Commentaires de Zeynep Tufekci suite au discours de Barack Obama sur la régulation des médias sociaux.
▻https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1517305731355131904
So, Barack Obama has taken up fighting disinformation. NYT notes how his administration didn’t regulate tech.
When I started writing about it, a decade ago, the pushback I got from the Obama universe was intense, and is hinted at the below profile of me.
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/23/business/media/how-zeynep-tufekci-keeps-getting-the-big-things-right.html
There was a lovefest between the Obama universe and Silicon Valley. Suggesting that wasn’t a good thing, and we needed to regulate for privacy and for a healthy public sphere was not considered unacceptable.
I heard of attempts to blacklist me from conferences, and more stuff.
(I haven’t written about most of this publicly. I try to focus on the substance. Some people from that world have called to apologize. It’s fine. The issue isn’t that I was right, and got treated terribly regardless, but that we all lost).
When that profile was written in 2020, I had just spent months arguing for masks as a tool. I got called a misinformer going against scientists etc.
Profile notes my next big target to argue against seeming consensus is importance of ventilation and airborne transmission. lolsob
I also spent a lot of time organizing against the war in Iraq in 2003, my first real effort to change anything in the United States. It had similar overtones: a seeming strong elite consensus, and anyone who disagreed was considered naive or misinformed, etc. etc. We failed.❞
Sometimes, going against consensus is conflated with contrarianism. Contrarianism is juvenile, and misleads people. It’s not a good habit.
The opposite of contrarianism isn’t accepting elite consensus or being gullible.
Groupthink, especially when big interests are involved, is common. The job is to resist groupthink with facts, logic, work and a sense of duty to the public. History rewards that, not contrarianism.
To get the right lessons from why we fail—be it masks or airborne transmission or failing to regulate tech when we could or Iraq war—it’s key to study how that groupthink occurred. It’s a sociological process: vested interests arguing themselves into positions that benefit them.
Indeed, Barack Obama became president exactly because he saw how that groupthink happened in the runup to the Iraq war, sadly aided by gullible “access journalism”, and ran on a platform to not do that again.
And yet, every age brings its own version, to challenge us once again.
Two things.
It’s key to understand why and how some false things seem like consensus, only to be acknowledged later they were wrong.
We must find more ways to productively challenge these consensus-of-vested-interests at the time, so we don’t lose more time and just lose.
So to end: being vindicated isn’t the goal, though people will often be if they resist groupthink with facts, logic and putting the public interest above all, especially above fitting in or what accolades may be available to the conformist or yaysayers.
But having been through multiple cycles of this, I think it’s important to understand how and why things happened the way they did. It’s not about vindication or I-told-you-so (and it sounds like it, which makes it harder to talk about but it should be talked about in general).
“History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes”, as Mark Twain said.
Understanding history, including recent history, is a powerful conceptual tool.
A little bit more “how did we get here” can maybe help us avoid having to ask the question again and again and again.