The Economics of Confrontational Conversation

On the internet surfers jettison much of their social restraint, confronting, and correcting perfect strangers. It leads to, for example, edit wars on Wikipedia, condescending insults on Reddit, and righteous putdowns on Twitter. This behavior invites plenty of legal analysis, angry editorializing, and technological proposals, but rarely economic analysis. The author addresses that gap and considers the question of "What economic factors make confrontational conversation more or less likely in our era?" the increasing frequency of breakaways is a symptom that they are becoming cheaper to build. Ergo, we should expect mainstream sites to face increasing pressures towards fragmentation. He concludes that the trends toward fragmentation worries anyone who wants to maintain civil society. Who will encourage the confrontations that settle the public conversations? Most worrisome, misinformation, and deep fakes are becoming more widespread in breakaway communities, and especially on the dark web. Right now, most users of deepfakes entertain themselves (you do not really want to know the details.), but, as with any frontier software, it will become mainstream soon enough. As deepfakes become more common, who will adjudicate whether a deepfake of a politician or celebrity is real or not? How can anybody do that if online users have sorted themselves into various groups that do not trust one another?