I have always leaned towards the social media divides us camp, but for a reason not discussed in your essay. What I think social media did in the United States is put people in the same room who would have never met in real life. Before, a denizen of San Francisco would intellectually know they were different from someone in rural Arkansas, and vice versa. However, these very different types of Americans weren’t confronted with the other’s ideas and beliefs on a regular basis before social media. Social media created interactions that wouldn’t have otherwise occurred with any frequency, and then dehumanized the dialogue, collapsed discourse into a handful of characters or seconds of video, all while simultaneously pushing the most divisive content to increase user engagement. We were always divided, but we lived in our own bubbles.
In meatspace, we live in bubbles more than we used to. Due to ideological polarization, many people seldom encounter those from the other side in the neighborhood or at work, much less than they used to. Maybe this supports you thesis. If we only see the other side online, they all look like crazy narcissists instead of normal people who happen to have different political opinions.
This so much. Analysis of politics on social media is often focused on the concept of people becoming convinced of things, less so on what kinds of experience people are having. I think by far the biggest impact is on people who are reading stuff they *don't* agree with and reactions against that.
I think that it would be very strange if the format of 24/7 anger, mockery, disdain, flattening and worse didn't leech out into the wider culture. All I have is anecdotes, but they're personallt compelling when you've done as much social media as I once did. That said, it's done us a service by revealing, to those of us who were open to persuasion, that our own sides are as bad as the other. I wouldn't have known (as a lifelong leftist) how blinkered my side was until I saw it for myself.
I agree with you. I just cannot conceive of how anyone could hold this "sceptical" view if he had actually spent any appreciable amount of time in these venues. I wonder if these studies are flawed bc they're looking at all social media users, rather than just the small portion of those who are into the political content. Bc most aren't. They're looking at sports stuff, or fashion stuff, or all kinds of things with zero interest in politics. Half of people also don't vote. It's the politically engaged 20% or so who lead the polarization, and who are in the social media venues hating on each other. They're also the ones that end up setting the agenda of the political parties, so it does matter.
This is my intuition, because the sceptical position seems to assume social media is a sandbox. Only this week I was discussing my real life persona experienced on the day someone met me just once, 10 years ago. I was obsessively on Twitter and talking about Twitter. I was definitely affecting people offline. And I have relationships now that have sadly cooled because I'm wary of talking to them, based on their FB posts. All anecdote, but I cannot help but think it probably scales to negative real world effects.
There's lots to like in this argument. I want to offer a slightly different take though. There's a more MacLuhanist view that see changes in media technology and media culture that then have cognitive and cultural consequences.
In this story, social media (in the sense of two-way media or something similar. Large scale email groups did the same thing 20 years before, just at a smaller scale) facilitates new ways of social engagement and social imagination. This allows some groups to self-organize and even appreciate themselves as groups in ways that they hadn't before.
It lowers the barriers to self-organization in ways that previous required more social and/or economic capital to do.
And these newly organized people aren't formed by the same social mores that were necessary to acquire the social or economic capital to organize.
So they really are the barbarians at the gates.
But this isn't breaking. This is a perfectly normal cultural change that has deep social consequences.
The MacLuhan take is the one I go for. It’s very hard to say what precisely the impact of the printing press was on the wars of religion and the age of revolutions, but it seems likely that the qualitative change in the media environment was relevant somehow. No one is ever going to be able to properly separate the effects of newspapers from pamphlets from books from bibles, and we are going to be able to say whether the net political effect was good or bad. But it’s implausible that it was irrelevant. And the same thing is true with the next great waves of broadcast media (radio and television). And then the internet and social media had a very different character from many of these, enabling peer-to-peer communication and algorithmic self-organization.
I would want to be cautious about claiming any *particular* effect being due to this. But saying “we can’t prove it, so the people who say it has a particular effect are wrong” misses half the point.
With much less cause, as I have not done the research you have done, I agree with you completely that social media is not the underlying driver of any of the problems we are experiencing today, across the whole of the political spectrum. To me, a central point, if not the central point, you note is this: “Media bias is largely demand-driven, not supply-driven).”
So, social media can be a facilitator for transmitting a point of view, but it is not the creator of that view. I hope I will not be too tiresome in quoting again from Arendt, who here is also quoting from someone else, “Propaganda is not ‘the art of instilling an opinion in the masses. Actually it is the art of receiving an opinion from the masses.’”
