I asked for research, I got research:
In a recent article, we show that most people in the United States and Denmark agree that online discussions are much more hostile than offline discussions. The results of our study, however, suggest that it’s not the Internet that transforms otherwise nice people into angry trolls. People who are jerks online are jerks offline, too. We do find that the kind of people who are obsessed with politics are often frustrated, angry and offensive. But they tend to rant about politics in offline interactions as well.
....This analysis provides a different understanding of why so many people find the Internet to be a politically ugly place. Frustrated people are also hostile in offline discussions, but these discussions occur in private....The big difference between online and offline discussions is that we witness a lot more acts of hostility online, not so much against ourselves or our friends, but against strangers.
In other words, the Internet doesn’t stir up hostility. Instead it creates and facilitates what we call “connectivity” among groups with shared politics, and between trolls and their victims. It allows individuals who are predisposed to be hostile to accomplish their goals more effectively. As Facebook executives concluded among themselves, the more that controversial content is visible in the news feed, the less people enjoy it.
I don't expect anyone to pay attention to this, since minds are mostly made up on the issue of Facebook and other social media outlets. Nevertheless, the bulk of the (limited) evidence to date suggests that social media doesn't cause hostility, it merely reflects hostility that's always been there but that most of us never noticed.
Now, I think you can still argue that there's a second order effect here: Merely being exposed to so much more hostility may have a negative effect on society. I'm open to that idea. However, is there really any question that the intense political hostility we face today started way back in 2000, or perhaps 2010 at the absolute latest? And therefore something else has to be at the root of it, with social media playing, at most, a modest supporting role in later years? I don't think so.
When Facebook presents its defense against its Metaverse being broken up, your arguments will be front and center, engraved onto stainless steel plates, framed with Cocobolo wood and Elephant Ivory, replete with gold leaf.
Facebook is Metajerk.
You're ignoring the most important part: Facebook may not be an instigator, but it is an amplifier. And I know that you took enough physics to know what happens when there's too much positive feedback in an amplifier.
Bingo! It might not breed hate, but it allows hate to spread much further than it would have in pre-social media days.
Exactly. FB has been amplifying humanity's worst characteristics and impulses. Well, the Republican Party has been running this way since at least Nixon's "Southern Strategy", which harnessed the power of racism. But FB has been like fentanyl for them.
The Democrats, with their appealing to people's better natures, their sense of community, their ethics and basic decency, have never even had a chance. And how much of that goes around on FB or the other media?
Oh please "racism" built as the last man has no future. Individualism is the creation of the weak and the last man type of thinking. Without the state, Individual rights, would not exist.
Exactly. Facebook "reflects" just like the Walt Disney Concert Hall, which reflected so much it started to cook nearby condos.
What makes Facebook and other social media platforms so dangerous is the way it feeds people the garbage unrelentingly. At least with FoxNews you have to actually choose to go there, and that choice is specifically in favor of the content. No one turns on FoxNews to see their niece's baby pictures, and then gets QAnon in between every snapshot.
..and the corollary to amplification is that increased exposure tends to normalize behavior. Jerks that may have rarely expressed their hostility and IRL rage now find role models and social support for their expression.
The problem with Facebook that it is just too big. If you allow a billion people to interact in the same space the inevitable result will be a cesspool.
You need to give people the ability to build walls to keep out the people they don't want to hear from (e.g. Groups), but the problem is that Facebook can't drive engagement if anyone can just wall it off anything they don't want.
Except that Facebook does give you some tools to block or reduce the stuff you don’t want to see. Those three dots in the upper right corner of every post allow you to snooze or block posts you don’t like from friends, and block ads from companies you also don’t like. It’s perhaps not a wall but it is some control over what shows up in your feed. I use the three dots often and my feed doesn’t have much hatred in it.
Of course the question is how many users actually do click on the three dots, indeed how many of them know that the three dots open up a menu (in many contexts by now.
