Facebook, online culture, coarsened political discourse, says Sherry Turkle
"I think the idea that fake news on Facebook influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg replied when asked how much social media influenced the U.S. election results at a conference.
But according to Sherry Turkle, author of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age and MIT's director of the Initiative on Technology and Self, Zuckerberg is in denial.
"I mean he is trying to come to terms, as is Google, as is Twitter, with what it means to be in this new kind of business," Turkle tells The Current's guest host Piya Chattopadhyay.
"And I'm sympathetic because he didn't set out to be a news organization, but it's really high time that Facebook, you know, really meets its responsibilities as a news organization."
Turkle says that when Facebook filters what they think you want, based on what you viewed before, it means you "burrow yourself into a silo where you will only see things that essentially you agree with."
"Now in most recent studies, college students will not talk to people whose political points of view they disagree with, even if they share a bathroom," she says.
Turkle tells Chattopadhyay that in this election "we have taken the coarse way we speak to each other online and we have now made that part of our standard political discourse."
In her own experience, Turkle says she's noticed a change in how she was treated online during the campaign, saying she experienced some "anti-Semitic" and "violent" interactions.
"There's been a kind of sense of permission to move away from civil discourse as though that weren't important."
And now what's left is a fatigue of political dialogue, says Turkle, where people just want the discussion to be over.
"Because people really aren't having a political conversation."
"They're just … caught in a nightmare of a comment section on a bad day on the internet."
Listen to the full conversation.
This segment was produced by The Current's Julian Uzielli.