I readily acknowledge that, in my hands, a little knowledge of what Arendt is discussing is likely a dangerous thing. That said, it struck me over and over in reading your article that people, in desperation for finding a way out of our current fix, are latching on to symptoms—with AOC’s comment appearing to me as an astonishingly extreme example of this—rather than doing the intellectual work required to get underneath the symptoms toward locating the causes (which are multifaceted and very messy).
I want to take a little bit of issue with you about the relative dysfunction of the two parties here in the US, in this respect: the Democratic Party (my party for all my adult life, and still is) is, to my mind, in a complete state of dysfunction right now, utterly unable to manage the simplest of course corrections it absolutely must take to have any chance of regaining power. To that extent, I also question whether your bullet beginning “A better explanation of this “asymmetric polarization” is a good take. Speaking as one who is among that class of over-educated liberal, urban professionals, I am astounded by how easily people of my ilk can be gulled into believing the most preposterous, science-denialist tripe. As one commenter on Substack I have found quite sound recently observed:
“It’s hard for me to tell if the Democratic Party is really doubling down on fringe trans causes or just running on fumes with them, having difficulty figuring out what to do with this rotten hot potato. It hasn’t quite dawned on many Democratic elites that this is really the motherload of wedge issues and would be the gift to Trump’s ilk that keeps on giving if a Democratic leader doesn’t step up and turn the ship around in 2028. That figure hasn’t appeared yet, as Rahm Emanuel has too much baggage, too little charisma, and too little to offer the Democratic base in other areas to get the job done. But my sense is that we’ll need to figure out who can turn the ship around soon because the writing’s on the wall that this particular set of issues will likely drag the party down for the rest of its existence if it doesn’t course-correct.”
I don't want to debate the whole topic of trans, since it's turned into the Israel/Palestine of US liberal culture. Just let me say, it's not that people are stupid. Many critics here just don't comprehend the visceral revulsion that many core Democrats have at the seething brew of bullying and hatred in right-wing ranting. Something like the above reads to them as "You must beat up on the weakest and most vulnerable, as a blood sacrifice to the right-wing hate-mongers. Punch down, down, down, to appease bigots. It's necessary to join the attacks and throw the abused under a bus, then drive the bus back and forth over the screaming victims, to make their abusers happy". Note, I'm not saying that's an accurate analysis. But I understand where it's coming from.
Thank you for weighing in. What I would note is that there is a great deal of misunderstanding that needs to be addressed. The people I know, all Democrats, who are raising issues about protecting women’s sports and medicalization of distressed children with complex presentations are thoughtful, knowledgeable, and eager to discuss how we, as Democrats, can get through this. There is, for example, the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group. The group met for three years, working through all the issues assiduously to arrive at analysis and recommendations that would be both fair and decent for all involved. They then reached out to a host of Democratic Congress members to discuss their findings, and not a single one would even meet with the group. Here’s a link to their website: https://womenssportspolicy.org/ What I have recommended (albeit with my wee small voice) is that we all contact our Democratic Congress members and urge them to meet with this group, hammer out a fair and compassionate approach, including legislative proposals, and take this issue away from the Republicans.
I would certainly agree there are many well-intentioned people involved in the issue. Similarly, I think there's a huge number of Israelis and Palestinians who don't hate anyone for religious or ethics reasons, and just want to live their lives in peace. Sadly, that doesn't neutralize structural conflicts. With a nod to the topic of the post here, I think the "weaker than you think" contention discounts the effectiveness of using social media to inflame people - as part of, not apart from - the long history of setting people against one another. The problem is that "take this issue away from the Republicans" runs into the difficulty that unless you give Republicans everything they want, and agree everyone else is wrong and should be punished, and that Republicans are put-upon victims for which they deserve grovelling apologies forever, they will continue to attack. That's the simple political logic which makes it a bad idea for any member of Congress to meet with a compromise group, because they know it's a losing calculation. It won't help them fend off attacks from the right, and they'll get grief from the left - lose-lose.
I really have no idea how to solve this. There's just a lot of "moving parts" that are opposed to one another.
