I’ve been a denizen of the internet since I was old enough to type “coolmathgames” into the search bar. I recall its pre-modern form - the classic Google logo, AOL Instant Messenger, flash games, using passwords considered far too weak by today’s security standards. If you’re a Zillennial like me, then chances are you grew up with the internet - and importantly - the internet grew up with you.
Before my time, the internet was an extremely niche hobby relegated to computer geeks and stereotypical nerds who wanted to discuss their interests in a digital space. True consumer-grade internet (the World Wide Web) wouldn’t come about until the early 90s, arguably later if one considers access to the technology required to interface with it. The underlying motivation of the web was always to share resources, data, and ideas across the globe to the overwhelming benefit of humanity. For the most part, I feel the internet has succeeded in fulfilling that goal. However, as we become more digitally literate, I also feel that society at large has begun to realize that the benefits offered by the Internet are accompanied by substantial costs.
For instance, I loathe the fact that I must engage with the internet and its systems, as one faces significant repercussions for not doing so (at least in my field, I feel this engagement is essentially mandatory). Many find it inconceivable to be inaccessible by email or a messaging app outside of working hours. The internet has subtly become an integral, inescapable element of the infrastructure that holds together the modern world, which makes the point of this essay so important.
The internet has the potential to promote a global citizenry, to make each of us more “worldly”. Perhaps the greatest shame of the World Wide Web, when considering its intended goals, is that we have largely failed to become more enlightened people after its creation. I attribute this failure of the internet to the creation of echo chambers, obscure forums, and terrible chat rooms, all of which I consider “digital niches.” In this essay, I want to discuss digital niches - what they are, how they come about, and why we need to be careful about inadvertently spawning new ones. In brief, massive social media sites have unintentionally cultivated spaces where truly vile ideas are isolated from those who would challenge them. If the internet is to ever attain its original goals, we must prevent these ideas from festering in the darkness.
Digital Niches
If we could all touch grass for a moment - a species’ ecological niche describes how that species fits into the grander puzzle of the ecosystem. The species’ habitat, diet, and overall function to the ecosystem are all wrapped into the word niche.
All things considered, the internet is not too different from a natural ecosystem. I would define a digital niche as the habitat, activity, and purpose of a group of like-minded internet users. As an example, defining the exact digital niche that video gamers fall into would be impossible. However, if we consider the subreddit r/SocialistGaming or 4chan’s video game board (/v/), you likely already have some preconceptions of what users of these forums may be discussing and how they interact with those who think differently than them.
Before you say it, political echo chambers are a subset of digital niches. But so are the cancer patients’ GoFundMe pages, model train enthusiast forums, and child-grooming Discord servers. Critically, one person could realistically be a member of all these niches. Indeed, whereas species are mostly beholden to their ecological niche, people can readily move between digital niches on a whim.
The internet is a vast, wild, and strange place - ultimately, it is a reflection of humanity at large (insert that Nietzsche quote here - something about staring into the abyss?). For every cute cat video in your social media feed, there is conversely some extreme, violent video content hosted elsewhere. For every long-winded Facebook post where newlyweds profess their love for one another, there is an equally long-winded manifesto where one articulates their hatred for particular groups of people. For every innocent forum you’ve visited, there are forums where several thousands of people have lost their innocence, and so on. The internet truly caters to the best and worst aspects of our humanity, and does so by allowing people to form distinct digital niches in which these aspects can be magnified.
Before the modern internet, one could bet on finding a highly specific forum or website for their special interest. Digital niches naturally form when people with overlapping interests and perspectives congregate in similar places. Natural digital niches are not inherently good - there are certainly websites that exist for the sole purpose of harassing others, sharing extremist ideas, spreading violent content, or promoting illegal activity. Regardless, natural digital niches often rely on self-policing to regulate the content in their space, and sites that opt against self-policing often implode, fractionating into splinter groups that invade other sites.
Digital niches don’t exist in the same way they did during the pre-modern era of the internet. The modern internet is defined by increasing corporatization, centralization, and sanitation by massive social media conglomerates, for better or for worse. The incentive structure for internet usage has rapidly evolved in the past fifteen years or so. What used to be an obscure hobby could now lead to a full-fledged career in pursuit of an online passion project. The young people don’t want to talk about GTA IV cheat codes anymore, they want to become YouTube stars and start podcasts in their buddy’s garage (or write essays on their buddy’s website; yes, I’m aware of the irony). I can’t blame young people for feeling this way - the possibility of sustaining a grassroots career out of one’s creative vision is a modern miracle only granted to us through the internet. Still, the way we interact with the internet has changed, and so have the digital niches we participate in. In my view, the modern internet has given rise to at least two types of digital niches beyond the natural: artificial and enforced niches.
