INBOUND Bold Talks: Caleb Gardner "What Barack Obama's Trolls Taught Me About Civility"

Hi, everyone. As David said, my name is Caleb Gardner. I am digital social media expert at Bain and Company. I also founded a company called 18 Copies, which is a digital collective looking to solve big problems. And, you know, David kind of got the punchline that I used to work for Obama. I actually ran digital for his political advocacy group for three and a half years. And as such, I feel like I need to start off with a little bit of a disclaimer. It's November 9th. It's a day after the election. In my head, the way this was going to go was a lot different. I was going to come up here and give you kind of an inspirational like, rah, rah, yay. We put our worst demons beside us, and as a country, we need to come together now and figure out what went wrong and move forward. And instead, I'm heartbroken. I am devastated. That's where I am this morning. I'm devastated over my old boss's legacy and what this means for him. I'm devastated over thinking about what this means for our country. That's what I'm dealing with this morning. And I see some nods. Some of you are dealing with that as well. But I think instead of this being a turning point, what we can think of this as is a beginning. And I think that it's important that we think of it like that. This is the opportunity for us to be very intentional about where we go from here. And so I think that this can have some relevance in that framework in a different kind of way. So just to give you a little bit of background on me, yes, I used to work for Obama. We ran some of the largest digital assets in the world. Millions of people on our email list, millions of people on our social media accounts. What it's like to talk to 100 million people every day is sometimes really fun and sometimes not. We got trolled a lot, as you can imagine, being the political voice of a, you know, a politician. So much so that Buzzfeed actually wrote about us in 2013 with some not safe for work. Examples of some of the first people that would reply to anything that we would do. And it was, you know, when you're talking about a community at that scale, usually, let's say take this room, for example. Any kind of community, you have a normal bell curve of people that are right with you and people who are kind of dissenting. Like in this room, there are already people who are like, oh, that guy worked for Obama. I've got to get his business card. It doesn't Matter what else I say, you'll find me afterward because you're going to love everything. And then there are some of you who are already tuning out because I'm talking about politics and you're like, oh, it's not really my thing. But a lot of you are kind of right there in the middle, right around that normative bell curve of, oh, this could be really interesting, or not really my thing, but I'm waiting to be convinced that's what a normal community looks like. But at scale, when you start talking about millions and millions and millions of people, the bell curve kind of starts to flip on its head where the only people that really engage are on one end or the other. It's like that whole normative band of people just assumes that it's not worth it. And so you get the people who love you no matter what you do commenting, and the people who hate you no matter what you do commenting. And it's not actually that helpful. We actually got to know some of our trolls. Glenn was one of them. We were like, oh, good old Glen, you know, always keeping us honest with your bald eagle avatar. So, you know, like, some of the behavior was pretty predictable. But I like to think that every community looks like that in one way or another. And part of what enables that kind of behavior online is this phenomenon called context collapse. What it means is that we don't talk to each other online like we do face to face because we don't have the social context like we normally would. I don't have the historical context of my relationship with you. Sometimes I don't have your facial cues to tell me whether or not what I'm saying to you is resonating. I don't have, you know, you walking out of the room because I'm offending you, having to work with you the next day because you're a co worker. A lot of those things don't exist when we're arguing with each other online. Or they exist in shades of a real life relationship, not the real truth of what that relationship is like. And so it enables bad behavior. This is the same thing that makes us really nervous when we get an email from our boss and we're not sure whether or not it's passive aggressive or if they're actually just telling us what to do. Like we misinterpret because you don't get the same social cues. Right? This has enabled at scale for this election cycle what I like to call is like a massive application of Godwin's law. You guys Know Godwin's Law. It's the idea that if a conversation online goes on long enough, someone's going to call someone Hitler, right? Like we have taken this absurd conversation and taken it to its extremes where we can only believe that one side or another is the absolute worst of all evils, no matter if they're just a different person with opinion or whether or not that's true. So what's interesting to me is we've done this to ourselves. We are