I just want to clarify that my comment is not aimed toward trying to convince Republicans of anything, it is rather about how to overcome the deep divisions among Democrats so that Democrats are better positioned to win in 2026. In my own volunteer work with Democratic groups working on this most contentious of issues, I have seen and experienced some success, particularly on the state and local level, in working through differences to find common ground. One-on-one, in person conversations between Democrats and Democratic leaners with differing perspectives can be particularly fruitful to get past positioning toward mutually beneficial problem-solving. The biggest problem is to get past what divides us, as Democrats, so the conversations can begin, and quickly, so that we can all row together toward 2026. Thanks for the conversation.
I appreciate your comments about objection 6 and the quote from Scott Alexander. I guess that I am an oddball whose prior is the opposite of Alexander's or Haidt's. My intuition is that the whining about social media is cope for the declining influence of the pre-2008 neo-liberal consensus, and a superficial analysis of the social conflicts caused by the rise of the "Brahmin Left" and the "diploma divide." And the anti-social media intuition generates pro-censorship policy ideas that I consider more dangerous to democracy than social media itself.
So, I'm glad that Alexander lacks the evidence to justify his prior. THB, I am kind of surprised that he believes in the wrecking ball thesis. He wouldn't be what he is today without social media. His type of writing success just wasn't an option available to anyone in the pre-Internet days. Does he believe that his own popularity and influence (within certain circles) is a danger to American democracy?
I love your writing and contributions to the public conversation. But I think you're missing the mark here. As you note, there have been harmful, extreme socio-political movements through modern history. Social media doesn't have to be the explanation. But I think you underestimate one thing you have granted and miss a key factor that should bias us towards thinking there are broad, negative effects of SM that are hard to measure.
First, as you grant, the timing correlation of the rise of social media and populism is at least plausibly supported by features of social media we all agree on. I wouldn't claim populism = broken democracy. But decrease in institutional trust and gatekeepers, and explosion of speed and vitality of conspiracy theories feels like a pretty big subset of the factors you might imagine break democracy, or at least catalyze breaking democracy in the presence of other stressors.
Second, I think it's really hard to argue that the rise in social media hasn't had very strong negative effects on the mental health of young people, especially girls/women. I think it's blinkered to interpret that independently. While not simple, that's a wildly simpler thing to measure than "breaking democracy", and concentrated effects in a particularly vulnerable and exposed demographic (teen girls in the free for all first wave of mass social media and smartphones) make it doubly easier to identify. I find it hard to believe that there were these horrible effects on mental health of teens across the rich world but magically those similar kinds of effects had zero or near zero effects on every other demo in every other area of concern.
As in, on the one hand it's clear that social media caused a huge increase in group nastiness and bullying among teens that led to increased depression and suicide. But that manifested in adults in the socio-political realm not at all? Especially when we know there was an excellent foundation to be catalyzed in the two generation buildup of paranoid, right wing talk radio and cable TV? It beggars belief. Especially since you've already granted that it probably has some effect on the rise in populism, which seems a clear outcome from the adult version of that effect.
I think these underlying causal mechanisms supporting that prior are difficult to overwhelm with the experimental data at hand.
- Social media makes it easier to find echo chambers and catalyzes political sorting.
- It erodes chances of face-to-face interactions with people of different backgrounds.
- It encourages snarky behavior through anonymity, likes, and the lure of going viral.
- It prioritizes keeping you hooked and grabbing your attention (dunking on the "other" group is naturally the most effective way of doing this, and algorithms discover that without the need for malicious guidance).
- The absence of journalistic standards opens the way for audience capture (the emergence of demand-side bias is certainly more frictionless without institutional norms or standards of accountability).
- Reputation can be lost as quickly as its gained if you fall out of the party line (cancel culture in both sides).
I'll make some assertions. I offer no proof, but you didn't say "Prove me wrong"; you merely said "Tell me why I'm wrong."
You say "Platforms do not run different algorithms for conservatives and liberals." No, they don't, but the algorithms are not run on the same set of data. The effect is a positive feedback loop amplifying whatever the reader consumes. And that effect is not necessarily positive. Social media may not be the cause of many of today's problems, but it amplifies them. (So, yes, "Media bias is largely demand-driven, not supply-driven.")