To briefly touch on artificial niches, internet users flock to massive social media sites to share their interests and ideas with others. After engaging with a particular type of content, an algorithm curates further content for the user to engage with. Through a process akin to stochastic gradient descent, this algorithm finds a local minimum of the user’s interest function and sustains (or rather, contains) the user in this content minimum. The idea of an algorithmically generated digital niche is probably what most people think of when hearing the term “echo chamber,” though it’s important to note that not all such niches are political in nature.
Here, I’d like to focus on enforced digital niches, as they are rarely discussed but indispensable when examining how society interacts with the internet.
Quarantined in Cyberspace
When the World Wide Web was in its infancy, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act of 1996 to regulate pornographic material on the Internet. Of the CDA, Section 230 has become infamous in recent years, as it codified the idea that social media platforms, among other sites, are not liable for the content their users publish online. Much like how AT&T would not be held liable for a robbery planned through their phone service, Facebook would not be held liable for copyrighted content being distributed across their platform. Section 230 aimed to protect and facilitate the growth of the developing internet by ensuring that it was financially viable for businesses to enter into the digital sphere. However, the internet has matured substantially in the last 28 years, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell whether the same protections afforded to digital entrepreneurs should be provided to well-established corporate conglomerates who have substantial say over the public discourse.
A natural consequence of growing social media platforms is that their content needs to be more heavily policed. Increased moderation is not necessarily bad; it is now much more difficult to harass people without action being taken against your account, which is typically productive for discourse. The internet has also become less anonymous - a fact I’m not exceptionally fond of - yet I can’t deny that the broader loss in anonymity has likely led to more civil discourse.
Still, let’s say you find yourself a victim of content policing on the social media site you use most frequently. The Whig Party has somehow resurrected itself from the dead and holds significant political power in your country. You’ve been particularly critical of a politician in the party for the past year, and they’ve finally gotten sick of your yapping. The Whig politician mobilizes their followers to (nonspecifically) report your account en masse. Though a reasonable person may see no evidence of wrongdoing in your account, the moderators of the social media site are stricter and found your account to violate the terms of service in an obscure, even nonsensical way. You and your Whig-critical associates are removed from the platform, forced out of the digital niche you once occupied. However, you still hold these critical beliefs and feel they are important to share. Without your digital niche, what do you do? Since leaving the internet is not a viable course of action (the ability of the internet to rapidly distribute your message cannot be understated), I’d argue that you only have two options.
Perhaps you can migrate to a different massive social media site. However, chances are that the Whig Party supporters are active on other sites as well, and it would only be a matter of time before your account would be mass reported again. To delay the inevitable, you may need to adopt a new username or register under a fictitious personal name. In doing so, you’d concede whatever audience or reach you may have had in your previous digital niche and would have to build up from scratch before eventually being ousted from this niche.
Alternatively, you may consider moving to an alternative digital space. Many alternative social media sites fall under the banner of “alt-tech,” and thus, it’s revealed why this topic is so rarely discussed. The people who are corralled onto these alternative sites are overwhelmingly far-right in their political leaning or have been removed from massive social media sites due to harassment or other foul play. However, if you were to make an account on an alternative site, the lack of moderation gives you a greater chance of sharing your message to a broader audience. Importantly, you could also keep your old username. Even though the size and composition of your audience won’t be the same as what it was previously, there’s at least some hope that your ideas can be meaningfully expressed and shared with others here.
In the current iteration of the internet, migrating to these alternative platforms is likely your best option. So you drop your metaphorical bags and set up an account - welcome to your enforced digital niche. Enforced digital niches arise when people are removed, banned, shadowbanned, deplatformed, or otherwise deprived from the mainstream modes of digital communication and are compelled to use an alternative. Discussing this topic is politically poisonous, so I want to make it abundantly clear: I do not associate with any of the groups that are commonly corralled into enforced digital niches, and I am not defending these people, their ideas, or their behavior when I speak poorly on enforced digital niches. I’m mostly a concerned observer who has witnessed the depths of depravity brought about by such niches, and I find it necessary to discuss the following points:
- Enforced digital niches are a natural byproduct of the corporatization, centralization, and sanitation of the internet.
Turns out that running a social media site is incredibly lucrative. It’s only natural that competitor sites would arise, which is objectively good for all internet users. When massive social media sites moderate the content on their platform - which they have a right to do, by the way - it often leads to an exodus of users. Just like the fractionation that took place in the pre-modern era of the internet, when groups of people are removed from a platform, they spread far and wide to initiate a new digital niche.
As a founder of one of these competitor social media sites, what would you do if you found your service overrun by people you don’t necessarily think should be given a platform (political extremists, sexual perverts, gore video enthusiasts, etc.)? Your hands are tied. You could start policing the content on your site, but this would be akin to sacrificing your service as the new users would simply migrate elsewhere. Alternatively, you allow these visitors to stay and let their content go mostly unchecked. Most would choose the latter, and I don’t blame them - we all have mouths to feed.
