The 142nd Block: Influencers, whistleblowers, and dangerous speech

Everybody has something to say these days

Jan 23, 2023

This week…

A happy lunar new year to everyone. Do you think the calendar concept was invented by women who were tracking their menstrual cycle?

And now, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.

The problem with influencers

Adenike Fapohunda for Current Affairs:

A person in a parasocial relationship may feel like they really know the person on the other end, without meeting them; they might be as attached as one would be to a close friend or a family member. The information that the person on the giving end of the relationship shares is a reinforcement of that bond, and as the amount of information increases, so does the intimate bond between the person consuming and the person giving. Most relationships are based on reciprocity, but for people in parasocial relationships, attempts to reach out to the objects of their affection are enough.

Technological advances in social media have revolutionized the manner in which we stay up to date with people we do not know. Even the average Joe can overload their followers with an unprecedented amount of personal information. This overload of interactions has led to an increase in the frequency and intensity of parasocial relationships, with more people than ever believing that their relationships with the people they follow are real. A 2017 study showed that 61 percent of adolescents saw their favorite media personalities in the same way they saw relationship partners. Not only has the internet created new routes to getting famous, but the effect of the internet on how we consume traditional media (such as music, movies, and TV) has made it much easier to develop parasocial relationships to celebrities from those worlds, and made those parasocial relationships even more intense.

The alarming rise of dangerous speech

Julia Angwin in conversation with Susan Benesch for The Markup:

Angwin: There’s also a lot of discussion about hate speech. Can you draw out the distinction between dangerous speech and hate speech?
Benesch: If you attack and denigrate another group of people because of their membership in that group, that’s hate speech. But the boundaries are contested, and the definitions vary a lot.
Dangerous speech is deliberately not subjective since the definition is consequentialist. It’s a prediction about the effect of speech as it is disseminated in the world. It is about the capacity of the speech to motivate somebody to commit or condone mass violence, which is a consequence that the vast majority of people don’t want. This means it’s easier to get people to agree that dangerous speech is bad, compared to getting people to agree that hate speech is bad, since it’s hard to agree that something is hate speech in the first place.

Why whistleblowers’ trust in journalism is fading

Mark Codington and Seth Lewis for Nieman Lab:

Journalists have depended on whistleblowers for some of their most consequential stories of the past several decades. But since whistleblowers often initiate an interaction with journalists, their act is a leap of faith that requires significant trust in both the journalist individually and the professional standards and impact of the news media more generally.
That’s the argument that undergirds a new study by the University of Georgia’s Karin Assmann, published late last month in Journalism Practice. If whistleblowing to a journalist is about the greatest act of trust one can put in the media, Assmann wondered, what were whistleblowers’ criteria for that trust, and how do they evaluate journalists’ performance in light of those criteria? And more broadly, might the decline in media trust generally make it less likely that individual whistleblowers choose to trust journalists with their secrets?

The authors also have a monthly newsletter, RQ1, on recent academic studies around journalism.

What I read, listen, and watch…

I’m reading how to engage blind audiences in data visualisation by John Cassidy for Reuters Institute.
I’m listening to where language names come from and why they change on Lingthusiasm, hosted by Gretchen McColloch and Lauren Gawne.
I’m watching Willow (2022). I enjoy a little bit of escapism.

Reviews, opinion pieces, and other stray links:

Fruit-peeling videos on TikTok are going viral by Allison Arnold for Delish.
Twitter is about 12 hours slower than Reddit by Ryan Broderick for Garbage Day.
Des jeux de réalité virtuelle pour des élèves avec des difficultés en français by Olivier du Ruisseau for Le Devoir.

Chart of the week

More than 130,000 people joined Mastodon in November. By the first week of January, there were about 1.8 million active users—down from more than 2.5 million in early December. Josh Nicholas writes for The Guardian: