The Art of Changing No One's Mind

This chronicle of

Charlie Becker

’s Facebook comment section redemption arc is exactly what I envisaged when I first floated the idea of ‘Touch Grass’ being this months Symposium theme. It’s a deceptively simple piece but the honesty is what really shines through. In a time of crafted online personas and carefully curated images it’s rare to encounter someone be so straight up honest about how they behave online (or how the Silicon Valley ecosystem nudges them to behave) without it turning into self-pity or attention seeking of a different flavour. This is the real deal and I suspect that there are some readers here who this will truly speak to. Perhaps even yourself.

Enjoy.

TJB.

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I spent fifteen years picking fights in Facebook comment sections. At one point, I thought it made me a better person.

It is likely, looking back at my life, that I have a resting dopamine deficiency of some kind. From the first time I got my account, I always loved checking Facebook. But once we had the Facebook feed on Facebook mobile, it was game over. I was on my phone nonstop, arguing about whatever I felt like. It felt important, and I felt like I mattered.

I was spending time on Facebook, so other people must have been too, right? I was making up opinions there, so other people must have been doing the same? If I could be reasonable, smart, employ some rhetorical flair, maybe even garner some empathy, I could win hearts and minds to some good causes. Arguing felt like it mattered for the reason that it came to be vilified later: "virtue signalling." It was a way to display that I cared (and care) about certain things. I am not opposed to virtue signalling as a concept. It's good to let people know your morals and ethics.

But I spent over fifteen years engaging in performative debate for almost no reason. And it's not like I was directing it toward an end, it was to satisfy my own end: to feel like I was doing something and that I mattered. This is not at all to say that anybody who shares or posts is doing so for themselves, but it's hard to see past that having been the case with me.

If I had to guess, I'd say I wrote at least 10,000 Facebook comments. In a Gladwellian sense, I am potentially one of the world's best Facebook commenters. It's a shame really, that I'm retired. But it's something I don't really do anymore for a lot of reasons. For one, I never changed anyone's minds. Well--that's not true. I can remember, from my nearly daily arguing habit, I changed people's minds in a big way TWICE in fifteen years.

The first time was in Facebook's infancy, in late Fall 2005. I'm not even sure if we had the newsfeed yet, but this was a time where someone could make a Facebook group and that was how things went "viral." Less than a year later, the first really viral sensation I remember happened when a music service called Ruckus created a Facebook profile for a fake person called Brody Ruckus who made a group called "If this group reaches 100,000, my girlfriend will have a threesome." that surged passed 400,000 before the Facebook administrators deleted the profile and group.

But well before this happened, someone made a Facebook group called something like, "Katrina wasn't even that bad," in reference to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. I live(d) in Houston, Texas, so I knew how bad Katrina was. Something on the order of 300,000 people from New Orleans relocated to Houston that Summer and Fall. The city was destroyed and people's lives were completely uprooted, and that was just when the trauma started.

I remember being aghast. Remember, this was 2005. I'd seen terrible things on the internet but Facebook was different--your name and picture was right there! People were saying terrible, mostly racist things. I remember commenting up, down, left, right, trying to make people get it. At one point, some guy from Michigan made a post that was written well and sounded reasonable but boiled down to like, "When things flood, you can go to your church, or family, or whatever, why don't they just do that?"

And I took the time to basically say, "what do you do when your church and family are all underwater?" And wouldn't you know, he changed his mind. He made a pretty mature post about how he hadn't thought it through and was on my side. It changed the whole tone of the thread and the group, if I do say so myself. There were a few dozen thousand people in the group and the tide shifted.

I didn't "win" another monumental argument until like 2020. I don't remember the entire context, but for starters I was in a group designed for civil debate. The idea was that, if I couldn't stop the arguing, I would localize it. It was sort of like a "Hamsterdam" for my most neurotic online tendencies. And I was pretty good at it!

The main idea of the group was that debates were structured and that there was given lingo for agreeing, disagreeing, and looking for more context--and it was all supposed to happen in good faith. So I thought there was one guy who was a bit literal, but what I didn't know that a lot of other people knew was that he was using a fake name, and several of the other annoying accounts were actually fake "sock puppet" accounts run by him, and that he had never admitted he was wrong.

I was having a rough week one week, and he said something that was coyly but overtly racist in an argument. And I just said, "that's racist." He tried to argue back. I knew how stubborn he was, and how persnickety he could be about detailed wording. I still remember I was sitting next to my girlfriend--now my wife--while she watched TV and I loudly exhaled. It was a Thursday night and I asked her if we had any plans for the weekend. She said she was busy mostly with work and stuff and I was on my own, "why?" she asked. I told her I was about to get into a serious argument.

And so I locked in. We went back and forth for hours. Then I woke up and went to work and pretty much all day back and forth on my break. The same thing continued before and after my workout Saturday morning, meal prep, watching a movie, through my girlfriend coming home and us falling asleep. By Sunday morning, 700+ comments deep, everyone else has long given up. I have preemptively covered every single pivot, made every point, I am rhetorically ironclad, and then finally, at long last, he says, "Wow, I guess I have never looked at it that way."

This may not sound like much, but it was so huge that out of nowhere half a dozen commenters come out of the woodwork with things like, "wow!" "Holy shit!" "L has never admitted he was wrong or didn't know something before."

A year later, when George Floyd was killed and the Covid lockdowns were happening and people would start protesting, and I couldn't contain my arguing and was just all over the place. Even once I put self-imposed moratorium on commenting, I couldn't stop checking social media. I realized that Facebook was no longer a useful tool to connect me with people or stay in touch, and it maybe had never been. I read a few books on social media and decided to deactivate Facebook for eighteen months.

I ended up keeping it down for nearly two years, and by the time I reactivated it, I felt no need to delete it. During lockdown, I picked up all the cliché habits: baking bread, gardening, running etc. But in reality, what helped the most was realizing that I was doing it and asking why I was doing it. Plus it was a huge help addressing the aforementioned dopamine issue with better sleep, more exercise, and a cleaner diet.

There are still things I check too much and stuff I comment on too often, but the truth is that I have a much clearer sense of what I can make an impact on and how, and when it matters when I speak up about something.

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