I'm not convinced that "the Republican Party is much more dysfunctional than the Democratic Party." I don't know how to measure this, but to me they both seem terribly dysfunctional, and they both seem to be home for many "resentful, anti-establishment, low-trust, conspiracy-minded cranks." What each party considers to be "the establishment" is often different, of course, but essentially means "those we believe to be in power."
I'm not convinced that the media environment has ever been constrained by basic scientific knowledge, but the scientific establishment has certainly been badly tarnished by abandoning scientific principles in favor of politics in recent years. And neither the "right" nor the "left" seem to be much interested in scientific principles or processes, with absurdities being promoted from both ends of the political spectrum.
Professional journalistic standards have been openly abandoned by once-mainstream media institutions, and there are enough savvy consumers that this has opened the door for "independent journalism" where professional standards still apply, at least as much as they used to in the mainstream media.
Regarding the "straw man" argument, hyperbole has always been an effective rhetorical device, and I when someone makes an absurd claim I often cannot tell whether it's a deliberate lie, an actual belief, or a rhetorical device.
As you can probably tell, these are mostly quibbles rather than outright disagreement. Where I seem to actually disagree with you is on the relative dysfunction on the opposite ends of the political spectrum. I find the disingenuousness and manipulation and misinformation coming from both sides to be utterly appalling, and the more I've learned the more appalled I've become. But in that regard, social media is a tool, not a cause, and unscrupulous political actors will - and do - use whatever tools they have available to them.
One worry I have is how the use of AI and the use of social media will evolve together for the propagation of misinformation. These are both amplifying tools which are constrained by neither truth nor consequences.
Regarding: "I'm not convinced that "the Republican Party is much more dysfunctional than the Democratic Party."
Pounds table: AN ANTI-VACCINE LUNATIC IS *SECRETARY OF HEALTH*. MEASLES IS BACK.
Republican Senators could have stopped this, and they almost all went along with it! This is a level of dysfunctional which is not "Both Sides". It is simply not comparable to what some journalist messes up about, or some pandering political speech. It is an nutcase rejection of a core civilization advance.
I could argue that that is not an example of dysfunction, but is instead an example of the Republican Party coming together despite some amount of internal disagreement. When someone within the party expresses a position which is at odds with the majority of the party, it makes sense for a senator to ask how much of an effect that position will have on what is actually likely to happen, and to balance the (guess at an) answer against the question of whether making an issue of it will cause schisms within the party to widen to the extent that the party itself loses power.
You may not like the outcome, but a political calculation does not inherently signal dysfunction. Are the machinations within the Democratic Party which led to the late switch of the 2024 Democratic Presidential nomination to a highly unpopular candidate, which in turn led to loss of the election itself, any less an example of dysfunction?
Well, that's using a different meaning of "dysfunction" (maybe lack of organization) than I thought was meant (more at ability to govern with some reasonableness - note it'll never be perfect). By that definition, a murderous dictatorship is not "dysfunction", since it's maintaining strong ruling faction unity. The fact that anti-vaccine lunacy is the position of "the majority of the party" should be an unarguable condemnation of the Republican Party as beyond the pale of reason, not anything to laud for party discipline.
I feel kind of alone in my views of the Biden drop-out as a complicated event where one can make reasonable choices in a risky situation, but still have it all blow up anyway. Nobody seems to care that the White House physician kept issuing clean reports, that "bounces off". It's all about echoing right-wing accusations against institutions.
Yeah, you're right: I don't think dysfunction has much to do with executing reasonable policies, and an efficiently run dictatorship isn't necessarily dysfunctional. (I have other objections to dictatorships.)
The question of what policies are reasonable is a different one. From what I can tell the issues surrounding vaccine policy are more nuanced than mere "lunacy" and I am not convinced that the majority of the Republican Party should be painted with the "anti-vaccine" brush, but I find it difficult to see past the rhetoric from both sides. That's not really relevant to the article which triggered this discussion, though.
For what little it's worth, I do agree that the clean reports from the White House physician should not be ignored, but what count as "reasonable choices" for dealing with that situation is again subjective. From my outside perspective there was a lot of incomprehensibly bizarre stuff happening, but I have no idea what it looked like from the inside, or what choices might have been better.
“Nobody seems to care that the White House physician kept issuing clean reports, that ‘bounces off’.”
Huh? Is this your version of “Trust the Science”?
Doctors are both infallible and more importantly never lie?!?
