Introducing 'Narrative Control'. A bit like censorship but probably more effective
Introducing 'Narrative Control'. A bit like censorship but probably more effective
Don't confuse Googling with finding out what you need to know on hot button issues
TL;DR
Whether or not Google or corporate media practice active censorship, the instant availability of impartial information seems to be compromised anyway. Search results seem to be increasingly biased toward a particular brands of cultural scholarship, commentary and talking points (although this may also be to do with progressives having better SEO).
The most pernicious quality of narrative control is that you don’t necessarily know that you’re subjected to it.
I was so sure I was right. Until…
A few weeks ago I was wrong about something. Here's what it was.
The ‘Freedom Convoy’ of Canadian truckers began rolling. I saw it briefly mentioned on legacy news services, like AP. Then posts about it started appearing online. Pictures and video clips showed the convoy growing each day. Then supporters of the convoy started claiming that the 'mainstream media' was suppressing the news about it.
Because I had seen the convoy mentioned in corporate media I got into minor altercations online with those people, explaining to them that there was no conspiracy (as they imagined it) to suppress this story.
I patiently explained how their frustration was just that their particular hobby horse wasn't being given the weight that they wanted by news decision makers who are constantly having to prioritise what stories to cover in a very busy world. This happens all the time, I sagely intoned. I'm a news professional (ex-BBC you know) I explained, flashing my credentialed expert status.
Over time that convoy grew so huge that I realised the absence of ongoing coverage really was a thing. There seemed to be a policy not to report on it.
The scaling up of that convoy was self-evidently more newsworthy than its beginnings as just another protest, but I wasn’t seeing a peep on the newswires or corporate media.
This continued until suddenly a negative angle on it was established. The Freedom Convoy was actually made up of science-denying, hate-filled white supremacists, complete with swastikas, went this version of the tale - and they were A Threat To Democracy. Only now did the story grow legs.
Suddenly corporate international and domestic media swung into action, granting it legitimacy as a news event.
A lot has been written about the authoritarian crushing of that protest. To date the most incisive is this one by NS Lyons1. Reality Honks Back. If you're a consumer of mainly corporate media you're unlikely to have seen a perspective like that because (I'm increasingly forced to acknowledge) corporate media's role is to establish and defend a dominant narrative rather than report on facts and events. In this way corporate and legacy media are increasingly participants in the news, rather than a mirror to events that we imagine them to be.
Not that I think there’s a grand conspiracy afoot. I imagine that it's more about journalists cravenly maintaining the 'right' positions through a combination of career protection, newsroom groupthink and fear of growing cultural forces that media organisations neither understand nor care to contemplate too deeply.
Once you notice this you'll see it everywhere.
If you broaden your information sources and seek alternative intellectual perspectives it can be quite jarring. As if you are seeing news, interpretation and analysis from distinctly separate but parallel worlds.
It takes a bit of effort and a degree of nerve to let go and place a foot in each world, feeling the ground you were so confident to stand on replaced by the sense of having a foot on each of two small floating pontoons. Noticing this I understand why people don't do it much. Or why people who do often tend to end up committing entirely to the alternative perspective and becoming 'based' or 'pilled'. Same arse, different cheek. Uncertainty is discomfiting and it’s nice to know where you stand on things.
There’s a point to this tangent, so stay with it…
This newsletter began as a way of charting a personal project to step off that wheel and thereby end my participation in the culture war by being a more dispassionate observer of cultural currents. Secondly, I wanted to practice more intellectual humility. To relinquish the security of certainty and recognise the fog of overconfidence for what it often is - a kind of pacifier in uncertain times.
Some of this is selfishly motivated because I notice that the less passionate I feel about the rights or wrongs of an issue, the more interesting it seems to become. And also the better I feel in myself. I can recommend not feeling pissed off all the time about what other people think, including when you think they're badly mistaken.
Secondly, I'm just wired to find the liminal space between apparently contradictory propositions more intellectually interesting than the essentially ego-driven debating school urge to turn discussion into a zero sum argument. That's how people like Boris Johnson end up doing so well for themselves because we kind of fetishise the persuasive power of a good rhetorical flourish or a neatly triangulating gotcha. Look at me, I won the debate even though I didn’t believe my own arguments, doesn’t really appeal much to me. It’s how Boris Johnson persuaded British voters to leave the EU. Nice.
Just to emphasise this point about how it feels to step away from values-led in-group/out-group thinking a bit more...
Several years of being tribal - on Twitter in particular - took a toll on my mental health. Or maybe being tribal on Twitter just reflected poor mental health. I don't know. But I didn't recognise, at the time, the essentially unhealthy and intellectually limiting quality it brought to my life. Then a point suddenly arrived when I realised that tapping into everyone’s Very Strong Feelings and Strongly Held Opinions about things seems to internalise as a kind of perma-state of heightened arousal, anger and contempt for other humans.
So I retired from what has been called the race to the bottom of the brainstem.
It sounds easy and it would be easy were it not for two things we rarely even notice.
