The Story Here... Isn't What You Think It Is

 

About six weeks ago, I was laying in my bed, doom-scrolling through the comments on the Instagram accounts of local news houses and distraught.

My country was about to start rolling out its COVID-19 vaccination programme and the comments were filled with skepticism, hesitancy and outright hostility to the idea of getting vaccinated. Every dangerous and and unevidenced conspiracy about vaccination was circulating in the comments section, with a trail of likes and co-signing comments in their wake. 

For someone like me who believes in the science behind vaccines and has seen the historical evidence of how my country's very efficient public immunization programme has improved our public health, this was far from encouraging.

Taken against the background of a second surge of COVID-19 in the country, this feeling that the populace was very hesitant to vaccinate, meant that my mood was morose.

'We're going to be stuck inside forever.'

'My daughter's childhood is going to pass her by interacting with her friends on Zoom and Roblox.' 

A few weeks later ... things were markedly different.

Over 20% of the population got vaccinated in the first phase of the programme. People were not only willing to get vaccinated but eager. 

Anecdotal stories of just how eager they were circulated.  Senior citizens  coming to fisticuffs in clinics over who got to go first. A walk-in clinic where senior citizens were allowed to bring their immediate household to get vaccinated as well being overwhelmed when folks started rolling in with 10 and 12 'household members' at a time.  

Coordinator of the National Vaccination Programme, Maj. David Clarke, admitted that they were taken aback and caught a bit off guard by the sheer intensity and enthusiasm of the response. 

In an interview with a local newspaper, he gave an example where an appointment-only clinic which had been scheduled at a local school for 80 senior citizens, was inundated with over 400 people turning up in hopes of getting the vaccination.

"There had been a level of skepticism in the society in general and we weren't expecting that large response from people. In the first week, it didn't seem that many wanted to get vaccinated, then in the second week, so many more people decided they wanted to after all," he stated.

So what on earth happened? How did we misjudge the actual sentiment so much? 

To answer, let's go back to that low morning as I was doom scrolling when a voice said to me - 'you know it's probably not as bad as it seems.'

 

I didn't know if to trust that voice then but she had some things to say. Namely: 

'Come on Amanda, you've seen this before. The comments section isn't real life nor is it reflective of the views of the majority.' 

What was this little voice even going on about?

Well, she was referencing two specific times in my career - on either end of storytelling and how my experiences taught me how much feedback platforms are dominated by the few and vocal even if they are open to all. 

In my first public relations role, at a state regulatory agency, part of my job was media monitoring of the radio call-in programmes. Now, Caribbean people love radio call-in programmes with an abiding passion. As a result, many of the most popular stations build large blocs of their daytime programming around them. 

When I began listening to the programmes, on a regular basis for hours each day, I quickly picked up an eerie familiarity. 

That voice... didn't I hear that voice yesterday? In fact didn't I hear that same voice today self on the other programme on another station? 

I realised that while these programmes are built on the premise of being a free public square where anyone can share their views, the truth is, anyone doesn't. In fact it's a very specific, relatively small group of someones who make up the vast majority of the discussion. 

Because here's the thing. While thousands are listening to the programme during the course of the hour or hours it's on the air, the vast majority of listeners don't have the time to call in. Even if they do find the time but are met with a busy tone, they generally don't have the inclination to call back again and again until they get through. Are they that passionate about the point they were going to make to stay on the phone for ages trying to get through? Be honest, are you? More than likely not.

Many others just don't wish to broadcast their views to the public at large for a variety of reasons - it opens you up to scrutiny, having to defend your stance, it may be unpopular or get you in trouble.

This thins the pack considerably and I realised what I was actually hearing was a rotating cast of diehard callers. I heard them so frequently that even now a decade on, I can still remember  the names.

Hugely opinionated and armed with the persistence of a telemarketer and the patience of Job, they called until they got through and spoke and shared their views on every aspect of the news of the day. 

Ok that's radio but what about my premise about the comments section? Social and digital media would seem to be a different beast with a lower barrier to participation. While commenting requirements differ from site to site, with some requiring sign up and others not, once you're on, there's nothing stopping you from having your say whenever you feel like.

While truth be told, this ease of access means that there is a wider level of interaction on websites and social media pages, the core principle still remains. The conversation is largely driven by a proportionally small number of followers. 

Ask me how I know? Well, when I left that state agency, I went back into journalism as the first digital editor of any local media house in my country and I got to experience that for myself. 

