2302: By the Power of the Virtues

There’s a new-ish trend on social media. And like most new-ish trends on social media, it’s not a particularly pleasant one.

Known as “virtue signalling”, it essentially involves people making public statements that make it abundantly clear that they hold what is widely regarded to be the “correct” viewpoint on something, be this feminism, homosexuality, Donald Trump, immigration, unisex bathrooms, whether or not we should leave Europe, gun control and whether or not Uncharted 4 deserved more than an 8.8 out of 10.

It’s an offshoot of a couple of other social media behaviours that have been happening for a while, most notably Twitter’s “dot-reply” practice, which gets around Twitter’s usual behaviour of not showing people you follow replying to people you don’t follow (because why would you want to “listen in” on a conversation involving someone you don’t know?), and the related practice of people complaining at companies on Twitter without putting the company in question’s user ID in an @mention at the start of the tweet. “Hey, @amazon, your customer service today was shocking!” — you know, that sort of thing.

Both of these practices — and virtue signalling too, for that matter — are a means of amplifying one’s own voice and trying to get noticed. Typically, social media consists of lots of people on a reasonably equal footing all shouting into the void and occasionally having conversations with one another. When you bring in dot-replies, public replies and virtue signalling, however, it becomes less about your actual message and more about public perception of you. When you engage in any of these behaviours, you’re trying your very best to get your message heard and, crucially, reshared by as many people as possible. In that way, the word can spread about What A Fine Example of Humanity you are, and you can subsequently reap the social capital rewards from successfully Saying the Right Thing in Front of the Right People.

Taking a public stand on things isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But unfortunately, the very nature of social media has a habit of distorting messages beyond recognition, and when combined with such transparent attempts to spread your message as far and wide as possible as what we’ve just described, the global game of Chinese Whispers kicks into overdrive and your message — which may well have been flawed in the first place, or perhaps just misinterpreted somewhere along the line — gets taken at face value, for better or worse.

And people these days simply do not question the things that are presented to them. This is particularly bad on Facebook, where many people — particularly those less Web-literate — will happily share completely untrue stories without bothering to check the validity of them, and their friends, equally Web-illiterate, will share them further, until they’ve been around the world and back, with a significant number of people believing the load of old bollocks that some troll from 4chan probably dreamed up in an attempt to see how many idiots he could net.

It happens on Twitter, too, though, and through the media as well. A recent example came via the subreddit for Ubisoft’s multiplayer shooter The Division, where a user made up a completely false glitch-based strategy for one of the bosses, and said “cheat” was picked up by numerous high-profile gaming websites without bothering to check whether or not it was legitimate for themselves. (It would have been easy enough to do so, given that the user in question actually posted another thread on Reddit at the same time with a legitimate strategy for the same encounter, admitting that his “glitch” was a complete fabrication.)

And this lack of questioning or critical thinking is poisonous when it’s combined with virtue signalling. Opinions that someone made up become accepted as irrefutable fact simply because someone “important” shared them, or lots of people shared them. Take the Ghostbusters reboot trailer, for example — now famous for being the most disliked YouTube video in the site’s history. The story runs now that it is the most hated video in existence “because of misogyny” — and there’s simply no arguing with that, because so many people  have made loud, proud statements about how they’re going to give Ghostbusters a chance because they’re not misogynist at all, no sirree, and that means that anyone who simply thinks the trailer is shit (it kinda is) gets thrown under the bus with the genuine misogynists and the trolls who enjoy stirring the pot for the hell of it.

Generally speaking, I tend to take the attitude that if you have to shout loudly about what a wonderful person you are, you probably aren’t a particularly wonderful person in the first place. So far I’m yet to be proven wrong with this theory.