Adoxastic publics: Facebook and the loss of civic strangeness

ABSTRACT After being criticized for promoting misinformation in the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook announced a “privacy-focused vision of social media.” Purportedly to decrease misinformation on users’ newsfeeds, these technical and rhetorical reforms moved users away from public-facing areas of the site, funneling them into private groups. Significantly, these reforms created groups organized around opinions increasingly disconnected from strangers’ views. Consequently, these changes facilitated publicities that fostered QAnon conspiracies, militia group recruitment, and right-wing violence. To understand this dangerous radicalization, we make explicit that publics are dependent on the opinions—the doxa—that constitute them. In clarifying that publics are rooted in doxa, we reveal how sociotechnical assemblages—particularly private Facebook groups—are creating what we call adoxastic publics, or publics made up of adoxa: asocial and highly sheltered, improbable, and often disreputable opinions. Specifically, we explore how the affordances of Facebook’s infrastructure divorce participants from encountering strange doxa, the heart of publics, instead promoting discursive stagnation and violent orientations towards others. These adoxastic affordances align with and embolden the rhetorical practices of masculine white nationalism and other dangerous ideologies. We conclude by offering the possibility of endoxastic networks as a productive correction to dangerous and anti-democratic adoxastic social media.