focus of endless commentary.

And I hear afterwards that one person privately asked “who’s the dickhead who hates teachers?”

This. Is. Ridiculous.

So in an effort to think this through — and to provide an example of what, perhaps, a more substantial argument looks like — I’ve tried to identify the key problems that make Facebook arguments so awful. They aren’t presented in any particular order, except perhaps the degree to which they annoy me, and I should stress that I am just as guilty of all of these as anybody else. They’re a Facebook/Twitter problem, not an ‘other people’ problem.

There’s a language gap

I’m sure we’ve all been in the position where we’ve clapped back at someone on social media, only to be told they were being sarcastic. It happened to me on Twitter the other day, and I instantly regretted going straight for the jugular.

Written text is — naturally — very different to spoken language. When we speak to each other, we convey huge sums of meaning through our tone and body language. Sarcasm in particular is transmitted through both tone and facial expression. The exaggerated caricature of ‘sarcastic’ tone isn’t usually how we deliver a sarcastic line, it’s also in the way we deadpan our delivery, our eyes, our facial features.

Sarcasm is a particular subset of irony, and unless someone knows you quite well, irony is often missed. Let me give you an example from Facebook, when someone I was arguing with described vaccination as ‘fascist’:

Pat Norman There are heaps of professions that mandate vaccination — I had to get Hep shots to be a lifeguard. I think calling it ‘fascism’ is a little over the top. Like they’re asking you to get a needle so you’re immune to a disease, not to be a racist populist ethno-nationalist with a highly centralised command economy and participate in regimented marches through capital cities, to throw dissidents into prison for rejecting the demands of a one-party political apparatus.

If he believes in his freedom from vaccines so strongly, then he can always go get a job at Coles or whatever it is in eastern europe. Tennis isn’t go to clap him in irons for not doing it, which is what you might expect in this fascist medical state you are describing, where fascist public health experts goose-step through hospitals demanding people salute the flag while they receive their vaccine against extremely deadly and infectious viruses.

Opponent They are calling Donald Trump a fascist and I’m pretty sure he is not advocating all you just described so what is the modern definition of the term? Lol

Pat Norman Uhh…I would not describe Donald Trump as a fascist.

I mean, for me to describe Donald Trump as a fascist he would need to say racist things and be a populist ethno-nationalist who calls for his political enemies to be locked up in prisons, and who holds vast rallies and demands that people march down the streets of cities. And he just doesn’t do that.

I would hope that the point wasn’t lost, but also that there’s a recognition that I’m taking the piss (not of my opponent, but of the whole concept of fascism itself). Of course, the whole argument by this stage hadn’t descended into the maddening part where I tried to take a serious position.

But what you can see here is that if my opponent didn’t know me particularly well, or understand my writing style, my tone, or my sense of humour, then they may well have completely misinterpreted my irony here.

Likewise, in my argument about teachers, one participant got the impression that I hate teachers, when I work with them all the time, have been teaching (at universities, granted) for 7 years, and trained as a teacher and was friends with most of the teachers in that conversation.

The problem was tone. It can’t be transmitted. We often write our argument the way that we would speak them, but this is a problem in written language. We need to make sure extra words are present to convey the things we would usually convey with tone and body language.

Sometimes we need to speak with less certainty, or we need to add qualifying explainers “I’m not angry by the way, I’m trying to do…”. I find myself from time to time trying to explain that “I don’t want this to sound like I’m ignoring your feelings on this at all”. These are my little ways of trying to show generosity and care in a Facebook argument.

This language issue is compounded by the fact that we often end up arguing with people that we don’t know. When we argue with people who knows us, they can at least make inferences about tone and style based on who you are. They’re familiar with the way you communicate.

Strangers and acquaintances on social media don’t have that luxury. To a stranger — even to my friends — I come across as very direct. And I am, but my friends know that at heart I dislike conflict, that I’m motivated by a desire to inform, for the most part.

A stranger arguing with me will get fired up if I don’t do extra text-work to help them get a sense of my personality, my intentions and my writing style. And to be honest, that’s a lot more work than any of us are prepared to put into a Facebook argument.

Dunning-Kruger works in overdrive

Have you heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect? It’s the idea that the less someone knows about a particular topic, the more confident they feel about their knowledge of it. It gets thrown around a lot in present times because Fake News, and people like Donald Trump, seem to put it into overdrive.

And social media draws this out more than any other domain.

