Thinking with the majority - a new twist

I wrote somewhere once that thinking with the majority is an excellent description of Google. Because one of the ways something rises to the top of your search results is that lots of other people have already looked at it, liked or linked to it.

The phrase thinking with the majority comes from a remark by A.A. Milne, the author of Winnie the Pooh.

I wrote somewhere once that the third-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking with the majority, the second-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking with the minority, and the first-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking.

When I wrote about this topic previously, I thought that experienced users of Google and other search engines ought to be aware of how search rankings operated and some of the ways they could be gamed, and to be suitably critical of the fiction functioning as truth yielded by an internet search. And I never imagined that intelligent people would be satisfied with just thinking with the majority. (Although I now suspect that Milne may have been having a dig at his friend G.K. Chesterton.)

The sociologist Francesca Tripodi has been studying how people carry out research on the Internet, especially on politically charged topics. She observes how many people (even those we might expect to know better) are happy to regard search engines as a valid research tool, regarding the most popular webpages as having been verified by the wisdom of crowds. In her 2018 report for Data and Society, Tripodi quotes a journalist (!) explicitly articulating this belief.

I literally type it in Google, and read the first three to five articles that pop up, because those are the ones that are obviously the most clicked and the most read, if they’re at the top of the list, or the most popular news outlets. So, I want to get a good sense of what other people are reading. So, that’s pretty much my go-to.

In other words, thinking with the majority.

However, Professor Tripodi introduces a further twist. She demonstrates that politically slanted search terms produce politically slanted results, and if you go onto your favourite search engine with a politically motivated phrase, you are likely to see results that validate that phrase. She also notes that this phenomenon is not unique to Google, but is shared by all internet search engines including DuckDuckGo.

And this creates opportunities for politically motivated actors to plant phrases (perhaps into so-called data voids) to serve as attractors for those individuals who fondly imagine they are carrying out their own independent research. Tripodi observes a common idea that one should research a topic oneself rather than relying on experts, which she compares with the Protestant ethic of bible study and scriptural inference. And this idea seems particularly popular with those who identify themselves as thinking with the minority (sometimes called red pill thinking).

Zeus' inscrutable decree
Permits the will-to-disagree
To be pandemic.

 

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 Tripodi explains her findings in the following videos

• Truth and Denial: Searching for Information in the Digital Age (Social Science Matrix @ UC Berkeley, April 2021)
• Reimagine the Internet 2 (Knight First Amendment Institute @ Columbia University, May 2021)
  

Tripodi has also presented evidence to the US Senate Judiciary Committee

• July 16, 2019 – Google and Censorship through Search Engines 
• April 10, 2019 – Technological Censorship and Public Discourse

 

See also  

G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (1905), Orthodoxy (1908)

Joan Donovan, The True Costs of Misinformation - Producing Moral and Technical Order in a Time of Pandemonium (Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, January 2020)

Michael Golebiewski and danah boyd, Data Voids: Where Missing Data Can Easily Be Exploited (Data and Society, Updated version October 2019)

Francesca Tripodi, Searching for Alternative Facts: Analyzing Scriptural Inference in Conservative News Practices (Data and Society, May 2018)

Wikipedia: Red pill and blue pill, Wisdom of the crowd 

 

Related posts: You don't have to be smart to search here ... (November 2008), Thinking with the Majority (March 2009)

Ministry of Truth

This week, a series of strong assertions by British Ministers. These strong assertions can all be seen as exercises in the Politics of Truth.

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1. British Health Minister John Reid asserts that sex selection will be permitted only on "compelling medical grounds"

see my notes on bioethics

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2. British Home Secretary David Blunkett asserts that biometrics are 100% reliable as a method of identification.

see my notes on biometrics

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3. British Minister for Children Margaret Hodge asserts that a certain individual associated with criticism of her performance in a previous role is "extremely disturbed". Many years previously he had been a victim of child abuse when living in a children's home for which she had had overall responsibility. (Life imitates art: the book in which Harry Potter was characterized as "extremely disturbed" by the spin doctors at the Ministry of Magic was published in June 2003.)

This appears to be an attempt to follow the "Prince Charles" method of News Management, when he denied some allegations that had been circulating on the Internet. If you had searched for either the Prince Charles story or the Margaret Hodge story, you would have been presented with a lot of news items reporting the denial and discrediting the source - before you got to the allegation itself. This creates a different context for the allegation, and many people will read the allegation differently as a result. See Google and Spin, Google and Spin 2.

But unlike the prince, Madame Fudge has since apologized [BBC News, 14th November 2003], thus undermining her clumsy attempt at News Management. Searches for the Margaret Hodge allegations are now dominated by right-wing criticism, of which the most moderate is probably Melanie Phillips calling her the Minister for Child Betrayal [Daily Mail, 12th November 2003].

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