Want to find out what normal people think? Don’t look at Twitter. Following Nike’s decision to make Colin Kaepernick the face of its new advertising campaign, news reports have focussed on criticism led by a small band of social media arsonists torching their trainers in protest. And, out of nowhere, a loose assemblage of random individuals have grabbed the headlines.
It’s high time to call bullshit on using social media as an accurate measure of anything. You know the drill. Something happens in the world and the news cycle rushes to gauge public opinion. This often leads to the views of an infinitesimally small group of people being negligently put up against a broad consensus. In this case, a few dozen people burning Nike trainers versus the vast majority who think Kaepernick’s appointment is both admirable and appropriate. And the balance fallacy, as it is known, is rapaciously fed by “social media users”.
We’ve been here before. But the case of Nike and Kaepernick is especially revealing. In its early reporting of the story, the BBC said 800 tweets had been sent using the #BoycottNike and #JustBurnIt hashtags. Elsewhere, reports of the criticism embedded and quoted tweets from outraged “critics”. These critics are, for the most part, absolute unknowns, plucked from online obscurity to become the newsworthy voice of an almost invisible opposition. It’s all terribly good fun to mock the burning shoe protests on your version of Twitter, but surfacing such posts in news reports only serves to reinforce and legitimise fringe behaviour and views.
Nobody, it would seem, has learned their lesson.
In the hours after the March 2017 terror attack on London, a picture started circulating on social media. Shot just after terrorist Khalid Masood ran a car through a crowd on Westminster Bridge, killing four, it showed a man on the ground, frantic bystanders and a woman in a hijab, apparently unconcerned, looking at her phone.
“Muslim woman pays no mind to the terror attack, casually walks by a dying man while checking phone #PrayForLondon #Westminster #BanIslam,” tweeted the account @SouthLoneStar, the bio of which proclaimed the user was a “Proud TEXAN and AMERICAN patriot”. The problem? SouthLoneStar was identified as an account run by Russian actors in a bid to influence the 2016 US presidential election and Western democracies. Until this revelation, dozens of news reports had blindly embedded or quoted from the tweet, using it as an example of how people were reacting to the attack. The photograph of the woman was, for the record, taken out of context. Spurred on by news reports, the tweet and the photo went viral.
Though the tweet was widely derided, few stopped to think about its intent or providence. Here was a proud Texan voicing his distaste for how a woman was apparently reacting to a terrorist attack. Yet SouthLoneStar, and thousands of social media accounts like it, was a lie created by the Russian state to disrupt democracy and spread discontent and division. The truth, ultimately, didn’t matter.
As the scale of Russia’s disinformation warfare was revealed, journalists rightly expressed alarm. How could social media platforms allow this to happen? And why weren’t they doing more to clamp down on this scurrilous behaviour? And yet, in the next breath, news reports fall over themselves to track down the next online outrage, sourcing hatred and bile from random accounts of unknown origins.
Using Twitter to gather public opinion is, at the most basic level, lazy journalism. Taking that one step further and scouring social media for the most extreme responses to the news is plain irresponsible.
And yet here we are. Again. The “criticism" of Nike and Kaepernick was covered by, amongst others, Business Insider, The Telegraph, Mail Online, Global News, the Evening Standard, Esquire, Metro, CNBC, The New York Times, The Sun, The Times, Vice and CNN. Vox was even on hand with a speedy explainer telling us all why the “boycott” is a “win for Nike”.
Outrage fuels outrage and creates a false discourse where everyone is angry with everyone else. News reports are stuffed to the brim with “opponents” and “critics” from social media who are put up against experts and voices of authority. In this case, the NFL (which, in a statement, somewhat dodged the issue but said the social justice issues raised by Kaepernick and others “deserve our attention and action”) is countered by @seanclancy79, a “Lover of Liberty” with 1,971 Twitter followers, who posted a video of his Nike trainers ablaze in a field. At the time of writing the video has been viewed nine million times and retweeted 25,000 times.
And so here we are, once again turning to social media to understand how we should think when recent history shows it is both a moronic or incredibly skewed barometer of public opinion. The balance fallacy is alive and well. And it’s incredibly dangerous.
In its report on the “critics” burning shoes and cutting up socks, The New York Times includes a still from a video of a “man with a lighter” seemingly about to set fire to dozens of Nike trainers in response to the Kaepernick deal. The video, in fact, is a celebration of the deal and ends with the man lighting a candle out of respect for Kaepernick. On social media, the truth continues to elude us.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