The power of emotional contagion and the establishment of Narrative Control.
Emotional contagion manifests in the tone of debate on certain topics, with shrill inflammatory language that often strays into hysteria.
Narrative Control reveals itself via difficulties in finding information which might enable us to approach certain controversies with an open mind and become persuaded by weight of evidence rather than the power of rhetoric.
You'll see this everywhere once you're aware. Here's what it might look like.
A post appears on my LinkedIn about a forthcoming British government event. It's a transwoman announcing that they will be boycotting the event in protest at the torture of trans people.2
They are saying that 'conversion therapy' is to be banned for gay and lesbian people but will be allowed for transgender people. And that the 'conversion therapy' that may still be employed with gender dysphoric people is torture.
The post (which you can see here, if you prefer to read it for yourself) received much positive affirmation from other people who - it's safe to say - rightly oppose conversion therapy and torture. It being 2022 and most of us not being fans of tormenting people for what they cannot help but be.
The post also notes, in passing, that the public overwhelmingly supports the right of anyone to be fully recognised by default as the gender they feel themselves to be.
So, there are two claims there.
One is that the British government approves of conversion therapy (which is also torture) for would-be trans people and that people in general believe that there should be no management of the gender transition process, socially or legally, except to affirm their wish.
Neither claim stands up to scrutiny. But this is fair enough. The original poster is an activist whose raison d'être is to make it as easy as possible for someone wanting to live as the gender to which they identify to get what they want as easily as possible. All activists exaggerate harms and benefits and cherry pick information to promote their cause. It's pointless to expect activists to be balanced.
As it happens, I don't accept the claim that the government allows torture of trans-identifying people because I don't recognise an equivalence between responsible professional counselling and the practices involving electric shocks, chemical castration, lobotomies or haranguing people that came to be known as conversion therapy.
Counselling a teenager to work out whether or not medically risky interventions or the social challenges of transition are right for them seems a compassionate and responsible thing to do.
You may think otherwise, but who is right here isn't the point. There are always multiple ways to subjectively interpret the same basic premises. We can always discover those different interpretations for ourselves to help form our own view.
Hold that thought.
As for whether the public in general overwhelmingly supports self-affirmation as the only necessary step to legally-recognised gender transition the activist seems to be objectively incorrect. That question is strongly contested, as polling consistently shows (examples here, here and here).
But, again, that’s fine. Activists cherry pick data and twist the answers to surveys to suit their agenda. If you define the statement 'I support trans rights’ as meaning I support whatever trans activists want that's how you get to claim that most people think transition should be just a personal choice.
Activists use inflammatory language and stretch evidential claims all the time and they might turn out to be right in this case. I don’t think so but they might.
In a well-served information landscape we can all weigh questions like these and some kind of consensus will eventually emerge.
A healthy information landscape serves up all perspectives (we may need to treat shit like Holocaust denial differently) and lets you consider the whole panoply of viewpoints, interpretations and source data.
That’s the theory. And today the concept of an information landscape is synonymous for many of us with Google. An agnostic information provider, as we probably see it.
But Google does not appear to be agnostic.
I imagined someone who knows little about the ins and outs of identity politics seeing that activist's post, being shocked to hear that conversion therapy - torturing transgender people - is endorsed by government and later Googling to find out whether it's true. Or wanting to check whether their personal intuitions about gender self-identification are in line with those of the wider public and, inevitably, using Google to find out.
You can try this at home. Pick your own hot button topic and Google the arguments about it.
Using multiple search terms (variations of 'uk public opinion on gender self id') to check the claim that automatic legal recognition of gender self-id has overwhelming public support it took almost 15 minutes and eventually a different search engine (DuckDuckGo) to find the polling examples shared above. On Google I just found the original claim repeated in page after page of results.
Google is like this on all questions with a culture war angle.
Try finding out whether or not diversity, equity and inclusion training in the workplace reduces hostility and bigotry toward minority groups. Google and DuckDuckGo will give you entirely different perspectives. Google results are dominated by positive affirmation of the value that 'DEI' education brings to businesses and minorities while DuckDuckGo returns much more diverse perspectives.
This also applies to which academic research is revealed in search, not just right wing vs progressive website results. Google seems to prioritise one class of perspectives on cultural hot button issues in a way that DuckDuckGo doesn't.
I have a bit of a mea culpa going on here. Because a few years ago, when I was building my own progressive brand on the Twitters and the Trump administration began sounding off about Google's 'bias' against conservative viewpoints I was instantly out of the trap with my snarky takes about Trump not understanding how search works and how it prioritises information quality and uses sophisticated proprietary systems to determine 'authority'. Back then I trusted Google implicitly. Now I don't.
It was only when I began the process of shedding ideological certainties and decided to check my biases that the role of Google in helping to shape opinion rather than reflect the cornucopia of human thinking on certain controversies became apparent.