Obviously the doctor was in on the cover-up - as his taking the 5th rather than answer questions in front of Congress strongly suggests (Yes, yes, I know it by itself doesn’t prove this…).
How much the doctor did it willingly versus being pressured by Jill and the other Biden advisers we will likely never know. Nor does it matter much at all.
I commend you for at least being willing to forthrightly face the implications. Almost everyone seems very reluctant to do so. Yes, indeed, it's my version of "Trust The Science". It seems obvious to me that we should look at the best-sourced material possible, and that's the White House physician's reports. Moreover, it's key, since if any of e.g. Biden's aides started saying privately there might be a problem with his capacity, they'd likely be told that Biden had a complete physical which gave him a clean bill of health, and you are not a doctor and haven't examined him, versus someone who both is a doctor and has examined him. And that would strike me as quite a reasonable response. Yet I've almost never seen this considered. It follows that someone who claims there was a cover-up must contend these reports were all a complete lie, that the physician was part of the (literal) conspiracy. That's not inconceivable, but it seems something most such proponents aren't willing to say (I wonder if they don't like the implications as applied to the current president who is the oldest ever elected and has a family history of Alzheimer's Disease).
We can't infer anything from his taking-the-Fifth. Nobody with any sense at all would say anything to Republicans, even if they (Republicans) weren't so obviously malicious. That's basic legal defense 001 (aka "Don't Talk To The Cops").
So you hide behind the patina of plausible deniability, basically.
Richard Nixon would be very proud…
You’re really trying to claim that Biden was fully competent to be the president the whole time? That he was mentally fit? Really?!?
You are also completely wrong about not being able to infer anything from taking the 5th. That is only true if the question is a criminal trial to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
And despite your implicit claim to the contrary, beyond a reasonable doubt is not the standard for making judgements about the political skullduggery that went on here.
The story I would tell is that America has several features that make it especially prone to polarization like having a large and diverse population, a two-party system, strong freedom of speech, etc. As such, the country started to become polarized decades ago but social media came along and accelerated the trend that would have happened anyways. How does this thesis hold up against the evidence?
Dan, have you ever actually spent time marinating in social media? Like hours every day, like most people? Just go on Twitter and scroll what's recommended, not who you follow? It's incomprehensible to me how anyone who has done so can maintain this "scepticism" of yours.
But some very non-academic points in push-back:
1. America is different bc we're a nation of crazy people. We are barely a nation, we're a giant collection of vastly different subcultures, and all descended from people who were either driven out of their home countries bc no one liked them, or imagined they'd find gold and fairy dust here, or are just straight up risk-taking and insane and think moving across the planet to a brand new empty place where no one knows who you are sounds like a great idea. You can't compare us to most places, we are simply more anti-social people with more nonsense, fairy dust, gigantic unfounded egos, and dreams that we'll all be millionaires than anywhere else. We have little to no regard for social norms or etiquette. We're cowboys and Indians and gangsters and snake oil salesmen and gold prospectors and puritans and religious fundamentalists, all mixed up together.
2. I think the burden lies on you to explain how a new technology that reveals to you on a daily, hourly basis just exactly how cruel, selfish, malicious, envious, grasping, and nasty other people really are, as soon as they have anonymity, does NOT have a negative impact on social and political stability. You can't find literally a single Insta post or YouTube video about ANYTHING...someone showing off their new woodworking project, someone giving advice on helping their infant sleep, someone showing how they walk their dog...literally anything, without there being dozens of nasty comments about how the OP is basically a horrible wrong evil stupid human who should probably die. Forget politics, it's not just that, it's EVERYTHING. We are a social species that requires manners and etiquette and many little customs and rituals to grind down the rough edges and prevent us from wanting to kill each other. Social media dissolves those, and we get to see exactly how hateful people are and exactly how much they hate us. Just the fact that it is considered perfectly normal to tell a total stranger that they are scum who deserve to die a slow death ... That happens a million times over every day. You think that doesn't impact people??
3. Any study that looks at political influence or persuasion that looks at all users is flawed, because 80% of users have zero interest in politics and could care less. It's the 20% who care who get polarized, and they're the only ones that matter. They set agendas, they vote, they raise issues or put them down.