Over time, users with extreme political opinions or unsightly interests accrue on these websites, creating cesspools where ideas are quarantined from the rest of the internet. Two great case studies might be found in BitChute and Telegram - the former being a video hosting service that was likely made with the intent to host far-right video content, while the latter is a messaging app that hosts a significant population of far-right users despite likely not being created for that express purpose. Discord was initially marketed as a way for gamers to chat during gameplay, but hosts servers filled with political extremists, sexual deviants, and other unpleasantries.
Massive social media sites have inadvertently created spaces where these ideas are explored without legitimate opposition, isolated from the rest of the internet consisting of people with different, more moderate perspectives.
- Enforced digital niches fail to suppress content - in fact, they promote such content on major sites.
There are a few reasons why these enforced digital niches are incapable of silencing ideas. Observing that someone was banned from a massive social media site plays into reverse psychology; I wouldn’t be surprised if users seek out controversial content following a controversial banning. If someone is relatively new to an enforced digital niche, I imagine it’s extremely easy to become radicalized without any other counterbalancing content present to challenge what you see. Finally, when someone adopts a set of beliefs or interests that fall outside of what’s considered acceptable, that person will always return to a niche that affirms and validates their beliefs. For all these reasons, enforced digital niches act like wellsprings that concentrate distasteful content, and the average internet user sources extremist ideas, violent videos, and similar from these spaces.
- The outcomes of enforced digital niches cannot be ignored.
To return to ecology - island gigantism is a phenomenon in which animals tend to grow larger on smaller landmasses. Several factors contribute to this observation, but notably, a lack of large predators at the top of the food chain removes pressures for other species to remain small. An absence of competition allows species to adapt into another niche, and in this case, literally grow larger in the process.Enforced digital niches also adapt (or devolve) to fill new roles, often with enormous effects on society.
If you didn’t think Trump could win the 2016 election, the consequences of enforced digital niches should be self-evident to you. At the time, 4chan was highly influential in producing memes that helped propel Trump into the White House, and I have a feeling we’re going to see similar patterns play out in this year’s election (though of course, this is a much more complex issue that I’m giving 4chan too much credit for). I imagine that the more radical Antifa members congregated in enforced digital niches, which led to real demonstrations on the ground.
Outside of the political sphere, these enforced digital niches can lead to utter degeneracy and pure evil. The worst case that I’m aware of - the case that changed my entire view of digital niches - is that of the zoosadist Telegram leaks from 2018. It’s exactly what it sounds like, a group of people discussing how they would acquire, torture, rape, and kill animals. The group even had pedophilic tendencies, with one user all but admitting that they molested their nephew. (I’m purposefully not providing much information here, as I strongly advise the reader to not look into this event. No reverse psychology here, digging into it will make your stomach sink, blood boil, and scar you for life - it’s legitimately not worth it). Suffice it to say, this event demonstrates the depravity that enforced digital niches can bring about. If we want to create an internet for the betterment of everyone, we have to be conscientious of the enforced digital niches we unintentionally create.
Let’s All Touch Grass Again…
Though the internet is an immovable part of our modern infrastructure, it is still very much under development as we learn how to parse this new mode of communication. In this increasingly corporatized and centralized space, our actions lead us to inadvertently quarantine not just people, but ideas.
In the real world, quarantines reduce the risk of disease transmission by isolating an exposed person or group from public spaces. Once the risk is diminished, the people are free to rejoin the public space. The problem is that diseases and ideas are not at all similar. Ideas fester, mutate, amplify, and intensify in isolation. The only cure for a bad idea is exposure to a better one.
Though I’m unsure of how exactly to solve the problems associated with enforced digital niches, I think the easiest place to start is to actively challenge ideas you disagree with. This statement is unfortunately not the most satisfactory call to action, but I’m unsure that a satisfactory one exists given the predicament we find ourselves in. Public discourse should be dictated by the public, rather than the small subset of individuals who rule over these massive social media sites. Though I don’t think that it’s any one individual’s express responsibility to moderate content on the internet, the collective responsibility falls on us regardless. We need to allow space for people to explore fringe ideological spaces, to challenge dogma for the betterment of humanity. But we should also be prepared to show extremists why they’re wrong, or point out evil when we see it. If our modern sensibilities restrict us from calling out either, then maybe our principles need reexamination.
The internet is ultimately a reflection of humanity at large. It’s impossible to cleanse the worst facets of human nature without shining a light on them, and I fear that the internet has provided deep, dark corners for them to stir in. The original intent of the web was to share ideas around the globe - to make us more worldly - and the internet cannot achieve that goal until we confront the most dreadful side of ourselves.
