We Have Made Other People Too Easy to Delete

In 1984, a programmer called Larry Wall created something called a KILL file.

It was part of an early program for reading Usenet, long before Facebook, Instagram or the block button. You could add a person, subject or phrase to the file and their posts would stop appearing.

By 1989, people had invented a word for doing it: plonk. It was supposed to be the sound of someone falling to the bottom of your KILL file.

Plonk.

Gone.

There is no single inventor of the block button we use today. It evolved through email filters, instant messaging, forums and early social networks. By 2006, Facebook was formally describing controls that allowed people to block other users from finding, messaging, poking or adding them.

But the original problem was practical. The internet had become too large and too noisy to read everything. People needed a way to remove spam, abuse and those who made public spaces unusable.

It was a tool for managing an enormous network. Somewhere along the way, it also became part of how we manage human relationships.

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We Used to Know the People We Disagreed With

Before the internet, most people in our lives arrived whole. We knew more than their opinion.

They were relatives, neighbours, colleagues, school friends and people connected to other people we cared about. We did not select everyone around us according to shared beliefs.

You might completely disagree with someone and still know that they were funny, unreliable, generous, difficult, good in a crisis or strangely talented at fixing things.

People could annoy us and remain people.

Now we regularly encounter one another as fragments.

A comment. A clip. A repost. Ten seconds from a longer conversation.

We know what somebody said before we know anything about who they are. Then we use that fragment to imagine the rest of them.

This is a very different psychological experience from disagreeing with somebody you know. A person you know contains their own counter-evidence. The colleague with the terrible political opinion might also be the person who covered your shift when your child was ill. The stranger on the screen contains no such complication.

They can remain entirely wrong.

And because they arrive through a screen, removing them does not feel like rejecting a whole person. It feels like removing the offending fragment.

Plonk.

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We Are All Editing the World

The block button is the obvious edit, but it is only one of them.

We follow people who interest us. We unfollow people who irritate us. We mute subjects we are tired of and leave groups where we no longer feel comfortable.

Our friends are editing too. They share some ideas, ignore others and signal what the group considers clever, embarrassing, acceptable or unforgivable.

Then the algorithm edits what remains.

It notices what holds our attention and gives us more of it. Not necessarily because it believes the content is true or good for us, but because we looked.

That creates three editors:

We edit.

Our group edits.

The algorithm edits.

Each one hands a slightly narrower world to the next.

A 2015 study by Facebook researchers of 10.1 million users found that people encountered less politically opposing material at three different stages: because of who was in their network, because of how Facebook ranked what those people shared, and because of what they themselves chose to open. When the researchers compared ranking with clicking, the individual’s choice had the larger effect.

That does not let the algorithm off the hook. It reveals a loop: we show it what holds our attention, it gives us more of the same, and then we choose again from the narrower world it returns.

The algorithm is not doing this to us from a distance. We are teaching it what to remove, and it is learning at an enormous scale.

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Brexit Showed Me My Feed Was Not the Country

Nearly everyone I knew was shocked by the Brexit result. I was too.

I have always lived in a very diverse part of London. I know people from vastly different countries, cultures and backgrounds. Nothing about my life felt closed or particularly uniform.

Yet almost everything reaching me suggested that most people thought as I did.

Then the UK voted to leave the European Union by 51.9% to 48.1%.

London had voted differently. Around 60% of London’s votes were for Remain.

My feed had not invented an imaginary country. It had shown me one real part of it repeatedly until I mistook that part for the whole.

I had been travelling along one line and mistaking it for the entire map.

That was the strange part. I considered myself surrounded by difference, and in many ways I was. But cultural diversity had not automatically produced diversity of opinion.

My physical world was diverse.

My information world was much less so.

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Blocking Is Not the Villain

We need the ability to block people.

Sometimes blocking is not avoidance. It is protection.

In 2013, Twitter briefly changed blocking so that blocked users could continue following and interacting with the person who had blocked them. The response was immediate. People organised around #RestoreTheBlock, and Twitter reversed the change that same day, saying it did not want to make users feel less safe.

That incident revealed something important. Blocking is not merely a way of hiding content. It can prevent access.

There is a difference between closing your curtains and locking your door.

The problem is not that we have locks. It is that the logic of blocking has spread beyond the button.

We increasingly expect our entire information environment to remove what disturbs us. People, opinions and facts can all begin to feel like unwanted content.

And the easier deletion becomes, the less practice we get at holding two uncomfortable ideas at once:

I strongly disagree with this person.

This person may still know something I do not.

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A Feed Can Be a Home Without Becoming the Whole World

Personalised feeds have done wonderful things.

They help people with rare interests find each other. They give marginalised communities somewhere to meet. They allow us to discover art, knowledge, humour and lives we might never encounter in person.

The answer cannot be an internet without filters. That would be unusable and, for many people, unsafe.

We also cannot fix the problem by throwing the most extreme opposing opinions into everyone’s feed. A field experiment on Twitter found that exposure to opposing political messages did not reduce polarisation and, among Republican participants, increased it.

Being shouted at by a wider variety of strangers is not the same as understanding them.

Perhaps the thing we are missing is not disagreement. There is plenty of that online.

It is the surrounding person.

The history. The contradiction. The reason they think as they do. Everything we once knew before an opinion reached us.

The internet allows us to meet more people than any previous generation. Yet the form in which we meet them can make them seem smaller than ever.

A feed can be a home. It can reflect our interests, protect our peace and connect us to people who understand us.

We just have to remember that it is a room we have arranged, not the entire world.

We have made other people extraordinarily easy to delete.

The harder thing is remembering that they continue beyond the edge of our screen.