I liked this recent piece from The Consilience Project. It starts with a great explication of the specific features and strategies of good faith communication, contrasted with those of bad faith. It then goes on to discuss the dangers of normalizing bad faith communication.
It also articulates well two points that I think quite important. First, that social media companies train people to engage in bad faith. This is an efficient explanation of one of my core objections to the platforms as they currently exist:
A key feature of escalating extremism is a belief that group membership requires bad faith engagements with out-groups. In these contexts, bad faith behavior is often justified to maintain in-group membership and consensus. The normalization of bad faith communication contributes to the creation of extreme in-group pressures, which can rupture identities and exacerbate mental health crises. Personal instabilities usually lead to a doubling down on the need for group membership, increasing rationalizations and amplifications of bad faith practices.[8]
Digital media companies’ business models result in a proliferation of increasingly niche group memberships. They also incentivize public displays of conflict and bad faith communication, in order to capture attention and optimize engagement. Advertisements and propaganda dominate the social media space, driving up the total amount of bad faith communication to which people are exposed.[9] In a very literal sense, heavy users of social media are being behaviorally entrained to engage disproportionately in bad faith communication. Politicians, public officials, and influencers of all kinds seek to exploit this environment of distrust and capitalize on the declining social value of good faith interactions. The epistemic commons is repeatedly degraded to the point of exhaustion.[10] A “post-truth” culture is a culture of bad faith.
Second, the need to distinguish between good-faith and naiveté. Good faith engagement is hard; it is always easier to engage naively (or in bad faith). But we need to do it anyway, and reject the easy excuses for not doing so:
Good faith communication is both a complex skill and a value commitment that shapes personal identity. In other words: doing it is sufficiently difficult that getting good at it will change the kind of person that you are. But good faith engagement is often misconceived as a simple emotional stance leading to an overzealous search for agreement. In part, this is because naive good faith interactions can often be based on an innocent orientation towards peacemaking and the avoidance of conflict. This can be seen in the good faith engagement of a child who does not know that some people are untrustworthy. Unskillfully engaging in good faith can be a danger when others are acting in bad faith.
In some political discussions today, it is common to hear that “you can’t engage in good faith with Nazis!” A generous interpretation of this statement is that there are truly unreasonable people who must not be trusted because they have proven themselves to be dangerous and unethical. But this is not an argument against good faith communication in general. It’s an argument against engaging in naive forms of good faith communication, which would play into the hands of those actively seeking to cause harm to others. Likewise, for those who have been lied to historically and treated with disrespect by specific groups, naively engaging with those same groups again in good faith would be foolish.