Opinion
Bodies stacked atop each other in refrigerated vans. Corpses laid out on the floor of a morgue. The unmistakeable crack of gunfire and the screams of thousands, footage blurring as crowds of unarmed youths flee for their lives. Hopeful, joyous protests. Teens and uni students and their parents and grandparents united in the streets, chanting for peace, chanting for change. Video messages, just in case: “If I don’t come back, I want you to know that I was willing to die…” More bodies, more death. People shot in the head in hospital beds, medical equipment still attached. Burning regime buildings, “death to the dictator”. Heartfelt yearnings for freedom and democracy. Funerals. Grieving mothers and grandmothers. Children clutching at the gravestones of parents.
My feed has been a seemingly endless doomscroll of the dead and the maimed, of hope and righteous anger, of lofty political statements and promised help which never came. A record of an unprecedented massacre whose chronology became scrambled alongside Iranians’ ability to connect to the internet, which was switched off by the regime on January 8.
The massacre in Iran was my first real experience of being trapped in an algorithmic bubble. My feeds on both Instagram and X had long been dominated by Iran-related content, but after news of the massacre started to filter out something changed. Now 100 per cent of what I was seeing was Iran.
Social media had become a fire hose of devastating violence to the exclusion of almost all else. From years of clicks and scrolls the algorithm knew I was invested. It knew I couldn’t look away.
I am only now beginning to understand the self-radicalising power of the social media algorithm. My Iran-dominated feed bears all the hallmarks of big tech’s ability to game our fears and anxieties, our innate concern for the downtrodden, and our political preferences and confirmation biases, in its insatiable quest to generate engagement-driven profits.
Initially, I felt a sense of responsibility to bear witness, and to post myself to amplify and speak up about the atrocities that had taken place in Iran at the hands of a brutal regime determined to cling to power no matter the cost. I still feel this duty.
After days of scrolling, however, those blood-soaked streets filled my dreams. The victims haunt my subconscious, as do the imagined faces of the perpetrators – among them probably the very same men who took me hostage and imprisoned me for over two years. Some of my prison friends are missing – dead, arrested or simply unable to connect due to an internet blackout that has lasted weeks. An ever-present undercurrent of dread started to animate all of my daily interactions. The algorithm was funnelling me into a place in which nothing else existed beyond the horrors of Iran.
There is an acuity to the polarisation prolonged exposure to social media algorithms is generating that simply was not present in earlier times – certainly not within mainstream political movements or causes.
Those of us old enough to remember the heady days of the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 will recall the optimism in the air – these were the first social media revolutions, in which young people organising online could outsmart brutal authoritarian dictators, reclaim the streets and peacefully, without weapons or even leaders, force change. For a painfully brief moment, countries like Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen stood as exemplars of a brave new world of tech-driven democratisation, in which social media was held up as an undeniable force for good.
Think about all the mass movement social and political causes that have exploded onto the scene recently. Almost all have authentic foundations grounded in real injustices or suffering. Scaffolded onto this, however, is the tenor of a growing radicalism nurtured online in algorithmic echo chambers and conspiracy rabbit holes. Some of this is the byproduct of the design of the algorithms themselves. Some of it is manufactured by outside forces.
Our feeds have become the playthings of interest groups, whether they be influencers or commentators chasing likes and clicks, companies seeking to sell us something or governments using bot farms, sock-puppets and sympathetic user accounts to contort public opinion in the service of foreign policy objectives.
In Autocracy Inc., Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum debunks the view in many democracies that the internet is a vast marketplace of ideas, a kind of libertarian public square in which, through reasoned debate, the facts will emerge salient and lies and conspiracy theories will be discredited and exposed.
This may have been the case in the early days of social media, which gave rise to the protest movements of the Arab Spring and groups like Occupy Wall Street. However, plentiful evidence has since emerged of foreign entities and governments gaming the algorithms, including Iran, China and Russia. Malign actors have an interest in fostering echo chambers of radicalism and outrage, bombarding users with content that over time, like my grief-stricken doomscrolling of images from the Iranian massacre, comes to saturate our brains in such a way that a single perspective becomes the only perspective.
You can’t blame foreign regimes for tapping these vast and powerful algorithms for their own nefarious ends. It’s just too easy – especially when our governments are either asleep at the wheel, in thrall to big tech or too afraid of provoking Donald Trump to properly regulate the mostly-American social media behemoths.
I am confident that the Iranian content in my feed was not curated by an online influence campaign. However, when I see influencers and commentators with sizeable followings casting doubt on the numbers killed, or characterising the protesters as paid agitators acting on behalf of Iran’s enemies, I do wonder.
Such people, likely to be ensconced within their own algorithmic bubbles, probably look upon me as being duped by propaganda in the other direction. Nobody wants to believe that there is an invisible hand shaping the very formation of their opinions.
Social media, far from the public square of old, has become a powerful tool in the hands of those who seek to influence our psychology. It’s important to recognise that caring deeply about a cause does not prevent us from tumbling into an ideological echo chamber. In fact, it might make it more likely.
Iran is still grappling with the fallout of the most devastating atrocity in its modern history. It’s essential that we amplify the voices of those who have witnessed these horrors. But, on a personal level, it’s also important to recognise when the time has come to look away.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert is an academic in Middle Eastern political science at Macquarie University, the author of memoir The Uncaged Sky: My 804 Days in an Iranian Prison and a regular columnist.
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