How to Handle a Crowd: The Art of Creating Healthy and Dynamic Online Communities - Softcover

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Anika Gupta is a digital thought leader whose research on online communities spans several industries. A former science and technology journalist, she’s currently a senior product manager at The Atlantic. In 2019, she was honored as a member of the Online News Association’s Women’s Leadership Accelerator, a program that finds and trains women media leaders for roles as leaders in the industry. She has a Master’s degree in comparative media studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Her journalistic work has appeared online in Smithsonian, Fortune, The Guardian, and elsewhere.

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Chapter 1. Building Bridges 1. Building Bridges
Make America Dinner Again

How I Met MADA

I met Justine Lee for the first time in New York. We’d “met” online months before, while working together on a podcast project about Asian American life. I asked her for suggestions for whom to profile in this book; she recommended herself. Over a couple of hours, Justine told me her story. Since October 2017, she and her friend Tria Chang have run a Facebook group called Make America Dinner Again (MADA). The name pokes fun at partisan rhetoric, but the group has a serious purpose: to encourage understanding and dialogue among people with differing political views. Justine and Tria started the group after the 2016 presidential election, and it now has almost seven hundred members. Those who want to join have to apply by answering a few questions on Facebook; the founders read each application thoroughly and personally. As MADA has grown, they’ve accepted new members with an eye toward political balance; Justine says the group today includes roughly equal numbers of self-identified liberals and conservatives, as well as many other perspectives. The two of them, along with nine other moderators, oversee debates about the most divisive political topics in American discourse. Recent posts include one comparing restrictions on gun ownership to restrictions on book ownership, another asking whether or not a Holocaust-denying school principal should have been fired, and a third asking how San Francisco can humanely resolve escalating rates of homelessness.

Their group is part of a growing movement, born in the run-up to and wake of the 2016 presidential election, focused on building bridges across what seems to be an ever-widening political divide. In any given week, the MADA moderators research and post articles for the wider group to discuss, contact group members one-on-one to offer advice on the tone or content of their posts, or—in Justine’s case—read through short surveys filled out by people who want to join the group. But their real work is trying to shore up common ideals in a divided world, building slim but strong bridges across the divide of partisan opinion. Justine refers to this type of work as “translating.” The group is sometimes fractious, sometimes hopeful, and often challenging. But in working there, Justine and Tria have established an interesting online home.

The Lost Art of the Dinner Party

MADA grew out of Justine and Tria’s feelings about the 2016 election. A self-described political liberal living in San Francisco, Justine says she woke up in a daze the day after Donald J. Trump was elected president. She didn’t know how to respond. She wasn’t alone: liberals across the country were torn and dismayed. In a popular blog post written right after the election, political science professor Peter Levine outlined several potential responses that the left could make. These possible responses included things like “winning the next election,” “resisting the administration,” and “reforming politics.” They also included “repairing the civic fabric” via “dialog across partisan divides.”1 This last category is the one that Justine and Tria would come to belong to.

Justine had just finished a public radio internship, which had exposed her to local politics. But she’d found politics to be “inaccessible and a little overwhelming.” Instead she enjoyed the “human stories,” in part because “I’ve always believed that there are multiple sides to a story.” That curiosity about other people, and a focus on the human face of political debates, would become the core principles of MADA.

“Dialog across partisan divides” sounds great in theory, but is difficult in practice. In a June 2016 study by the Pew Research Center, nearly half of self-identified Republicans and Democrats said they found discussing politics with someone with opposing political views to be “stressful and frustrating,” and more than half said that they left such conversations feeling like they had less in common than they originally thought.2 Maybe just as troubling, at least from a national unity perspective, was that Republicans and Democrats saw each other in a personally poor light, ascribing negative qualities like laziness or closed-mindedness to those on the other side of the political divide.3 Researchers refer to this type of partisan dislike as “affective polarization.” In a seminal 2012 paper, the researchers Shanto Iyengar, Gaurav Sood, and Yphtach Lelkes demonstrated that affective polarization in the United States had risen dramatically since 1988, as measured by things like whether or not people would be upset if their child married someone from a different political party. In another paper, published in 2019, a group of researchers suggested that affective polarization could have serious consequences: “Partisanship appears to now compromise the norms and standards we apply to our elected representatives, and even leads partisans to call into question the legitimacy of election results, both of which threaten the very foundations of representative democracy.”4

In the months before the election, Justine says she saw political conversations break down, time and again, in her own social media feeds. People often talked past each other.

“Anytime there was a news article posted on our FB feeds, we would see it in the comments. People would make a statement in response to the headline. They would come out really strong, with almost no room for dialogue.” The worst, she says, were the comment sections on news organizations like Fox News or CNN, which she says turned into a “a mass of name-calling and trolling and inflammatory language.”

Platforms like Facebook had enormous reach and scale, but neither their technology nor their business models prioritized the facilitation of wide-ranging conversations. On the contrary, algorithms that powered popular social media sites often encouraged like-minded bubbles. A popular Wall Street Journal project from the time, called Blue Feed, Red Feed, compared how liberal and conservative Facebook news feeds featured different stories, from different outlets, with different slants.5 “If you wanted to widen your perspective and see things from a broad range of backgrounds, you would have to go and like the pages yourself. Facebook’s product makes it hard to do this,” Jon Keegan, the project’s creator, told media industry site NiemanLab in May 2016.6

But there was a flip side to the name-calling: entirely homogeneous spaces where people never interacted with anyone who had opposing views.

“If it was something that was posted on our friends’ feeds… everyone was in agreement, but it almost felt narrower still,” Justine said.

She recruited her friend Tria Chang, a wedding planner who also lived in San Francisco, to host a dinner party for people with opposing political views. Their hope was that under the auspices of a shared meal, Democrats and Republicans might discover even more common ground.

Tria already had experience with unusually...