Polarization, with Daniel Kreiss
“It’s a lazy way of thinking about the world” argues the UNC professor, when the real issues are “power, status, white supremacy.”
Daniel Kreiss (@kreissdaniel) is a professor in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, a principle researcher in the school’s Center for Information, Technology, & Public Life, the author of several books, and a key figure in the ongoing public debate over the political roles being played by online platforms like Facebook and Twitter — especially when it comes to how to think about polarization, misinformation, and power.
Kreiss grew up in central New Jersey — “the sort of place where my high school English teacher taught Bruce Springsteen,” he says — and went to Maine’s Bates College. He ended up doing political-organizing work in Brooklyn and experiencing the gritty side of New York City politics, including Democrat-on-Democrat racial appeals delivered via old-school literature drops. September 11th caused him to reevaluate, he says. He started an after-school program in Flatbush but, missing writing, decided to become a journalist.
Kreiss made his way to Stanford to study for a master’s degree in journalism. During the 2004 election cycle, he got caught up with some Bay Area volunteers for Howard Dean, and followed them to Sioux City, Iowa, to cover the presidential race. He came back intrigued by how technology was shaping the practice of politics, but he decided journalism wasn’t for him. For one thing, he’d discovered a love for doing big-picture analytical work. For another, he was in his late 20s and, he says with a laugh, his one job offer in journalism was “in the middle of the country for like $18,000 a year.”
He enrolled in Stanford’s PhD in communication program, finishing his degree in 2010. He counts himself among a set of Gen-X academic researchers focused on the intersections of tech and politics who know life before and after. “Tech clearly matters, because scale matters,” says Kreiss. “But that process of making veiled racial propagandistic attempts for electoral gain, that's super freakin’ old.”
We spoke right as Kreiss is in the middle of the controversy over UNC’s decision not to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist whose work on the history and legacy slavery in the United States as part of the New York Times’ “1619 Project” has made her a target of criticism, particularly in conservative circles. Kreiss has been critical of the university’s handling of the situation, which has him facing some tough questions.
(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Scola: How are you handling all this?
Kreiss: It’s been a long few days, but I’m glad it’s the public eye now, because it needs to be.
You and two co-authors recently put out a paper on “identity propaganda,” or the role of race-based narratives in misinformation that exist to shore up “pre-existing power structures.” The paper focuses on the 2020 election and then-candidate Kamala Harris. But I was struck by what it might also say about the broader public discussion around Nikole Hannah-Jones.
You can see that the discussion around misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda has been way, way, way, way too focused on platforms, and it's been primarily conceived as a technological problem. And doing that has resulted in a few very key issues.
The first is that the narrative way to easily slides into like, ‘Oh, this is totally Facebook's problem, and not a democracy problem.’ It elides any actors at all. So you're like, ‘Oh, my god, there's all this misinformation on Facebook,’ and it takes you away from, ‘Okay, who are the agents of this disinformation? What comes prior to it hitting Facebook?’
And then at the same time, it's been very convenient, particularly for researchers and members of the news media, to frame things in this way. That’s for the simple reason is that it enables you to avoid making any political claims at all. You can easily get away with hating Facebook and the tech industry, because everyone agrees. I mean, if you're a Republican, sure, go after Facebook. If you're a Democrat? They hate Facebook, too.
It’s so easy to be in that space, to just trot out Facebook as the cause of all your democratic problems. And never say that like, well, look, actually the extremism here is coming from the Republican Party, or the extremism here is from here's these coordinated attempts to turn critical race theory into you know, something that is divisive — something that is skewing American history, not trying to actually tell us about America’s racial history.
So framing things as a tech problem has been very politically convenient. And it also just leads us to ask the wrong questions and solve for the wrong thing.
“The problem is that if polarization is your foremost concern, you're not analyzing structural inequality. And any group that's pushing to achieve equality is automatically dismissed as being polarizing because it’s threatening the status quo.”
But if, as you’ve said, the problem isn’t “polarizing rhetoric or misinfo” but “power, status, white supremacy,” don’t they reinforce one another?
There's a couple problems here. Platforms are part of the battlefield, so to speak, within which lots of other social, political, state, and other interests are playing out. It's literally the spot where like people are contending over public opinion, public perception, public knowledge or lack thereof, public ignorance, etc.
So when we say that, like, you know, ‘white supremacy is the problem,’ what we're pointing to is basically the ways in which — and here I’ll shout out people like Lilliana Mason and her amazing work — the contemporary Republican Party is a vehicle for, primarily, white dominant interests. Those interests are very old, they're just sorted into a political party in a very coherent way at an unprecedented moment.
And the polarization thing — it drives me nuts, because I think it’s a very lazy way of thinking about the world. You see this very clearly in one of the attacks that the right will make on critical race theory, on “1619,” is that it’s divisive. It’s polarizing, and therefore to say, that if our value is for us all to have unity, anything that’s polarizing is automatically bad.
There’s a whole cottage industry of academic research that trades in saying, ‘Polarization is is awful, let's find the sources of it and then bring us all together.’
“The problem is that if polarization is your foremost concern, you're not analyzing structural inequality. And any group that's pushing to achieve equality is automatically dismissed as being polarizing because it’s threatening the status quo.”
What’s so wrong with that?
The problem is that if polarization is your foremost concern, you're not analyzing structural inequality. And any group that's pushing to achieve equality is automatically dismissed as being polarizing because it’s threatening the status quo.