The three dots appeared on the scene a while ago quasi spy stealth. Nobody explained anything to anybody; people were just expected to guess right. I just saw the dots and didn't think about what they were doing there, being focussed only tasks. It took me a at least a year before somebody explained them to me.
This is a new trend in computer technology: Apps are now almost always being distributed without proper documentation and help. We are supposed to learn by osmosis. I hate it.
"In another publication, we demonstrate that American Twitter users do not share online misinformation because they’re ignorant. People who share more stories from untrustworthy sources are as reflective as others, and they know more about politics and digital technology. Instead their defining characteristic is a passionate hatred for members of the other political party."
I think it's fair to say that FB drives hatred (at least post 2016) in an asymmetric, consistent, and less than neutral fashion.
https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
And Fox is the house that passionate hatred built.
"However, is there really any question that the intense political hostility we face today started way back in 2000, or perhaps 2010 at the absolute latest?"
Try back in 1963. A woman protester hitting Adlai Stevenson with a poster.
https://ffbsccn.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/stevenson-attack-dallas.jpg
Or back in the Red Scare days of the 1950s. People who had their careers destroyed, were blacklisted, and even innocents who were incarcerated and worse.
She was a plant
Twenty years ago, it was mainly some asshole's direct family that had to put up with his/her raving. Now they can go online and connect with thousands of likeminded assholes. Still often a tiny minority, they nevertheless find support and encouragement from their brethren.
If facebook weren't an instigator, then we never would have needed coral as a corrective.
So sorry for going back to Nazism, but think of the propaganda machine as facebook. The tools available to the hateful are powerful. The ability to manipulate and mold "public opinion" predate facebook and twitter, but that doesn't really provide any comfort.
I don't expect Mr. Drum to pay attention to this, since his mind is mostly made up on the issue of Facebook and other social media outlets.
"The Ministry's aim was to ensure that the Nazi message was successfully communicated through art, music, theater, films, books, radio, educational materials, and the press. There were several audiences for Nazi propaganda. Germans were reminded of the struggle against foreign enemies and Jewish subversion. During periods preceding legislation or executive measures against Jews, propaganda campaigns created an atmosphere tolerant of violence against Jews, particularly in 1935 (before the Nuremberg Race Laws of September) and in 1938 (prior to the barrage of antisemitic economic legislation following Kristallnacht). Propaganda also encouraged passivity and acceptance of the impending measures against Jews, as these appeared to depict the Nazi government as stepping in and “restoring order.”
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-propaganda
They built their own facebook.
When it comes to facebook I definitely don't care about this:
"One of the main allegations of the antitrust lawsuit is that Google and Facebook colluded to rig ad prices and “kill header bidding” (the attempt by competitors to make the ad market less Google-centric).
“The lawsuit claims that when Facebook began to gain traction as a rival advertiser, Google made an agreement with Facebook to reduce competition in exchange for giving the social media company an advantage in Google-run ad auctions. The project was called ‘Jedi Blue,’” we wrote in April of this year."
Since I don't use facebook, I am content to see them steal from advertisers. It's so... Meta.
https://searchengineland.com/google-allegedly-creates-ad-monopoly-with-facebook-to-favor-its-own-exchange-according-to-new-unredacted-details-from-project-jedi-375487
Good points in the comments. One other word: Russia.
Personally, I feel that the media is a huge factor in the negativity of good discussion. Rather than presenting simple facts, they have idiotic pundits spewing idiocy. I also feel that "rampant" repulsives and t-Rump have given people the "okay" to be mean and rude anytime, anywhere. The first time an elected official shouted "you lie" shocked me. This is not how well behaved, educated, ethical people behave. I rather suspect the repulsive party has scraped the bottom of the barrel for their representatives and they are not nice people who spew horrid nonsense non stop.
As a methodological point, Kevin, one should compare the issue ("has political polarization increased? over the past 20 years") across a range of countries.