The thing is, experts in a particular field also tend to express more doubt and uncertainty about the status of truth in that field. This is one of the reasons why general publics and journalists find academic writing dense and unhelpful: people crave certainty, and experts don’t want to claim to be certain about something when they aren’t.

Experts doubt themselves. Idiots don’t.

The debate around modelling of the Coronavirus epidemic in Australia is one example of this. Public health experts themselves are at pains to emphasise modelling isn’t a way of ‘predicting’ the future, but rather offering a series of possible outcomes and attaching probabilities to them. There are a whole lot of assumptions and logics that go into a model — whether it be for infectious diseases, financial markets, or even climate change — and these assumptions impact the range of possible outcomes.

Experts try to speak with as much certainty as they can about their sciences, but the fact that they are experts mean they naturally include qualifications and provisos.

What do people who are not experts do? They rely on intuition and common sense — but often these don’t account for the strange ways data behaves in real life. So without an awareness of the full complex picture, those of us who aren’t experts in a given field speak with more certainty than is warranted: we don’t know what we don’t know, so we think that we know everything. It’s called a cognitive bias and it’s a serious, serious problem.

Experts doubt themselves, idiots don’t.

Slightly adjacent to this is, of course, the problem of political bias. Because social media is a way for us to perform our identity, people lock in to particular positions and don’t want to back down.

What do I mean by ‘performing identity’? Well I’m kind of drawing on an amped up version of Judith Butler’s gear here, which is the notion that identity isn’t intrinsic but is produced through our social interactions. It’s amped up by social media because the very concept of Facebook is that we put ourselves out there for public consumption.

We are performing every time we post something — and every comment we leave in a Facebook ‘debate’ is left in full awareness of the fact that others are watching it. It contributes to a particular performance of self — and when it comes to political matters, that can entrench tribalism.

For example, I’ve found it really difficult to process the way people on my side of politics insist on criticising the right-wing government of Australia throughout the Coronavirus crisis. Just yesterday, an ABC news article started doing the rounds with the following clickbaity headline:

Now, if you read that article, there’s hardly anything about ‘ditching the World Health Organisation’. To say so is a total misread of Morrison’s comments, and to be honest I expect more accurate headlines from the ABC.

But the reaction from people on my side of politics was to immediately lump Scott Morrison — a man I can’t stand, by the way — in with Donald Trump as wanting to cut funding or abolish the World Health Organisation. He’s said nothing of the sort, and it’s silly to misrepresent his position.

It’s impossible to have a fair and accurate debate when people on both sides of politics lock into blatantly biased and ideological positions. That’s especially the case during a fast-moving national crisis. I’m happy to give my ideological opponents credit where it’s due, and reasonable criticism where appropriate. And I’ll do the same to my own side.

What is not helpful is ignoring the detail because of a pre-existing belief. If we want to engage in debate about public policy and have people engage reasonably with us, we need to acknowledge two things:

1. We are not all ever going to agree.
2. We need to disagree better, and respectfully, and with full attention to each other’s arguments.

Social media lends itself to logical fallacies

Speaking of arguments, I think it would help if we put some time into doing them better. There are a couple of bad habits in online arguments that creep in because we’re being snippy and emotional.

For ‘smart people’, there tends to be an over reliance on ‘appeals to authority’. This is where someone defers to a qualification or an ‘authority’ in a field as a way to win an argument. You sometimes see climate change deniers do this when they cite one dissenting expert who has a dubious qualification as proof that climate change is false. And more often, you might see actually informed people deferring to the authority of a particular high profile scholar, or saying “well epidemiologists say this so you just have to accept it”.

To be clear: authority is an important thing to consider when assessing the validity of an argument or source. An academic journal article written by an expert in the field of climate science is much more reputable and reliable — on the subject of climate change — than an opinion piece in the paper written by a prominent business person.

But that doesn’t mean you should put a stop to a conversation because someone is unqualified. Arguments are intellectual processes which involve putting forward an argument and then supporting it with a series of points and pieces of evidence (more on this later). Anybody can participate in this process — and so they should on matters of public consequence.

I am so super conscious of this when I’m talking with people about an issue, especially if it’s one that I regard myself as ‘qualified’ to talk about: my view is not the only view, and just because people don’t have the same qualifications as me doesn’t mean they don’t have a better argument than me.