Where do you draw the line on polarization? Black Lives Matter is premised on making polarizing arguments because it's a social movement. Like, they want to make emotional appeals and they want to represent their coalition in certain ways that plays on social identity. Who's to say Facebook should be solving to take organizing power away from the Black Lives Matter movement?
I'm not convinced as a policy solution to that. I think a lot of people pretend there is by sidestepping or forgetting about the fact that a lot of totally legitimate social movements that I would agree with are also premised on the sort of appeals that in other contexts other people would decry as being polarizing.
To go back to your original question, I don’t want to let tech off the hook, because one thing is does is create incentives for certain types of behavior, certain performances of identity. It’s not a neutral battlefield. They need to think about what they’re making it easier to do, and does that accord with democracy?
But I’ll also say that I have quite contrarian views. I think political targeting is not necessarily bad. I think that data in politics is not necessarily bad. I think political ads are not necessarily bad. And I don’t think polarization is necessarily bad, either.
Getting back to platforms for a minute, the idea is that they’re less like a soccer field than they are “The Hunger Games,” an arena will all sorts of rules?
There’s rules, there’s weapons around, there are things in the built environment that you can take advantage of. But, I mean, even a soccer field’s not neutral. It has a certain distance that rewards certain abilities; artificial turf benefits some athletes more than grass does. Nothing is ever purely neutral.
I get that you’re not absolving the platforms and that polarization can lead to positive social change. But if you concede that the U.S. isn’t in a great place politically right now, then, well, whose fault is it?
Some of it is certainly psychological. There’s very clear evidence in the social sciences and psychology that humans are hard-wired to create distinctions between groups. Group membership is extremely important. And I think the real driver of American politics are the ways in ways in which racial and other forms of social distinctions became carved up.
When Fox News came along, it didn’t create that sorting. A lot of politicians did. Elites really matter. They tell a story about who they represent and what the parties represent, and Fox News gets grafted on to that.
But another piece is, and the 2020 election was a perfect display of this, is what are the platforms responsible for? Well, very clearly not having a set of pro-democratic policies being evenly applied on powerful politicians. I think they have an obligation to say, ‘There’s a bright red line around voter suppression and undermining the ballot box, and all our policies and actions need to flow from there.’
Some of my work with my RAs now is fleshing out an idea of what would non-colorblind platform policies look like? What would race-conscious policy look like? What if, modeled off the Voting Rights Act, we had platforms apply greater scrutiny to certain groups that had been the subject of discrimination, particularly along the lines of things like voting?
So if it’s “identity propaganda” clearly based on race, that should trigger more alarms?
Right. Let's think about the Obama ‘birther’ stuff. On the one hand, Trump would hide behind freedom of speech, or say, ‘I’m just asking questions, I’m not asserting anything.’
On the other hand, if you were Twitter and you say, ‘Look, we have a democracy frame on all our policies. What is this type of content actually doing? It’s saying that a non-white candidate is illegitimate for office, in a deliberate and strategic way.’ I think if it was a race-concious policy, it would have to say that this isn’t just a neutral birth certificate [debate]. There’s not a lot of white people who have their birth certificate scrutinized on a regular basis.
Therefore, we should view this as undermining legitimate opposition, and that runs counter to democracy and shouldn’t be allowed.
So drawing a distinction between people questioning whether Barack Obama can be president and whether John McCain can be?
Right. Though at some point it just shades into disinformation. So after you see a birth certificate, there you go. That’s solved.
“What needed to be done much earlier [in the pandemic] is to frame it as, ‘Within the Republican party, there are many different perspectives.’ We know from the social science evidence that presenting it as an intra-partisan debate frustrates that immediate identity thinking.”
Switching gears just a bit, COVID has been a lot about science, for sure, but also a lot about political communications. How do you grade what the Biden administration, the CDC, Dr. Fauci have done there?
Look, I don't study health communications, but from what I know about political communication it’s been an insanely poor job.
I think the entire community was extra-ordinarily flat-footed — and I don’t entirely blame them — on understanding the political dimensions of things like mask wearing and the vaccine, and that you need validators on the right in particular.
For a long time, we were under the assumption that health information is health information, and ‘Everyone wants to live so everyone’s going to adopt this.’ Clearly that’s not the case. And that’s because people are both skeptical of institutions and are going to read group interests into everything.
What needed to be done much earlier is to frame it as, ‘Within the Republican party, there are many different perspectives.’ We know from the social science evidence that presenting it as an intra-partisan debate frustrates that immediate identity thinking.
THE TOOLS FOR GETTING THINGS DONE
We love us some productivity tools here at Slow Build. Kreiss, a prolific writer, shares his:
“My productivity tool is honestly a 100% analog watch. I started wearing it when I had kids and I decided that I didn’t want my phone to be the only way I could check time. When you check time on your phone, you’re checking every one of your notifications. We’re hard-wired to check for new information. So when I went to an analog watch it was basically to say, it’s purpose-driven, and I’m only looking at this to check the time. And the same thing that works for when I’m with my kids on the playground works for when I’m writing.
The other thing that keeps me focused on my mental space when writing is turning the Internet off and just having a Word document in front of me. Or it’s opening up an entirely new browser, like Firefox, with zero tabs. So if I need to look something up or do research, I’m just focusing on the task at hand.
Also, I write for like four hours a day when I’m working on a big project, and that’s protected, guarded time. I don’t check emails. I don’t get notifications. The phone is away. That’s me time.”