4. Political accounts are often dedicated to doing nothing more than finding and curating the absolute worst examples of the other side, to put in the haters' faces so they can hate even harder. How is it possible for someone to spend two hours a day watching videos of the worst, most hysterical, most insane, scariest seeming people from behind enemy lines and NOT be radicalized? Honestly how?
5. What does demand driven versus supply driven have to do with anything? I don't see how it's relevant. Meth and fentanyl are also demand driven, so what?
6. Of course people have been crazy and gone through moral panics and mass hysteria up to and including slaughter in the past. What's notable now is that they are riled up acting as if it's time for pitchforks and war when everyone is literally living in the safest, most healthy, most prosperous, most convenient, most full of ease and entertainments and pleasures time in all of history. Unemployment has been incredibly low for a decade. Everyone's lives are materially better. Yet they're angry as if we've been living through the Great Depression or something. I would say one needs an alternative explanation for why people are so angry when actually their lives are pretty damn good, if you claim it's not social media.
7. I get told literally EVERY SINGLE DAY on this platform, one of the more civil and highbrow ones we have, that I'm a degenerate whore who is also frigid and a prostitute at the same time, who deserves to die alone and soon, by at least one man. And, um ... I'm just a very boring married lady in my 40s who lives in the middle of the country, is nice to almost everyone on this site, and most of what I post is like married people jokes or other humor type content. I can't even imagine what others get. You think that doesn't effect me? It certainly does. I have to try...like truly make an effort...to talk myself down from not just deciding I want all men castrated, some days. And I've spent my whole life really loving and liking men. But online, good god they are so full of bile and hatred and pure black-hearted nastiness. I just can't imagine how you think there can be a medium where people blast all the worst parts of themselves at other people, where we now just accept this thing called "trolls" as a fact of life, and NOT have that effect people's social and ultimately political way of understanding and viewing the world.
Then what is? Just Trump? A one-man cause? I can't think of much else that is different between now and 12 years ago, and we are far more polarized now. Also, even if one is inclined to put the blame on Trump for causing TDS and MAGA mania, he never would've become President in the first place without social media, so it all still points back to that.
[not in priority order, and loosely chronological. The seeds go back much more than 12 years]
* Roe v. Wade (the original decision; the recent overturn is just an additional increment)
* Election 2000 (Florida recount^nth)
* gerrymandered districts (politicians choose their voters)
* loss of Mainstream Media (MSM) monopoly on information and narrative
a) rise of cable (more channels), Fox and talk radio across late ‘80s and ‘90s
b) rise of the Internet: email, competing news sites, Google search, early Facebook
c) mobile devices plus full-fledged social media and algorithmic amplification
d) all of the above combined to make MSM less profitable, bleed viewers/readers, encouraging focus on partisan niches vs centrist mass appeal
- outrage sells on both sides
* relatively “conservative” Southern Democrats in office ceasing to be (and so the parties are less overlapping in ideology)
* the Dem party moved hard left on both social issues and economic issues. Became the party of elites and the poor; abandoned non-unionized white working class voters
* the GOP drifted left on social issues (save abortion), moved somewhat right on most economic issues (except spending), moved substantially right on illegal immigration
* the end of the Cold War made it easier for the left to drift leftward on not just foreign policy but also respect for the military (presidential candidates no longer need to have served in the Armed Forces to win)
- leaving politics at the waters edge re: foreign policy vanished
* the rise of Trump
- first as symptom of elites (both sides) failure on illegal immigration, Dems abandonment of the working class
- media used Trump as an excuse to become more openly partisan
- the man himself is vulgar and uses Dem tactics against the left, which they can’t stand
- Dems used Trump as reason to disparage large classes of *voters* (bitter clingers, basket of deplorables, racists/bigots) not just opposition candidates
- lawfare used against Trump, which wasn’t obvious to most in 2016-2020, but *very* obvious 2022-2024
* academia and Hollywood become openly highly leftist versus merely clear lean; combined with MSM and the masses noticed and resisted/resented
* the left pushed identity politics - woke / DEI / intersectionality / oppressor-oppressed - despite large majorities of the country being opposed - and used cancel culture on those who opposed them
- big corporations jumped in 2018-2024 after previously largely staying out of politics
* geographic self-sorting into economic and political identity groups
I’m sure I’ve left out a few. And some are indeed overlapping and mutually reinforcing.
