Tim Lee takes a common shot at social media today:
This obviously isn't an original observation but I still think almost everyone is underestimating how much the Internet drives polarization on every controversial topic.
— Timothy B. Lee (@binarybits) November 9, 2023
I know how appealing this is, but most of the research points in the opposite direction: We're already polarized and social media mostly just gives us an opportunity to indulge it. It doesn't make things worse:
Four new papers published in the journals Science and Nature on July 27, 2023 studied the impact of Facebook and Instagram on key political attitudes and behaviors during the 2020 election cycle. The papers found little evidence that key features of these platforms led to polarization. For example, one study found that replacing Facebook and Instagram’s default algorithmic feed with a reverse-chronological feed did not significantly impact political polarization or political knowledge, contradicting the argument that algorithms create filter bubbles rather than, at most, replicating individuals’ existing selection bias.
In addition to studies like these, there's the fact that social media simply doesn't fit the timeframe of increasing polarization. For my money, the strongest evidence for this comes from periodic measures of affective polarization. This is academese for "how much we hate each other guts," and it was pretty flat through the mid-90s:
From 1980 to 1994 the trendline is flat. But starting in the late 90s, and then really taking off after 2000, affective polarization skyrocketed. Most of the damage was done by 2012, before social media became widespread.
I will once again make a pitch for the real reason political polarization has increased so much: it got a kick start in 1994 by Newt Gingrich and then soared in the aughts as Fox News grew its audience by 10x. Social media really and truly had little to do with it. It has merely exposed our behavior, not created it.
i remember watching fox when it first started broadcasting and thinking 'we are well and truly fucked'
I never watched FQX. But I knew the effect by watching my parents change over time. They went from the nicest people you ever met to raging assholes who hated everybody and everything (except RepubliQans, of course).
when i was a kid the NRA would come to our school to hold hunting safety classes; very civic-minded
then fox came along and showed them there was much better money to be had playing to white rural grievance
I kind of lean towards Rush Limbaugh as opposed to Newt. I remember the America held hostage line starting at the beginning of Clinton's term and right wing radio just grew from there. Before that, Rush was as likely to criticize President HW Bush as he was any Democrat.
Rush is a big part of my worldview today. Not so much what he said or did - but making me realize how the Reich-wing plays the game.
I listened to Rush every day (the country station my office played had Rush on 12-3 every day). One day I was listening to him run President Clinton into the ground for his statement on education funding. EXCEPT, it just so happened that I had heard the speech Rush was talking about. I got to hear it waiting for a Duke-Carolina BB game - all 15 minutes of it. Pure plain vanilla rah, rah, rah we support teachers.
So - what did Rush do? Rush played Clinton's voice saying the most ridiculous thing imaginable. How? He took a part of the speech, clipped out some key words in the middle of a section, then grafted the ends together. VOILA - Clinton said the exact opposite of what Clinton actually said.
After that, I started to be more attentive and I notice the same rotten "editing" all over the place.
I have a recollection of a blog post or something by James Fallows saying that in the early days he found Rush somewhat interesting and corresponded with him a bit. But he found that over time Rush became boring, because he was taking the Repub side of issues "100% of the time."
Agreed. It was Rush Limbaugh.
I'll agree.
X gets the square!
Its Faux News and the Murdoch's for most of blame. The monetization of hate, racism, xenophobia, LGTBQ hatred, and mistrust of all things related to the Democrats and the US Federal Government.
All this to make a few $ billions more money.
Murdoch has been pure poison worldwide.
Kevin - I agree that, like Trump, the negative impacts of Fox are always underestimated. However, if this were just a Fox News effect, why has polarization continued to grow? I would think it would have plateaued.
it's just that there's a lot more outlets pumping this sludge
OAN, newsmax, info wars, breitbart, gateway pundit, epoch times, daily caller, endless internet personalities/influencers, etc etc etc
Stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere doesn't suddenly end global warming. Same principle.
I think this is how social media and the internet does impact the polarization. Social media amplifies the messaging that started with Fox. I also wonder how Russia comes in to play. It was (maybe?) late to the game, but with its success in 2016, I think its misinformation and chaos operation has ramped up. So:
Rush/Gingrich then Fox, then internet, social media, and finally foreign players.
Well, he did say 'the Internet' not specifically social media. Before there was Facebook, there were plenty of misinformation/disinformation e-mails tagged with 'please forward to everyone on your mail list'.
In 1987, the Fairness Doctrine was repealed. Talk radio started its ascent and Fox News piled on.
The Fairness Doctrine applied only to broadcast media and has absolutely nothing to do with Fox News, which as a cable entity, would never have been covered by the FD in the first place.
The FD made sense because the airwaves are owned by the public. The cable space was never owned by the public, and thus, due to the First Amendment, was freed people to do whatever they wanted, within the usual constraints that cover other media, such as newspapers.
Fox may have been cable but Rush was public airwaves and he was the one to demonstrate how much ca$h could be made selling outrage. Murdoch surely took notice.
Perhaps I'm too much of an economic determinist, but I find surprising that there is nary a word here about rising economic inequality and nothing about the long slow recovery from the GFC.
They're all related. Political practice strategy is, "United we stand, divided we fall." Political malpractice strategy is, "Divide and conquer."
Political practice increases social harmony, improves the economy, lowers crime, increases economic equality, and increases the speed of economic recovery. Political malpractice has the opposite effect. Newt and Citizen Murdock are two of a growing number of advocates and active supporters of political malpractice, although some are having second thoughts.
While I agree that Fox News plays a large part that's underestimated, it's worth noting that Lee said "the internet" not "social media". I think an argument can be made for "the internet" causing / exacerbating / exploiting a lot of issues, even if social media itself proves to be less bad then we think.
Oh wait, I actually read the whole thread, in which Lee he does, in fact, seem to mean social media specifically.
Still, I stand by my point that the internet has done more harm than acknowledged.
Kevin still on his Fox kick for driving this when in all sorts of other countries with polarization and lunacy, like the Q freaks in Germany where there is no Fox News
Eyeballing the chart here and in the linked study, the mid 2000s seem like the jumping off point, not 1994. The data points are sparse so we can conclude anything we want....but Kevins explanation doesnt appear to even try to explain whats happened on his chart over the last 15 years.
Social media is little different than broadcast TV channels -- everything is self-selecting. The algorithms shouldn't make that much of a difference when the people you're following are already in the same meta info echo chamber.
Your point is...pointless.
"Four new papers published in the journals Science and Nature on July 27, 2023 studied..."
I read the Nature one at the time, and it was clear rubbish, biased and underpowered.
I said it before (e.g. https://www.losingmyreligions.net/ ) and I'll say it again: Newt is one of the worst things to ever happen to the US.
Yeah, Newt and Rush in the late 80's were the seed for this. Just look at HW's 1988 campaign. People forget just how divisive the Willie Horton/flag factory/ACLU basing campaign that Atwater ran. I hope he suffered a lot before dying.
My grandparents referred to FDR as "That Man" rather than saying his name, 25 years after his death. Polarization has always been present. The internet has made information more readily available, but it has also increased access to misinformation to an astounding degree. I think it has increased polarization, but as an effect of the tsunami of lies.
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