The deafening effect of echo chambers

Akiko Hart, director of Liberty in the United Kingdom, talks here about the dangers of preaching to the choir and the need to engage other audiences, including the “persuadable middle,” to advance the human rights agenda. The context is increasingly adverse, with the rise of the right-wing Reform UK party and the possibility of the country exiting the European Convention on Human Rights. Liberty is embarking on an internal process to reevaluate its strategies and goals in light of current threats.

Progressive sectors and the human rights movement have been debating the dangers of echo chambers and group-think, which exacerbate the disconnect with the people who have been defining elections recently. What is happening, and why is it a problem?

Liberty is an influencing organization, like most, if not all, members of INCLO. But it strikes me that organizations like ours are not always brilliant at influencing, because influencing isn’t about talking to people who already agree with you. It’s sitting down with someone who has maybe a different analysis as to why we are where we are, and who might have a slightly different view about where we want to get to.

Like a lot of organizations, we moved to a “digital first” approach, so we’ve gone really strong on social media. And I think that’s great because you get to speak to lots of people in a different way. But what you also get with that is in-group bias. The data suggests that progressive activists are overrepresented on the social media of other progressive activists, which creates a distorted impression of the diversity of views out there, because the algorithm will make us feel that there’s lots of people online who agree with us. But that group of people is probably much smaller percentage-wise in terms of the wider population. So on social media, it can mean we are seeing a lot of accounts of people who agree with us strongly, as well as accounts of people who disagree with us strongly, but not much in between. And if we are just talking to people who already agree with us, and possibly enraging people who do not agree with us, we are not really influencing. We might be fundraising, or shoring up support, but we’re not influencing.

Also, echo chambers can exacerbate a move towards ideological purity, and a preference for getting in-group validation over trying to persuade other people. And that prevents us from reaching out to people who might agree with, say, 40 percent of what we’re saying. It means we might be less amenable to challenging ourselves, and that isn’t a healthy place for a human rights or civil liberties organization to be.

One of the problems with all this is that there’s a lack of visibility, you don’t see what else is out there. And there’s a huge risk, because it means that you don’t see some of the threats, challenges or events coming up.

Can you give an example?

A big example in the UK was the Brexit vote, which took a lot of people by surprise.

Now in the UK, there is a lot of debate as to how much of a threat the Reform vote is, and how people, political parties and the sector should respond. There are people who argue that the Reform vote is a racist or fascist vote, and there are those who think that it’s largely a swing vote, a protest vote, people who are fed up with the status quo. It does feel quite similar to the different analyses of the Leave vote during Brexit, including similar shortcomings and biases in the analysis.

I think it’s hard, but essential, to distinguish between Reform UK as a political party, and Reform voters. And Reform voters are not a monolith. And of course, what are the differences between Reform UK and some parts of the Conservative party in the UK?  

So there’s a lot of complexity there. I think people in the sector who have family members or friends who are considering voting Reform will have a far better understanding of how complicated this all is, and of their different motivations. But the NGO world – not just the human rights world – is full of people who do not have connections outside of that world, and that means that we can struggle to understand those motivations. And that has a direct impact on our work and how we communicate.

So what can we do to break out of these echo chambers and reach more people?

So as an organization, and as a movement, we need to be thinking strategically about which communities, groups and people we are best placed to influence. We need to ask ourselves: who are we talking about? And who are we talking to? And the answer to that will differ depending on our organization – and that’s OK. We shouldn’t all be speaking to the same group of people.

For Liberty, given our supporter base and our positionality, I think it’s about better engaging the persuadable middle – people who are not completely opposed to what we’re saying, but are not perhaps completely aligned either. And if we can shift some of those people, then we are probably doing our job.

There’s a problem with how human rights is perceived, certainly in the UK but I think elsewhere too, in that it can look like we’re defending lawyers and marginalized groups, but not anyone else. That has been a very effective smear against human rights for the last few decades, but that is also one that we, as a sector, haven’t fully addressed. We’ve got to find a way of talking about the work that connects to everyone, to people. Which is difficult when marginalized groups are at the forefront of the attack on rights, and that’s absolutely where we need to be, that’s where the fight is. But we need to find a different way of talking about it that cuts through. This is about people, not institutions.

And then we need to think about what we are trying to achieve. For example, on the issue of protest, the aim isn’t to try and get that persuadable middle to get really excited about protest, because they’re fundamentally going to see it as quite inconvenient, and a little bit extreme. The aim is to get them to not be hostile about it, and to get them to a position of neutrality about it, so that they’re not pushing for restrictive laws. And so you might have to adapt your messaging accordingly to different audiences.

Also, to be able to put forward a progressive offer, and not just be in defence mode, we have to hire very differently and think very differently about the kind of organizations we build. It is difficult to ask people whose entire career is built on defending the status quo to come up with generative new ideas. We must consider who is best positioned to lead transformative work. And we need to consider diversifying teams by hiring people with different political perspectives, including those who might be more conservative, and from different backgrounds – so we don’t have a bias towards white, middle-class, and progressive activist people – to broaden the reach and effectiveness of our organizations.

Download the complete series of interviews of Hard Conversations for the Future of Human Rights.