Rational debate killed in the sewer of social media

In a selfless and courageous act researching this column, I typed my name into the search bar of Twitter. The results were telling.

Pregnant mother Zoe Lee Buhler is arrested in her home. Picture: Facebook

In a selfless and courageous act, researching this column on Thursday night, I typed my name into the search bar of Twitter and hit enter. In the first 20 mentions, the terms directed at me included: “predictable idiocy”; “c#nt”; “joke”; “professional f#ckwit”; “give a flying f#ck”; “propagandist”; “hard right”; “dog-shagging best”; and the only imaginative phrase, “ambidextrous nose-picker” (I did not realise they had been watching).

Still, there was not one entry that was supportive, and to be frank it was a pretty tame sample because I am often labelled a lying, racist, misogynist on that platform. We are talking about a social media world where ­knowledge, insights and manners are pre-Neanderthal — and defamation laws, in the main, are ­impotent.

Twitter digitises and broadcasts the public debate equivalent of a teenage graffiti and vandalism rampage. And yet it shapes debate; our mainstream media and politicians look to the digital world for instant opinion polling and guidance about where to take their narratives and policies (the ABC has audiences tweet responses to be broadcast immediately live to air).

In intellectual terms, this is the opposite of natural selection. It is amplifying and weaponising the crudest and most inane elements of society and inviting them to dumb down our public square.

There is no political issue in most countries where Twitter is not habitually wrong — so that whatever is popular on that medium will be rejected by most of the population.

The situation is different in the US because that is the one liberal democracy where, for now, it verges on acceptable for young people to identify as being right of centre; so social media is still ugly and brutal but at least it hosts a contest of ideas.

Imagine Tutankhamun’s wonder if we could bring him back to life (as the ancient Egyptians intended) and he could see the vast and instant online knowledge we can share through our digital hieroglyphics. Then ponder his confusion and dismay at seeing the junk we share on it.

Our battered and impoverished public debate will not improve unless we learn to talk to each other. For a civil society to exist and political debate to be useful, people need to be able to hear ­alternative arguments, avail themselves of all relevant facts, and learn to deal politely with people who do not agree with them.

In this century, we are blessed with instant access to infinite amounts of information, often from primary sources, as well as endless analysis and commentary from every corner of the globe. Far too many people waste their time shouting digital abuse at each other, or regurgitating views they agree with from accounts chosen by the faceless match­makers of the Facebook algorithms, instead of reading, discussing or learning.

The digital revolution was going to democratise the media, personalise democracy and mobilise the truth, but instead it has polarised and emaciated the media, dragged politics into the mire of anonymous bullying, and fostered deceptive memes, fake news and pile-ons. And we wonder why young adults know more about Meghan Markle’s gratuitous gripes than they do about the separation of powers.

This is not a throwaway whinge. The digital degeneration of our public square and political processes is not just an easy target for columnists and conversationalists — it has serious consequences. Aggressive outsider Donald Trump took the Republican nomination and won the presidency in 2016 largely based on his use of social media to subvert the curation and homogenisation of the mainstream media.

Social media played an influential role in the ascension and demise of Kevin Rudd. It was at the vanguard of the asymmetric war against Tony Abbott. And it is the standard-bearer in the unconscionable media/political assault against Christian Porter.

For good or ill, social media played a role in the Arab Spring and the Brexit campaign. If you doubt its effectiveness, ask yourself why Beijing geo-blocks a wide variety of content, censors digital media and publicly punishes citizens for dissenting views published online.

To comprehend how insidious this policing of cyberspace infractions has become, just think of Zoe Lee Buhler, a 28-year-old pregnant woman who was arrested and handcuffed in her Ballarat home last September for posting about anti-lockdown protests on Facebook. This was not in some future dystopian state imagined by Aldous Huxley or George Orwell, it was in the town of Australia’s Eureka Stockade.

So, what is it that makes social media such a sewer? And how does this coarsen our discourse?

At its core is a lack of accountability. The enticement of being able to post widely and often about anything — without submitting to editors, curators, lawyers or peers — encourages bravado and aggression, and it fosters an impetuousness that ­values gut feelings over facts, and devalues the time and effort required to get across the facts.

The lure of virtue signalling, along with ever-present peer group pressure, are further forces for conformity. Emotionalism triumphs over rational thought.

In short, all the usual flaws of human conversation and debate are at play, but they are exacerbated by the instantaneous nature, wide audience, and lack of responsibility inherent in the platforms. Judgments are made and allegations thrown around, without regard for facts, by people ­ignorant of or untroubled by the laws of defamation and contempt.

This freedom could liberate debate; but instead of letting a thousand flowers bloom, it shares the scrawls of a thousand dunny doors. People are unthinking enough about what they post without the added shield of anonymity — requiring people to post under their real names, with proof of identity, would not eradicate the problems but it would improve the situation.

We live in an age where social media criticism and abuse will rage against an article and its author in this newspaper when most, if not all, of those joining the fray have not read the article. The headline or the topic is enough for these people to slur or condemn; often egged on by hysterical opinion leaders such as Kevin Rudd or Quentin Dempster, who at least might have sprung for a subscription in order to generate grist for their ideological mills.

Bill Leak was a target of this mentality. Thousands of ignorant onlookers, oblivious to deeper arguments running in these pages about how the sharp end of the juvenile justice system deals with the consequences of community and family dysfunction, piled on to him about a telling cartoon they saw completely out of context in their deliberately ignorant world. This past week, people have wondered on Twitter about how there could be any argument against an additional, extrajudicial inquiry into allegations against Christian Porter. Well, you will not find these rational ­arguments on Twitter or the ABC — so people stuck in those silos might never understand the rule of law.

Not only audiences, but facts, disappear into silos. ABC viewers are told Bill Shorten was “cleared” by police and Porter was not. And in social media, such misinformation, or fake news, is not in­terrogated or corrected; it is embedded and entrenched.

Two years ago, former ABC and Fairfax journalist Mike Carlton tweeted about Liberal MP ­Nicolle Flint when she appeared on Q&A. Carlton wondered why fellow panellist Jimmy Barnes did not “leap from his seat and strangle the Liberal shill”.

Fancy harbouring such a thought, let alone sharing it. Yet when this was recounted on another ABC program last month, Carlton showed his courage runs as deep as his chivalry, extracting an apology from the ABC which clarified that he did not say Flint “should” be strangled, only that he questioned how Barnes could ­restrain himself from doing so.

How pathetic. I guess he has the courage of his feeble convictions. Carlton still tweets profanities regularly, while Flint will leave politics at the next election, with Carlton’s old, white, hateful, male barbs just one minor memory in a long string of vandalism attacks and threats.

This is what happens more often, thanks to social media; more conservatives are forced underground. Like most of these factors, it existed before — the shy Tory factor was observed long ­before social media — but social media has weaponised the assault against anyone right of centre.

Taxpayer-funded media and other leftist journalists are led by the affirmation from this digital diatribe to deepen their own anti-conservative jaundice. The woke love the following and adulation of social media — it is performance art for them — until they cross a line, make the mistake of speaking sense or asking a salient question, then they experience the rule of the leftist lynch mob.

Public debate becomes coarser, more out of touch from the mainstream, and less tolerant of differing points of view. Soon the stage is vacated by all but the screaming green left, and those who will appease them.

The only outlet remaining for real, analogue people is the secret ballot. And there the media and the Twitter mob have met their match — so far.