Inside Facebook’s semiosphere. How social media influence digital hate and fuel cyber-polarization

ABSTRACT

The journey inside Facebook’s semiosphere revolves around the present-day controversy on how algorithms foster polarization and discord in one of the biggest and most popular social media platforms, namely, Facebook. The present work focuses on the so-called Facebook Files as a specific case study. By drawing on these investigations, the present study discusses what are the principles used by the Facebook algorithms in order to select a certain type of content and to direct attention to it, whilst generally discarding other types of content considered not enough engaging. By drawing on the perspective of the semiotics of culture, this paper makes an analogy between Ju. Lotman’s model of the “semiosphere” and the Facebook’s digital semiosphere with the goal of unpacking how the selection, diffusion, and suppression of online content is geared towards the polarization of ideas.

KEYWORDS:

• Filter bubbles
• semiosphere
• Ju. Lotman
• cyber-polarization
• digital hate
• Facebook

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 “Gone in Minutes, Out for Hours: Outrage Shakes Facebook.” New York Times, October 8, 2021 (Accessed December 21, 2021), https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/technology/facebook-down.html.

2 These documents are sometimes referred to as “Facebook papers.” In the reminder of this article, I will use the terminology “Facebook Files.”

3 Public lecture.

4 “36 percent of Americas under thirty get their news through social networking sites” (Parisier 2011, 10).

5 At present, 2.912 billion people use Facebook, meaning that they are active Facebook users. https://datareportal.com/essential-facebook-stats (Accessed January 28, 2022). Due to the proliferation of fake accounts, it is actually not so easy to know exactly how many people actually use Facebook today. On this point, see Schechner and Horwitz (2021).

6 The term “cultural text” stems from the terminological toolkit of Ju. Lotman and other members of the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school. Undoubtedly, text is one of the key concepts of the semiotics of culture and is an essential component in Lotman’s theory of literature and culture (Levchenko 1999). The concept of the cultural text in its full-fledged formulation is described in a seminal work published in 1973, simultaneously in Russian and English: The Theses on the Semiotic Study of Cultures (As Applied to Slavic Texts), which is a summary of the basic principles of semiotics advanced by the group. In the Theses, text is defined as “the fundamental concept of modern semiotics” and “the primary element (basic unit) of culture” (Uspenskij et al. 1973, 57–58). In simple terms, the semiotic analysis of culture is carried out by means of the study of texts: “for the study of culture there exists only those messages which are texts” (Lotman and Piatigorsky 1978, 237).

7 This is a term modeled on the term “iconoclasm” that Lotman and his colleagues use in order to refer to the intentional deletion and destruction of texts from cultural memory.

8 The Theses for a Semiotics of Cultures, moreover, point out that “one must distinguish a non-text from the “anti-text” of a given culture: the expression that is not preserved from the expression that is destroyed” (Ivanov et al. 1979, 204). Within a given culture, therefore, there are certain texts that are targeted and become the object of destruction and of a “culturoclastic” action. These are anti-texts, that is, texts that, for various reasons, can be targeted and destroyed or be the object of iconoclasm. This is a framework of how we can have different kinds of texts: “culture texts,” “non-texts” and “anti-texts,” something that has to be, precisely, eliminated, removed or destroyed.

9 The literature about Lotman’s notion of the “semiosphere” is legion. For a background on this concept from a semiotical perspective, see Alexandrov (2000), Clark (2010), Kotov (2002), Lotman (2001, 2002a), Mandelker (1995), Markoš (2014), Merrell (2008), Monticelli (2019), Nöth (2015), Patoine and Hope (2015), Salvestroni (1985, 7–46), Semenenko (2016), Steiner (2011), Sturrock (1991), Torop (2004, 2005a, 2005b, 2022), Portis-Winner (1998), Lorusso (2015, 88–100), Pezzini and Sedda (2004), Sedda (2022).

10 On this point see, Randviir (2005, 2007), and De Luca Picione (2022).

11 “Bringing the world closer together,” https://m.facebook.com/nt/screen/?params=%7B%22note_id%22%3A393134628500376%7D&path=%2Fnotes%2Fnote%2F&_rdr (Accessed January 28, 2022).

12 A special issue devoted to contagion was edited by the Rivista di estetica (15, 2/2000) (Griffero 2000).

13 The literature of the subject is legion. For an introduction to the subject, see Dawkins (1976, 1994), Sperber (1996), Blackmore (1999) Ianneo (1999), Brodie (1996), and Chesterman (1997). For a semiotical account on memes, see Marino (2015, 2022), Thibault (2017), Marino and Thibault (2016), Bennett (2021a, 2021b), Kull (2000), Cannizzaro (2016), Fomin (2019), Bouissac (1993, 2001, 2007), and Kilpinen (2008).

14 There have been skeptical views regarding the existence of filter bubbles and counter-arguments challenging this theory. In this connection, see Bruns, A. (2019) Are Filter Bubbles Real? Cambridge: Polity. See also Bakshy, Messing, and Adamic (2015).

15 See, “How News Feed Works.” Meta Developers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-Yhpz_SKiQ (Accessed January 11, 2022).

16 “How News Feed Works.” Meta Developers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-Yhpz_SKiQ (Accessed January 11, 2022).

17 “How News Feed Works.” Meta Developers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-Yhpz_SKiQ (Accessed January 11, 2022).

18 The Wall Street Journal. The Facebook Files. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039. (Accessed February 15, 2022).

19 The Wall Street Journal. The Facebook Files. “Facebook Tried to Make Its Platform a Healthier Place. It Got Angrier Instead,” https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-algorithm-change-zuckerberg-11631654215?mod=article_inline. (Accessed February 20, 2022).

20 The Wall Street Journal. The Facebook Files. “Facebook Tried to Make Its Platform a Healthier Place. It Got Angrier Instead,” https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-algorithm-change-zuckerberg-11631654215?mod=article_inline. (Accessed February 20, 2022).

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Remo Gramigna

Remo Gramigna is a post-doc researcher at the University of Turin, Italy, within the ERC project FACETS. His academic research to date has mainly focused on semiotics and culture studies, cognitive theory, communication studies, semiotics of culture, and the history of semiotics. His areas of research include lying and deception in human interactions, fakes, manipulation and strategies of simulation and dissimulation.