The piece asks the question, “whether our new developing public discourse, largely mediated online, has made our conversation more open, democratic and accountable? Or, instead, more fragmented and poisonous?”

Looking back over some of my posts here and elsewhere, these are the exact issues I’ve been flagging up most over the last year, and my experience, together with the evidence I’ve provided, points to a definite tendency towards the latter.

So it’s refreshing to hear Cass Sunstein admit that "New technologies, including the internet, make it easier for people to hear the opinions of like-minded but otherwise isolated others."

It’s like a breath of fresh air to read Peter Beaumont acknowledging that this can lead to a tendency to “isolate themselves from competing views”, leaving virtual communities “at risk of a tendency to organise around confirmatory bias. A tendency that, as neuroscientific research by Daniel Kahneman and others has argued, makes us confuse emotion for rational thought.”

The Oxford Dictionary defines confirmation bias as “the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories” and it’s highly observable in the dialogue between alternative health practitioners, and skeptics, who all cite evidence as the antidote.

What this Guardian Comment does is to gently point out that confirmation bias can be social as well, and that this is not without danger as it may lead people to “isolate themselves from competing views... [creating a] breeding ground for polarisation, potentially dangerous for both democracy and social peace".

And the problem is how easily social confirmation bias can be manipulated by those whose commitment to democratic communications is not strong enough to resist such temptation.

This can lead to some quite severe social anomalies, which are, nevertheless quite hard to correct.

For example, even though defaming others’ mental health on Twitter has recently been flagged up as being a legal risk, there is no shortage of evidence that this is one way in which people try to manipulate the social confirmation bias of their followers, if they wish to avoid communicating democratically. 

In fact the language of manipulating social confirmation bias is familiar to everybody on Twitter by now.  So and so is a “nutter”, “bonkers” or some such casually stigmatizing word on somebody else’s say so. 

But it’s when you see such smearing on grounds of mental health from influential people who actually work in that field, that you see the real power of social media and the danger of the virtual mob.

So, for example Melanie Byng, wife of Richard Byng, who is Senior Clinical Lecturer in Mental Health at the Peninsula school of medicine, feels able to describe me thus:

Melanie, who is not prepared to even speak to me now, or tell me why, even though she used to find me “funny and brave”, says this with no apparent awareness of the legal risk of defamation, nor any irony whatsoever about such a statement given her husband’s prestigious position in mental health.

The response clearly shows confirmation bias at work (note that the response happened less than a minute after the original tweet):

Emboldened by her ability to manipulate her followers’ confirmation bias Melanie Byng has also been happy to pass on a link blatantly smearing a third party as a probable pedophile (casual stigma par excellence) just because this person was prepared to talk to me.

Social confirmation bias must be extremely powerful if such blatant smearing of people advocating in the same area as her does not raise even a murmur from Melanie’s loudly skeptical, evidence-based followers? 

Surely one of those evidence-based skeptics, scientists, or journalists they know would notice that un-evidenced smears about others’ mental health and inferences about pedophilia are being touted around by popular ‘intellectuals’ and call it out?

In fact it seems very unlikely that such unethical behaviour from the wife of a supposedly responsible senior mental health professional could last two minutes on Twitter without being noticed and shot down.

But even more obvious,why didn’t Richard Byng himself object, immediately and loudly, to his wife making these kinds of public and un-evidenced statements regarding others' mental health, statements clearly intended solely to destroy their reputation in a smear campaign?

Of course, he may not know what his wife has been up to, but if not, then he certainly should be made aware of the danger to his reputation.  Even should the Byngs actually have medical evidence of mental health problems in another person, it would be an outrageous breach of privacy to make such public statements and raises serious ethical questions about this kind of treatment by a mental health professional.

With or, as is this case, without evidence, for anyone with mental health connections to mount  such a flippant, confident and public smear campaign on Twitter shows that social confirmation bias, and the urge to manipulate it, can, and in this case has, simply run amok.  

As the Guardian’s Comment points out, it’s primarily a numbers game.  If one person isn’t going to examine the evidence, then it’s more likely the next person won’t and so on.  Of course it’s completely unethical behaviour, but the fact that it’s happening does show how social confirmation bias works, because if enough people coast along on theirs, the hope for Melanie Byng and her gang,  must be that the target will be destroyed without anybody ever finding out.  

If you want to believe that your friend must be right just because they are your friend, it probably won’t be that hard to persuade you that their statements about another person that you don’t know, are also likely to be correct.  

Bingo, you’ve just joined a cyber-gang.

Here’s another example: David Colquhoun talked to my husband on Twitter the other day, but when I was mentioned he said:

In fact, what I did was to ask David to try and help by looking at the evidence that people bringing up issues in Steiner were being sidelined and ostracised by the ‘critics’.  I had good reason to think that David would be a reasonable person to talk to because he has published on Steiner. Even the other day he wrote....

But when (months ago) I tried to tell Mr Colquhoun how, as parents advocating for children over bullying in that system, we were being censored by the ‘critics’, he immediately blocked me. 

Not only is he apparently totally unaware of the contradiction of wishing that people would find out while blocking exactly that information, he uses the same casually stigmatizing language, saying I’ve “slagged off his friends”, whereas, in fact, any and every allegation I’ve made about his friends’ behaviour towards me is specific and evidenced.  

David Colquhoun simply isn’t prepared to look at evidence that shows that his friends are mounting a prolonged and vicious cyber-attack on individuals they’ve decided to ostracise, sabotage, and defame. 

That’s how easy it is to manipulate the social confirmation bias, even of an aggressively evidence-based scientist whose response puts him in the position of an unhelpful bystander - a passive member of a mob.