I’d surely agree that the 3 most important bullets are the loss of the MSM monopoly, the rise of Trump (at least as much the reaction to him as the man himself), and the rise of constant social media with algorithmic amplification “optimizations”.
But to claim that the last or even the last 2 are the entire reason is to ignore huge fractions of the story.
Lol well okay, but that is a rather complicated explanation. 😊 Easier to just say "social media". FWIW, I dont think it just arise out of nowhere and caused a drastic shift, I see it more as a culmination of a long one-way descent generally caused by mass visual media, so starting in roughly the 70s which is when half of US households got a color TV, and accelerating in intensity and speed every year thereafter. And AI will be the next step and put it on warp speed, where there's no longer any relation between what is being out in people's minds during most of their waking hours, and "real life".
I can’t tell if you’re disagreeing with me (“Easier to just say ‘social media’") or actually now agreeing (most everything else you wrote), since most of what I cite and you cite occurred before “social media”, and certainly before social media became the dominant force it now is.
Social media seems to be an exhibition of our epistemic crises, rather than a significant cause.
My personal anecdotal experience on social media, is that I have yet to initiate any blocks on BlueSky (I do return block), but several dozen have initiated blocks against me.
Even though I mostly vote Democrat and consider myself a social liberal, I am a political independent who is more critical analytical than political, so I fail party purity and loyalty testing. Willful partisan blindness and excessively blaming other parties is the norm exhibited on political social media, not the exception.
I used to perceive Democrats as far more interested in reason. But all the people on BlueSky blocking me for unpleasant and contradictory facts, have done me the kindness of shattering that delusion into a million tiny bits. So there is that cheerful benefit of social media, for those who wish to see it.
one possible explanation is that social media makes us personally unhappy, and so we assume it has a similar effect on society, or we just want an excuse to ban it
Since you asked "So why are so many people convinced it did?" in your subheading but didn't answer this, I wanted to add something (and I suspect that you already know this):
1) the claims about the amazing powers of social media to change the world come from the companies themselves who aim to juice their stock market valuation, and whose message gets boosted by media, pundits and politicians. Before social media was the "wrecking ball" destroying US democracy, it was supposedly the singular tool enabling democratic revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa and the toppling of decades-old dictatorships (and by now we know how this turned out).
It's the same as for the AI companies, who promise paradise and the apocalypse, anything really that communicates "our technology is so powerful and valuable!".
2) social media makes a so convenient scapegoat that political decision makers of the last fifty years can use to deflect responsibility for the state of the world, and the resulting distrust in traditional elites.
You point out correctly, that the extreme polarization of the voters for the two legacy parties in the US is not found (to this degree) in other countries but this is, I think, a side effect of the US political system. In France, the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, all the legacy parties, as more-or-less interchangeable managers of neoliberalism, have lost a lot of trust and votes, as new parties arise.
And it's just so much easier to point to social media (and Russian interference) than admitting that past policies were wrong and changing course.
#2 is very important to understand why the social media wrecking ball idea dominates. There is a belief common among establishment and well off liberal circles that everything was just fine until very recently. The rise of social media appears as a reasonably timed caused within that time frame. Brexit and 2016 Trump other examples. It's a wilful ignorance of how the policies of reigning left parties of 1990s and 2000s have built the current reality. This is particularly necessary for those politicians who idolize those leaders and seek to continue the policies of that era.
I’d argue, however, that with the *enormous* exception of immigration - and in the U.S. in particular, illegal immigration - the establishment policies of the 1990s were actually overall quite successful.
The 2000s, by contrast, I don’t defend.
And perhaps it was somewhat different in Europe.
And again, the immigration issue is indeed a massive exception.
I.e. that for society writ large, social media is nowhere near the primary cause of our problems and divisions, in particular re: politics.
While for young people, it could well be the single biggest cause of their problems and their personal unhappiness.
I’m personally > 85% confident that DW is correct on the first point (the main thesis of this piece), but I remain very open to the idea that you are basically correct as to the second point.
Great comment. The internet can still show intelligence. Thank you.
I disagree with the 85% correctness coefficient in the same manner that I disagree with my own assessment, i.e., 98.4% of this way of looking at stuff is moronic. It's like an offshoot disease of the main disease of social media, which is still being determined ad infinitum.