The crucial thing is to think critically, but not to criticise. At least, that’s when people are trying to engage in a discussion — if it’s just an outright opinionated sledge-fest, then there’s no room for reasonable discussion: but that just feeds into the general toxicity of Facebook. Critical thinking involves considering the quality and logical flow of an argument, the evidence being used to support it, and keeping an eye out for common logical fallacies.

The flip side of this is that people take anything as gospel, or refer to non-authoritative sources of evidence, or the whole thing deteriorates into ad hominem attacks or simply statements of personal opinion. Social media is a tool for identity production and social networking — it’s very rarely a useful platform for developing ideas, and that’s because…

Arguments need to be sustained pieces of writing

I wonder whether or not part of the issue is the fact that we’ve become lazy in our thinking thanks to the very features of the website. Never mind the compulsion to reply to notifications immediately, the fact that we can delete or edit comments after we write them might mean that we don’t take the time to think carefully and structure our argument before posting it.

Or, it’s simply the fact that Facebook comments are designed to be short, grabby and forceful. That’s not the best way to conduct a reasonable discussion, and if our goal is unreasonable discussion then it’s no wonder social media is such a corrosive medium for civic debate.

I’ve taught writing and research in universities for seven years now, and one of the core things I tell my students is that they need to outline a thesis — or core argument — for everything they write. This means that from the very outset of an essay, people need to have a clear idea of the argument that they’re trying to convince their reader to accept.

That means thinking first, doing some wide reading, weighing up sources of evidence, thinking through why that evidence is or is not compelling, and then forming that into a coherent argument. It is hard work!

An argument is also supported by a series of points. This means that a person takes a considered position — and not a blind stupid view like ‘5G causes Coronavirus’ — and then outlines a series of points that help to support that argument, which are backed up by evidence (more on that later).

If people aren’t taking the time to think through an argument and a clear set of points to support that argument that are backed with appropriate evidence, then you end up bashing your head against the wall with each side looking something like this:

Not even having the same argument.

You can see on the left a coherent argument at the top, and three valid points to support it.

The argument on the right presents a subjective opinion, with three unrelated statements. The first statement on the right could be a valid argument for bodily autonomy, but that wouldn’t contradict the ‘public health’ argument, it would become a question of degree. In this argument though, it’s a non-sequitur, and the following two points are both irrelevant and factually wrong.

Let’s look at some more examples from my recent debate with a person who claims to ‘believe in’ vaccines (let’s set aside the fact that vaccines exist and are not a matter of faith):

Opponent I believe in vaccinations but to force people to have a medical procedure to interact in society is to me a violation of your human rights. What’s next , a chip to ……, who knows. Are we going to be forced to accept that too.

This is called the ‘slippery slope’ fallacy. Firstly, nobody is ‘forcing’ people to have a medical procedure in order to ‘interact in society’, so the exaggeration there is a problem. But the next point about being forced to have a chip has no basis in evidence, and belies the earlier claim that this person ‘believes’ in vaccines because they need to be forced.

Opponent Hardly a choice. But whatever it’s we do as we r told or our lives are affected. Fascism at its best.

This is a softened version of what in internet slang is called Reductio ad Hitlerium — equating a position to the Nazis, or Hitler, or describing a position as fascist. This kind of emotional, baseless, hyperbolic remark doesn’t get any of us anywhere.

Incidentally, this isn’t a phenomenon exclusive to social media. Former Australian parliamentarian Bronwyn Bishop famously spends her time on Sky News describing anything and everything as ‘socialist’, as though that constituted some form of rational discussion.

If I’ve drifted somewhat from my point, then it’s a symptom of the lack of focus engendered by this kind of internet debate. A proper debate can’t be had with thoughtless rhetoric and emotion-driven improvisation. It requires planning, careful thinking, and a clear structure and coherence.

That’s why they’re better if they are a sustained pieces of communication — like a conversation or an essay. That’s why op-eds are a minimum of 800 words, long-form commentary essays are around 5000, and academic journal articles can be up to 10,000. The Quarterly Essays are around 30,000. A PhD thesis is around 100,000.

That’s literally what it takes to systematically and carefully lay out an argument. Facebook encourages people to do it in less than 50.

Basically anything counts as evidence

Okay, so you’ve formed up a coherent argument, and you’ve established a number of points to support it — how do you defend those points? The answer is with evidence.