A subsequent search session to check the facts about UK government policy on 'conversion therapy' played out in exactly the same way as trying to find out if everyone really is cool with gender self-ID. Pages and pages of Google results labelling the counselling of gender dysphoric people as 'conversion therapy' appeared before I found one alternative perspective. Which was this article by the consistently dispassionate and good faith Tom Chivers. One article from five pages of results.
My intuition is that anyone who encounters these arguments as a culture war virgin is going to be instantly immersed in dominant 'progressive' perspectives if Google is their go-to place. Who knows whether or not this is calculated and in a way who cares? The point is that when you want nuance on a topic, it's risky to rely on Google.
I'm not sure that many people know this. Our impulse, whenever fact-checking stuff, is to Google it without imagining that the 'facts' you'll receive are often only a quite specific half of the story.
Is Google politically biased then? I don’t know. But it does seem partial.
I recommend this piece about a former Google engineer blowing the whistle on how the organisation changed in 2016 as a jumping off point if you do want to dig around for yourself on the idea that there's an actual Google agenda at work here. There's a consistent anecdotal theme that links changes at Google with panic over Trump's win in 2016.
There are plenty of other articles around (more easily found on DuckDuckGo) that offer less political perspectives on why there seems to be a sociopolitical monoculture in Google search. For example, it may well be that progressive perspectives dominate search results because of better search engine optimisation by liberal-leaning websites and activist groups.3 Whatever causes a progressive skew, though, the result is still a progressive skew.
Just as I was finishing this edition another example of how such perspectives come to dominate Google results popped up on my Substack. I think it's free to read, so consider reading Jesse Singal's piece on the wave of publicity generated by some recent claims about how best to help gender-dysphoric tweens and teens. If Singal is right Google is about to be filled with the objectively incorrect answer to a very important question. And you know who will soon repeating these claims. Almost anyone who Googled the topic.
It took some effort to surface more on this but my curiosity was sufficiently piqued to dig around more on the subject of whether counselling people who want to change gender really is 'conversion therapy' (let alone 'torture'). Eventually this paper turned up. It suggests that the reported psychological harm caused by counselling someone whose aim is to switch gender is possibly overblown by researchers in the field. The Danger of Conflating Ethical Psychotherapy with Conversion Therapy published by the Society For Evidence Based Gender Medicine.
Meanwhile I see that the BBC, Sky News et al are reporting on protests that took place this weekend in Britain against conversion therapy without reflecting any of this nuance. That's how narrative control works. With the connivance of corporate and legacy media. And Google.
Postscript: I just read a correction in Private Eye after it had repeated claims that a Twitter protest against natal males being held in women’s prisons wasn’t real. Good on The Eye for accepting that it should have been more discerning in its reporting of a dubious ‘fact check’ on the Twitter hashtag #KeepPrisonsSingleSex.
In short, the claim by ‘fact checkers’ Logically was that the hashtag had been artificially promoted to trending status, rather than by organic human interaction with the topic.
The claim that bots are responsible for promulgating certain perspectives is now a standard practice in social liberal discourse. The point is to delegitimise wrongthink by claiming that ordinary people do not really believe the promoted perspective, so it can only reach prominence through artificial means. Along with ‘Russian disinformation’ it’s a handy smear to deploy from an increasingly authoritarian information management toolbox beloved of progressives.
But never mind that Logically’s claim is dubious. It has done the trick on Google. Try looking the story up today and see how long it takes to find a result that questions Logically’s version of why #KeepPrisonsSingleSex trended.
That’s how ‘fact-checking’ has become part of Narrative Control.
Talking of ‘fact-checking’, here’s a check that hasn’t aged well…but then, the point of it wasn’t to enlighten. It was to reinforce a narrative. Sound up for the jaunty music.
Quote of the week (about how it feels to be tribal on sociopolitical stuff)
The life-or-death struggle is not contained—it is everywhere. If you think you are trapped in a zero-sum existential battle, there is no room for compromise, no possibility of bargaining, because Our interest and values and Theirs are unreconcilable. Further, if one assumes that the situation is a supreme emergency, one will be inclined to think that the ordinary moral rules do not apply. The result is a race to the bottom - Allen Buchanan, University of Arizona
That quote comes from a discussion around the pros and cons of human tribalism that featured in Quillette here. Four quite different perspectives, each with persuasive lines of reasoning.
Onetime Twitter followers may be pleased to see the reappearance of Youna in my world. Her wakeup routine (or ‘ignition sequence’ as I call it) typically involves monitoring you upside down for a while like this. I know that all dogs are great but Youna is the best one.
NS Lyons is a pseudonym for the author of a Substack newsletter called ‘The Upheaval’. He or she produces some compelling helicopter view commentary on cultural currents and writes pseudonymously because they apparently work somewhere in the Washington DC foreign policy analysis machine. I imagine that the New York Times will doxx them eventually, as they doxxed Scott Alexander for having wrong thoughts about things.
The conference has now been cancelled following a general outcry along the lines described above.
This looks like a really difficult thing to prove. I read many articles by SEO experts arguing it both ways. Here’s one that concludes that we can’t really know.