Personally, I am skeptical that the baseline assumption is even true. People being angry and irrational about politics has been with us forever. Obviously we are all aware of the 60s, but hell, Guelph vs Ghibelline or Nike Riots Blue vs Green makes no sense to us in terms of the actual points of difference, but is immediately understandable in terms of the behavior and tribalism.
If anything has changed, it's the *public* (private? that's more difficult to tell) behavior of the professionals in the space, things like unwillingness to compromise. But that's a different issue, to be measured and understood using different tools.
Anyway, back to the point at hand. Obviously Fox and more generally Murdoch have cast a shadow over most of the Anglosphere, so tracking UK or Australia or Canada won't get you much new info. But look at what's happened in France, Italy, or Germany, India, Brazil, or Indonesia. What can we make from their experiences?
There are common threads to everyone's experience. In particular
- new technology gives many more people a feeling of constant discomfort, low level stress, low level fear. Not so much the tech itself as a feeling of "I no longer understand the world", driven as much as anything else by lack of common culture (we used to all read the same books, but that became impossible; then watched the same TV, but that became impossible). Essentially the collapse of Manufacturing Consent.
- one of the first times we saw this sort of tech-driven mass hysteria was the world of Marx up to 1917. (I wouldn't classify 1914 as this sort of thing, but 1917 yes). People reconceptualizing (correctly or not, and driven to do so by constant change) the way the world worked.
The 30s were a second version of this.
And since WW2 we've been in a constant version of this, sometimes less obvious, sometime (60s) more so.
But overall what we have is that
- society always has its discontents.
- until recently society also had is Consent Manufacturing aparatuses.
- and the net result was that most of us did not see the discontent, and considered (correctly, IMHO) our individual discontents to be idiosyncratic and irrelevant to the body politic.
Tech as change had created many more people who feel that their idiosyncratic discontents are rooted in *something* real.
Tech as tech has created many more ways for these people to communicate.
Tech as choice has killed the Consent Manufacturing that kept this all under control.
But pretty much none of this has anything to do with the actual causes given, the language of -phobia's, -ism's and identity. And it only reflects Fox News insofar as there will always be political entrepreneurs.
Blame Fox yes -- if your only concern is "why does our team not control everything, we are obviously right".
But you can also blame The Great Awokening as precisely the sort of vague inchoate irrational/religious response to times of "change I don't understand" that gave us the previous Great Awakenings, the Hippies, and the Iranian Revolution.
If you think all this is unfair, look at what happens when either group gets some sort of power. Whether it's Trump or Biden, BLM or Occupy WallStreet, no-one can agree on any sort of platform, actual demands, or even something more meta like "how do we even agree that we agree on something?"
This is the politics of idiosyncratic dissatisfaction, and because my idiosyncrasies are so different from yours, we agree on nothing except "burn down the system" or "drain the swamp".
We went through this at least once before with the Reformation -- with much the same results. We managed to control the lunacy inherent in every man claiming his opinions on anything and everything are fully as good as anyone else's via Hobbes, then Locke, then the Enlightenment. But the mass of humans were and remain unwilling to accept the constraints and discipline inherent in those ideas; the end of Manufacturing Consent means the return of the long sixteenth century. And we're just living in the early days, the time of Luther. We haven't yet had Henry seeing a way to kill multiple birds with one stone via taking over the Church, let alone Munster and the 30 Years War.
(Yes, yes, I know. Who cares about boring white male history when there are -ism'ist heretics to torture and -phobic witches to burn?
Just one more reason why, indeed, the madness will play out in the same way.)
Good post. Reminds me what I posted in another thread. The lack of a strong political coalition is the big part of the problem.
> is there really any question that the intense political hostility we face today started way back in 2000, or perhaps 2010 at the absolute latest?
I think a case could be made for a 1980 start. Also, 1972 when the South is fully on board with voting for Republicans again. Or 1964 (Goldwater).