How to Handle a Crowd

“... A fascinating peek into a largely overlooked part of the online world. Gupta's work casts a long-overdue spotlight on the work that goes into making online communities enjoyable and rewarding.” —Fiona McQuarrie, Popmatters.com

Auteur

Anika Gupta

Texte du rabat

Don’t read the comments. Advice that feels as old as the internet, yet more relevant than ever.

Résumé
The tools we once hailed for their power to connect people and spark creativity can also be hotbeds of hate and harassment, and platforms like Facebook and YouTube are under fire for either too much or too little moderation—even though most people aren’t even sure what moderation means. What we do know is that creating and maintaining healthy online communities isn’t easy. Luckily, Anika Gupta is here to explain what makes some online communities tick—and others explode.

Over the course of two years of graduate research at MIT, Gupta interviewed moderators who’d worked on the sidelines of gamer forums and in the trenches of online news comments sections. She spoke with professional and volunteer moderators. In How to Handle a Crowd, she builds on that initial fascination and connects it to new and important issues around how we use the internet to create community.

She interviews people who have built and sustained fascinating online communities in our unpredictable digital climate, and dives deep with activists, organizers, journalists, and executives to find out what strategies work best for them. Is there really such a thing as a recipe for success?

Échantillon de lecture
Chapter 1. Building Bridges 1. Building Bridges
Make America Dinner Again

How I Met MADA

I met Justine Lee for the first time in New York. We’d “met” online months before, while working together on a podcast project about Asian American life. I asked her for suggestions for whom to profile in this book; she recommended herself. Over a couple of hours, Justine told me her story. Since October 2017, she and her friend Tria Chang have run a Facebook group called Make America Dinner Again (MADA). The name pokes fun at partisan rhetoric, but the group has a serious purpose: to encourage understanding and dialogue among people with differing political views. Justine and Tria started the group after the 2016 presidential election, and it now has almost seven hundred members. Those who want to join have to apply by answering a few questions on Facebook; the founders read each application thoroughly and personally. As MADA has grown, they’ve accepted new members with an eye toward political balance; Justine says the group today includes roughly equal numbers of self-identified liberals and conservatives, as well as many other perspectives. The two of them, along with nine other moderators, oversee debates about the most divisive political topics in American discourse. Recent posts include one comparing restrictions on gun ownership to restrictions on book ownership, another asking whether or not a Holocaust-denying school principal should have been fired, and a third asking how San Francisco can humanely resolve escalating rates of homelessness.

Their group is part of a growing movement, born in the run-up to and wake of the 2016 presidential election, focused on building bridges across what seems to be an ever-widening political divide. In any given week, the MADA moderators research and post articles for the wider group to discuss, contact group members one-on-one to offer advice on the tone or content of their posts, or—in Justine’s case—read through short surveys filled out by people who want to join the group. But their real work is trying to shore up common ideals in a divided world, building slim but strong bridges across the divide of partisan opinion. Justine refers to this type of work as “translating.” The group is sometimes fractious, sometimes hopeful, and often challenging. But in working there, Justine and Tria have established an interesting online home.

The Lost Art of the Dinner Party

MADA grew out of Justine and Tria’s feelings about the 2016 election. A self-described political liberal living in San Francisco, Justine says she woke up in a daze the day after Donald J. Trump was elected president. She didn’t know how to respond. She wasn’t alone: liberals across the country were torn and dismayed. In a popular blog post written right after the election, political science professor Peter Levine outlined several potential responses that the left could make. These possible responses included things like “winning the next election,” “resisting the administration,” and “reforming politics.” They also included “repairing the civic fabric” via “dialog across partisan divides.”1 This last category is the one that Justine and Tria would come to belong to.

Justine had just finished a public radio internship, which had exposed her to local politics. But she’d found politics to be “inaccessible and a little overwhelming.” Instead she enjoyed the “human stories,” in part because “I’ve always believed that there are multiple sides to a story.” That curiosity about other people, and a focus on the human face of political debates, would become the core principles of MADA.

“Dialog across partisan divides” sounds great in theory, but is difficult in practice. In a June 2016 study by the Pew Research Center, nearly half of self-identified Republicans and Democrats said they found discussing politics with someone with opposing political views to be “stressful and frustrating,” and more than half said that they left such conversations feeling like they had less in common than they originally thought.2 Maybe just as troubling, at least from a national unity perspective, was that Republicans and Democrats saw each other in a personally poor light, ascribing negative qualities like laziness or closed-mindedness to those on the other side of the political divide.3 Researchers refer to this type of partisan dislike as “affective polarization.” In a seminal 2012 paper, the researchers Shanto Iyengar, Gaurav Sood, and Yphtach Lelkes demonstrated that affective polarization in the United States had risen dramatically since 1988, as measured by things like whether or not people would be upset if their child married someone from a different political party. In another paper, published in 2019, a group of researchers suggested that affective polarization could have serious consequences: “Partisanship appears to now compromise the norms and standards we apply to our elected representatives, and even leads partisans to call into question the legitimacy of election results, both of which threaten the very foundations of representative democracy.”4

In the months before the election, Justine says she saw political conversations break down, time and again, in her own social media feeds. People often talked past each other.

“Anytime there was a news article posted on our FB feeds, we would see it in the comments. People would make a statement in response to the headline. They would come out really strong, with almost no room for dialogue.” The worst, she says, were the comment sections on news organizations like Fox News or CNN, which she says turned into a “a mass of name-calling and trolling and inflammatory language.”

Platforms like Facebook had enormous reach and scale, but neither their technology nor their business models prioritized the facilitation of wide-ranging conversations. On the …