Foreign Policy Blogs

Facebook and the Middle East Conflict: The Saga of the Sisyphus of Social Media

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Photo Credit: Kris Krug, via Flickr

About two months ago, Mike Hudack, the Director of Product at Facebook, in a rant about the current state of our news consumption, posted this on his Facebook wall:

…And we come to Ezra Klein. The great Ezra Klein of Wapo and msnbc. The man who, while a partisan, does not try to keep his own set of facts. He founded Vox. Personally I hoped that we would find a new home for serious journalism in a format that felt Internet-native and natural to people who grew up interacting with screens instead of interacting with screens from couches with bags of popcorn and a beer to keep their hands busy.

And instead they write stupid stories about how you should wash your jeans instead of freezing them. To be fair their top headline right now is “How a bill made it through the worst Congress ever.” Which is better than “you can’t clean your jeans by freezing them.”

The jeans story is their most read story today. Followed by “What microsoft doesn’t get about tablets” and “Is ’17 People’ really the best West Wing episode?”

It’s hard to tell who’s to blame. But someone should fix this shit.

Vox, whom Hudack was attacking, responded:

Here’s where I disagree — it is not hard to tell who is to blame for the fact that the jeans story (which is a great, interesting, informative story) got more readers than Andrew Prokop’s excellent feature on the DATA Act. Facebook is to blame.

As of writing, the jeans story has been shared 1,062 times on Facebook while the DATA Act story has been shared just 242 times. That’s why the jeans story has been read by more people. We featured the DATA Act story much more prominently on our home page, but these days the bulk of web traffic is driven by social media and the bulk of social traffic is driven by Facebook…

But for better or for worse, traffic on the internet right now is all about Facebook sharing behavior. And here’s a key point. Facebook doesn’t work like Twitter. On Twitter if you share something, your followers see it. On Facebook, what is seen is driven by an algorithm that Facebook controls — if they wanted to promote more hard news they could do it…

I have been thinking about this exchange a lot recently.

What is going on in the Middle East right now is horrific. No matter what “side” you are on, there is ample grief to go around. Hundreds of Palestinians are dead, as well as dozens of Israelis. Gazans and Israelis alike are living in a constant state of fear. The situation is a disaster and it only seems to get worse every time I refresh my browser.

I am following the current Middle East conflict all over the Internet. I read the news, and I read opinions. I read left-wingers, right-wingers, and moderates. If someone is writing about the conflict, I am at least browsing what they have to say.

And I am finding a lot of information on Facebook. Having spent a lot of time in the Middle East, studying peace and conflict in graduate school, and living all over the U.S., I have accumulated a Facebook cohort with quite a vast array of opinions. From one side of the spectrum to the other, I have seen it all on my Facebook wall. I have academics, Israelis/Palestinians/Jews/Muslims, people who follow the news, people who never follow the news, but everyone has an opinion and the opinions are all over my feed. And I love it.

I don’t love the fact that people are angry, mind you, but I enjoy the access to so many diverse opinions and ideas in one, easy-to-reach, digital place.

Well… sort of easy.

As we all know, and as Vox spells out above, Facebook only really shows us two things: things they think we want to see and things that make them money. One thing that struck me while following the current iteration of the conflict on my Facebook feed was the lack of substantive back-and-forth I had come to expect.

It seems to me, more and more, Facebook is becoming an echo chamber. I used to see epic battles on my Facebook feed about Middle East events. These days I see the occasional spat but nothing equivalent to people’s obvious passions and attitudes.

So I posted the following question on my wall:

I’ve been noticing recently how little back-and-forth has been showing up in my newsfeed regarding the Middle East. I have seen A LOT of of posts condemning Hamas, and A LOT condemning Israel and they both have plenty of comments. But everyone commenting always seems to agree with the original poster. Am I the only one noticing this? Is Facebook making it harder for people to have discussions or are people purging their friends with whom they disagree? I’m really curious. Please share your thoughts.

One friend told me she has seen “quite a bit of back and forth,” but most responders stated that they simply no longer engage.

I work in social media, and have recently been doing a lot of research on the way Facebook works. The more that you engage with a person or a topic, the more that person/topic will show up in your feed. If you are constantly liking pictures of cats, you are going to see a lot of pictures of cats. If you only comment on posts about Phish, the jamband world will flow into your feed. Groovy post, man.

On the other hand, if you constantly ignore certain topics in your feed, Facebook will assume that you are less interested and will begin to filter them out. An interesting idea in theory, except some people come to Facebook to browse, not to shop.

I wonder if more and more people are simply disengaging from things with which they disagree, and are therefore only seeing topics about which they are already firmly in the choir.

I was discussing this notion with a friend (on Facebook and in person) and he was telling me about a friend of his who “defends” (his word) Israel whenever Israel is under attack on Facebook. If someone posts something about Gaza that is critical of Israel, he sits down and takes the time to explain “the situation,” as he sees it. He stands up for Israel and then fights the good fight in perpetual comment threads.

Here is the interesting part: Presumably, the more often he engages in these debates on Facebook , the more often things he likely disagrees with are going to pop up in his feed. He is a Sisyphus of social media, except he is not only pushing his boulder up the hill, he is hauling dirt with him each trip he takes, making the hill he will next have to climb taller, steeper and more taxing.

If he stopped defending Israel, he would probably see less posts he felt compelled to respond to — which is neither good nor bad; it is just the facts of living in the Facebook world. This is something we should all consider the next time we choose to engage — or disengage — with those wonderful voices in our Facebook feed.

I’m going to give the last words, at least for now, to Tres Thomas, a very interesting member of my own personal Facebook community and a very knowledgeable and engaging theorist on international peace and conflict resolution:

I have chosen to only have political discussions on Twitter and to keep Facebook for posting pictures of sunsets.

 

Follow me on Twitter @jlemonsk

 

Author

Josh Klemons

Josh Klemons has an MA in International Peace and Conflict Resolution with a concentration in the Middle East from American University. He has lived, worked and studied in Israel and done extensive traveling throughout the region. He once played music with Hadag Nachash.

He now works as a digital storyteller/strategist with brands on finding, honing and telling their stories online. Follow him on twitter @jlemonsk and check him out at www.joshklemons.com.