Probably the problem with which Facebook — and the world — has been most actively engaged is that of fake news. All of the issues with Facebook arguments I’ve described thus far relate to the relationships, structure and content of a debate, but the actual evidence that underpins it is a much more complicated issue.

Social media has created a really slippery understanding of evidence. Memes get shared that contain unsourced or false information, but that seem authoritative (there’s that word again!). People share memes and articles that they agree with or that feel intuitively correct, and they do this without fact-checking it.

This can happen in harmless ways, as was the case when many people (including me) shared photos of drunk elephants in China and sea creatures in the canals of Venice returning while humans were in COVID-related isolation.

But it can also happen in very dangerous ways, such as false representations of scientific data around climate change, or spreading propaganda that inflames racial tensions, or that misleads people about the effectiveness and safety of medical treatments.

While the internet has massively democratised and opened up access to information, it hasn’t been accompanied by enough education about which information is accurate and which isn’t. I suspect there’s an attitude among many that ‘every source is biased’ (which, in a complex way, is true), and so therefore people tend to read things that confirm what they already believe.

Part of the process of critical thinking involves asking why we agree or disagree with a source, what evidence that source provides and how accurate it is, and what other experts in the field might have to say about it. This is where checking an author’s qualifications to speak on a particular subject is important.

And it gets quite precise at times: an epidemiologist is more qualified and authoritative when talking about the spread of Coronavirus than a GP (but both are more authoritative than, say, the Mayor of Las Vegas).

Just as there’s a hierarchy of authority in a field, there’s also a hierarchy of sources of evidence. In my work, I use this diagram to show what I mean by the ‘hierarchy of trustworthiness:

Not all sources of information are created equal, and not everybody is equally qualified to speak with authority about a topic. Even within peer-reviewed academic literature, there are heirarchies of quality and reputability.

Part of the process of thinking critically is understanding that an article from an academic journal is more reputable than an article from news media, which is more reputable than an opinion piece on Sky News, which is more reputable than a random youTube video, which is more reputable than some thing you saw on Facebook.

Sources of evidence matter hugely, and a Facebook debate rarely encourages people to unpack the assumptions and logics that sit within all this evidence. You can talk your way through that in a conversation (because we can use tone, and think things through together, and take our time to explain and think). You can write it all out in an essay because you’re forced to plan and think and structure your argument.

But on Facebook, most often these debates are a short, snippy performance. They’re a public spectacle that deteriorates into an annoying he said/she said opinion match.

And that’s no good for anybody.

So what do we do about it?

A few years back I made myself a promise not to delete anybody just because I disagreed with them. I have done it in the past, and I kind of regretted it. I don’t want my social media to be an echo chamber — I am happy to engage in debate with people that I disagree with.

I’ve broken that promise twice in the past few months: once because I criticised Jordan Peterson and someone decided that was a good reason to get personally abusive towards me. I’m happy for robust debate, but personal sledges? It’s not really necessary for me to regard that person as a ‘friend’ now is it?

The second time because a person regularly came to my Facebook for arguments and the frustration of trying to explain something to someone who doesn’t listen to or understand the concept of a hierarchy of evidence just boiled over. Carefully constructed arguments and evidence just get batted away with conspiracies and decade-old news articles, and as someone who cares about accuracy and evidence it became a profound mental burden.

It’s hard — for some of us — not to take the bait. I envy my more zen friends who can just ignore these kinds of provocations, or who aren’t invested in Facebook. I am genuinely in awe of their ability to rise above — I can’t.

How do I avoid the echo chamber? If I delete people I disagree with, then I’m robbing myself of a broader perspective. As a person of the left, that horrifies me because we’re already notoriously bad at listening to people we disagree with. I have a strong suspicion that’s why we’re pretty bad at winning elections too.

But if I keep people whom I disagree and who want to dive into these arguments all the time, I am going to be massively distracted and frustrated and so my personal mental health will deteriorate into constant irritation.

Do I care more about civic health or my personal health? Tough call — Aristotle would probably advise me to worry about the civic because it is through my social life that my personal life is given meaning and health. But then Aristotle didn’t have to live with Facebook. I think he would have hated it. (Socrates would have loved it, but that’s a separate matter).

Long-form responses — sustained pieces of writing like this one — force us to be more reflective. That’s in both the writing and the reading. If we can’t sustain a piece of writing for this length to justify an intellectual position, then we probably don’t have enough evidence and belief to sustain the argument.

So we should just shut up about it on Facebook.