our own worst enemy. We've talked a little bit in some circles that I've been a part of about how much social media enables this, how much the Internet enables this. But I honestly believe that the Internet is just a reflection of who we are as people. George Orwell said that public opinion is no more innately kind than people are innately wise. So we are a reflection of ourselves online. But I think the beauty of that is that the solutions to that can scale with the problems. I'm a big believer in this concept in physics called stochastic self similarity. The idea is that the universe creates patterns out of chaos. And if you pay attention, the patterns at a micro scale look similar to the patterns at a macro scale. So the patterns in a leaf look similar to the patterns of a forest or the patterns in the stars or patterns in Internet networks. Out of chaos comes reliability. And so if we have become our own worst enemies in a predictable way online, we can actually find solutions to that and scale solutions to that in a reliable way as well. And so I'm just going to present you for the sake of time with just a few ideas that I think are scalable. And then I want you to take them and run with them and do amazing things with them and then give me all the credit. One is we have to figure out a way to find the context again. If we've lost that face to face context, how are we going to get it back? I think of the phenomenon of like meetup in the 2000s and how there's this amazing platform that all of a sudden took the people that you met online and put them in a room together around a common topic. Like that was a revolutionary idea when that came out. What are ways that we can actually find our face to face context again? In Chicago, we've got this amazing program by the Chicago Community Trust called On the Table that actually just hosts dinners with people who live in similar neighborhoods who have different viewpoints. They just find excuses to bring them together. I think that's a little bit harder because we've become so balkanized in terms of our geography that we don't even live near people who believe the same things that we do anymore. But there's got to be ways that we can figure this out, right? 2. Find new ways to doubt your own ideas. Part of the problem is that we live in these filter bubbles where Facebook only gives us the news that we engage with and that we want to hear. Google only gives us the search results that automatically confirm what we believed anyway. How can we get around that stuff both on an individual basis but also on a societal basis where we can start finding ways to actually gut check ourselves? Google is starting to do a little bit of this with their fact checking on search news results links. Have you guys seen this? They'll actually give you a fact check as it'll surface it as you're reading the news. I think that's a start. But we've got to do a lot more than that if we're really going to have a civilized online discourse. The three Criticize from within and from within. I mean from within our own social groups. There's been so much discussion during this election where one group is criticizing another. White people are criticizing black people, men are criticizing women. We're criticizing people that we don't even live their same shared experience. So how can we actually give them any kind of advice? So I'm a big believer in the fact that critiquing is actually a healthy part of any kind of dialogue, right? Like we should be able to disagree with our friends and we should be able to disagree with people who aren't our friends in a civilized way. So how can we do that in a way that is actually healthy? I think it starts with criticizing from within a social group that we're actually a part of. There's a teenager, high school teenager in Naperville, Illinois that just went on Shark Tank for her idea called Rethink and all Rethink does. It's an anti bullying tool that gives you pause before you post something. Literally all it does is prompt you. Do you really want to say this? Imagine if we did that for everything we posted. I'm a big believer in the 22nd rule. You guys heard of the 22nd rule? Make something 20 seconds harder and you're less likely to do it. It's a way to break bad habits or to start new habits. But if we did that for everything we were going to post online, imagine how that would change our dialogue. So these are just a few small ideas, but I really hope that they're at least inspiring something in you to solve this big, massive problem we have of online discourse right now. Because online discourse is where the action happens now. It is. We're not going to stop talking to each other online. We're not going to stop sharing news stories with each other. But we have to find a way to take the high road again as a society. I have this quote posted up on a refrigerator right at the eye level of all my children because I want them to internalize this. I want them to internalize the idea of taking the high road because if we don't, the next four years are going to be miserable, the next eight years are going to be miserable. Who knows how long. So we have to figure out a way to solve problems together again. And I'm counting on all of you to figure out a way to do that. Thank you, Caleb Gardner, everyone. Awesome job.