As with the radio call in programmes, I realised that the comments on the website (we had no social media platforms at the start of my tenure, back in the bad or good old days, depending on where you stand) were coming from the same people over and over.

At the time, we just required users to put in an email address and a user name. However, for comment moderation purposes, we could see IP addresses in the back end and that showed ... a lot.

While there was a wider spread than what I was hearing on the radio, if there were 200 comments in a day spread across several articles, sometimes as many as 60 or 70 were coming from the same 8 to 10 users.

And when a contentious issue was being discussed like immigration, it would take a dark turn. New commenters would enter the discussion, yes but were often bent on chaos. Both the volume of the comments and the nastiness would get ramped way up and I'd notice folks were using multiple email addresses and usernames to comment, agree with their comments and abuse other users who disagreed.

I started to joke to my then boyfriend, now husband that the comments sections were dominated by the dregs of humanity. I was kidding ... a bit.

I also discovered I was not alone in my sentiments.

In early 2010, I attended a training course at the Poynter Institute - 'Leading the New Newsroom: Digital Skills and Strategies for Today's Managers'. There were journalists drawn from the four corners of the earth and when it came to comment moderation, we all faced the same issue - we were incredibly frustrated at how our comments sections were dominated by what amounted to a handful of voices over and over and to be honest, quite often they were not the best voices.

There were some sessions and vigourous discussion about solutions to improve the quality of discourse on our websites but in the years since then, things have unfortunately only gotten worse, not better.

The truth is, comments skew our perception of well... perception, creating false impressions about what the public at large really believes. Our instinct is to think that because the comments section is open to a wide cross-section of the public, that they reflect the views of a wide cross-section of people and that is simply not the case.

For one, there is what has been referred to as the 'lurkers paradox' or the '90-9-1 rule' which posits that in any internet community, dating back to the days of message boards, about 90% just consume content, 9% contribute/comment a little and 1% comment a lot. You can read more about it in this article from the Nielsen Norman Group, co-founded by famed web usability expert Jakob Nielsen who popularized the term participation inequality to refer to the phenomenon.

This is backed up in research from the University of Texas at Austin, which looked at the patterns and habits of Americans in commenting on the news. They found that while the majority of respondents had left a comment at some point in time, only 14% had ever even commented on the news.

And of that sub-set who had ever commented on the news, it was an even smaller proportion who could be considered frequent commenters, commenting daily or a few times a week.

In addition, those who do comment tend to be... not middle of the road in their views, to say the least. Research from the London School of Economics some years back showed that policy discussions on Twitter were dominated by those on the two extremes of the political ideology spectrum - those who were very conservative and those who were very liberal.

So it's perhaps not surprising that discourse dominated by diehard ideologues eventually became... unpleasant. I still remember the early, glory days when we were enamoured at this ability to get instant feedback from our audience, hear (what we thought were) a wider range of views and were eager to find ways to channel this audience feedback into clever, crowd-sourced journalism products, like CNN's venerable iReport project. 

But as our online audiences increased, so did the vitriol. This poignant piece from UK Guardian journalist Jessica Valenti sums up how the tide turned, going from the early days of optimism and genuine joy at interacting more closely with readers:

"I saw the comments section as a way to destabilize the traditional writer/reader relationship – no longer did audiences need to consume an article without a true opportunity to respond. Comments even made my writing better those days; feedback from readers broadened the way I thought and sometimes changed my mind.

... To the modern setting where:

"... As the internet and audiences grew, so did the bile. Now if feels as if comments uphold power structures instead of subverting them: sexism, racism and homophobia are the norm; threats and harassment are common....

For writers, wading into comments doesn’t make a lot of sense – it’s like working a second shift where you willingly subject yourself to attacks from people you have never met and hopefully never will."

It's perhaps no surprise that many news houses have limited commenting from those who have done away with it altogether like NPR to even the Guardian which put in place much tighter controls on their famously lively comment sections.

Add to that social media, where the algorithms reward not necessarily the most insightful and informed commentary but comments which draw engagement even if they are flaming, trolling and antagonistic remarks which serve only to stir up digital outrage and rebuke.

These same social media algorithms also mean that what we tend to see can well be alternate versions of reality - see the Wall Street Journal's Blue Feed, Red Feed project which showcased how polarised  social media timelines can be, depending on ideology.

What does this all tell us? 

That using comments to assess the mood of the populace on anything is fraught with peril. It's simply not a reliable way of measuring sentiment and in fact, relying on it can skew what we think that people think.

In short when it comes to commenting, the story here is rarely what you think it is.