So what can you do against mass unconscious bias in people who think they’re exceptionally evidence based?  Isn’t any individual target going to be finished before they can even mount a defence? Especially as, due to Twitter’s policies, it’s actually easier for you to be banned as a troll for trying to set the record straight than to stop it happening in the first place.

Perhaps this is the reason for the author’s rather fumbling ending to a Guardian Comment piece that began so assertively.   

Peter Beaumont does not appear to want to overtly admit the obvious fact that social media, including Twitter, glorious as it is, present superb opportunities for exploiting mass ‘confirmation bias’ to target individuals, telling catchy little (and big) lies about them to destroy their reputations i.e. perfectly ordinary bullying behaviour, augmented by the cyber-mob capabilities that the internet provides.  

Cyber-gangs, in this case the Steiner ‘critics’, who use these techniques, can manipulate their own followers, through their social confirmation bias, into even bigger gangs of unwitting mobbers to damage other people.  It’s bullying by bystander.  

The reason the end of the Guardian Comment piece seems to wobble off isn't really because: “It is democracy in action, at such a young stage that we don't even know how to integrate it into the rest of the democratic mix." as per Beaumont’s Shirky quote at the end, but because  of how very serious the issues actually are in a world where bullying of all shades is palpably getting worse.

Perhaps it’s just too challenging to the author’s own confirmation bias to risk calling a spade a spade. Nice white middle class professional people who bang on about social justice wouldn’t really be that nasty, would they?  Wouldn’t that make social media very dangerous?

And the fact that we’ve arrived at the bullying threshold points up another problem with the wording of the title, given how far the Comment's author is willing to go, because, hello, you can’t actually deal with bullying by trying to ‘escape’. You have to call it out, and address it.

Whatever the reason the Steiner ‘critics’ are attacking a family following due process regarding the notorious unchecked bullying, which they themselves flag up as the main reported problem in Steiner, it seems that they loathe us most for not staying down after a beating, which is why the attacks get harsher every time.

So confident was Melanie following the last vicious cyber-mobbing we received from her gang of friends on the Waldorf Critics site (where we cannot reply), that she published this tweet, linking all her followers to another defamatory post all about me, and even named after me but where I am also censored from replying and so from defending myself.

To which my answer is “projection”:  Who is really behaving badly here?

I haven’t blocked this person, or any of her friends, or mobbed anyone, and I’m perfectly prepared to communicate democratically with them if they ever decide to behave decently.

I’m not in competition with them, and don’t even consider myself a Steiner ‘critic’.  I’m a mother, advocating for children who were expelled for being bullied, from a Steiner school.

But that may help explain it because show me a whistleblower that hasn’t been attacked from all sides.

The Guardian Comment stops way short of solving any of the problems it raises, so I’d like to finish by offering my own views on the rather urgent matter of what individuals can do if they experience these kinds of attacks by motivated cyber-gangs especially if many gang members are convinced that they are evidenced-based and thinking critically whilst actually being in thrall to clique.

Although it is definitely helpful to de-personalise the attacks, even if possible to the extent of perceiving that you are being targeted by erroneous “confirmation bias”, rather than by a screaming mob of cyber-bullies; it’s not realistic to expect people to maintain any kind of perspective in the face of unrelenting mass cyber-attack and any such suggestion would therefore be irresponsibly flippant.

As a self-defence teacher, an assertiveness and empowerment trainer, the honest answer is, that there is no easy answer.

If you find yourself in this position, it is so unpleasant that nobody could be blamed for just dropping the whole thing and walking away.  The problem is that this would leave the bullies’ defamation intact which, although it’s what they want, is obviously an undesirable outcome.

In reality of course it is only evidence that can fight these tendencies.

The Guardian Comment’s reticence in naming this kind of behaviour as bullying, means that it also fails to helpfully remind people that this type of bullying, as all bullying, must be comprehensively documented whether you intend to follow due process or not.

No matter how much hostile ‘confirmation bias’ a target must face, the nature of the internet is that the evidence, once posted, is there both chronologically and permanently.   

Whatever else you do, whether you can get legal redress or have the contacts to bring it into public view, you must make sure to gather all the evidence there is.

Sadly you can’t stop people from joining in with cyber-gangs and bullying, neither are you guaranteed a fair democratic hearing, even by the ‘great and good‘ who are proving themselves adept at this type of social manipulation.  

All you can do is make sure the facts are there chronologically and permanently and then try and bring it up somewhere people are more likely to listen.  In spite of your isolation, and the ganging up element, as long as you document it then if and when you are successful in bringing the matter up properly, the fact that the chronological evidence is all there will be invaluable..  and if you have to document that avowedly evidence-based people have been studiously ignoring your evidence, then if and when you do succeed in bringing it to public attention, that will eventually negatively effect their reputation, not yours.  And that’s ok, because those are the choices they are making.

Of course, standing up for yourself in this way means that you will be posting the evidence where people in, and on the edges of, the cyber-gang can also read it and that can lead to further attack, which again you must document.  If people prepared to behave like this don’t like it, they could always try communicating democratically instead.

So if this writing is triggering your confirmation bias, because you don’t want to believe that people you like would behave like this, that’s actually to be expected because you’re human.  

You might want to blame me for the uncomfortable feeling, but in reality I’m just the messenger. What’s actually making you feel uncomfortable, is your own bias.

If you’re a skeptic you’ll obviously recognise that this is the same thing you’ve been telling other people for a long time now, but it might be hard to realise that confirmation bias works socially as well.  And the hardest thing to realise may be that you yourself are susceptible to it.

So let’s make it easier, if I can just ask you to set your disbelief aside for a moment, and to simply ask yourself the question, if it was true that the wife of a Senior Clinical Lecturer in mental health is part of an active cyber-gang smearing the mental health of others on Twitter, and relying on your social confirmation bias to ensure that nobody will ever find out, would that really be ok with you?