I was aware of the phenomenon long before, but it all came home when I was locked up in the Wuhan quarantine in early 2020 in the Covid hysteria, before it became a world issue. Having little else to do, I ricocheted around the internet reading all I could. The pattern was some previously unknown expert came down in favor of quarantine. The next day would bring the next expert explaining how quarantines were useless. Then there was the pile on of every possible iteration of opinion vs. countervailing opinion. After a while, it would all start over again. It all lead to general confusion and nobody know WTF was going on or what to do about it.
Which is where I'm at on the "social media being the cause of all problems thesis". It is, it isn't, it's unprovable, it's proven, this academic department has irrefutable evidence it's one thing and this social scientist says....etc.,etc.,...and it provides endless opportunity for the new internet thought leaders to fill their daily requirement of column inches and the perfect go to for when they're out of editorial fuel because everyone's on it and (in general) hates it.
So, I'm comfortable with the idea of everyone being full of shit on the topic. I'm very certain I don't know for sure, and equally certain DW doesn't either.
To be clear, I didn’t say 85% correct. I said that north of 85% was my approximate confidence level that he is correct.
I totally agree that this answer, and ones like it, are unknown, uncertain and unprovable.
But that said, it doesn’t mean anything that is unknown is 50-50.
To claim or believe that (which you didn’t quite do, to be fair, but skirted the edge of) is to misunderstand probability.
Though I do agree with your claim that (most, anyway, including all who don’t show the proper epistemic humility) everyone is full of shit on this topic.
I was (kind of) making a joke by citing percentages. I have NFI on percentages. Per probabilities, my spidey sense sez the probability that SM and phones are at the root of accelerated craziness is high.
I'm an old guy. PC's didn't happen until I was a young adult. IOW, I have substantial life experience in the "before times".
It's different now. My non-scientific observations indicate it's WAY different...in a bad way.
I have always leaned towards the social media divides us camp, but for a reason not discussed in your essay. What I think social media did in the United States is put people in the same room who would have never met in real life. Before, a denizen of San Francisco would intellectually know they were different from someone in rural Arkansas, and vice versa. However, these very different types of Americans weren’t confronted with the other’s ideas and beliefs on a regular basis before social media. Social media created interactions that wouldn’t have otherwise occurred with any frequency, and then dehumanized the dialogue, collapsed discourse into a handful of characters or seconds of video, all while simultaneously pushing the most divisive content to increase user engagement. We were always divided, but we lived in our own bubbles.
In meatspace, we live in bubbles more than we used to. Due to ideological polarization, many people seldom encounter those from the other side in the neighborhood or at work, much less than they used to. Maybe this supports you thesis. If we only see the other side online, they all look like crazy narcissists instead of normal people who happen to have different political opinions.
Came to say this.
This so much. Analysis of politics on social media is often focused on the concept of people becoming convinced of things, less so on what kinds of experience people are having. I think by far the biggest impact is on people who are reading stuff they *don't* agree with and reactions against that.
I think that it would be very strange if the format of 24/7 anger, mockery, disdain, flattening and worse didn't leech out into the wider culture. All I have is anecdotes, but they're personallt compelling when you've done as much social media as I once did. That said, it's done us a service by revealing, to those of us who were open to persuasion, that our own sides are as bad as the other. I wouldn't have known (as a lifelong leftist) how blinkered my side was until I saw it for myself.
I agree with you. I just cannot conceive of how anyone could hold this "sceptical" view if he had actually spent any appreciable amount of time in these venues. I wonder if these studies are flawed bc they're looking at all social media users, rather than just the small portion of those who are into the political content. Bc most aren't. They're looking at sports stuff, or fashion stuff, or all kinds of things with zero interest in politics. Half of people also don't vote. It's the politically engaged 20% or so who lead the polarization, and who are in the social media venues hating on each other. They're also the ones that end up setting the agenda of the political parties, so it does matter.
This is my intuition, because the sceptical position seems to assume social media is a sandbox. Only this week I was discussing my real life persona experienced on the day someone met me just once, 10 years ago. I was obsessively on Twitter and talking about Twitter. I was definitely affecting people offline. And I have relationships now that have sadly cooled because I'm wary of talking to them, based on their FB posts. All anecdote, but I cannot help but think it probably scales to negative real world effects.
There's lots to like in this argument. I want to offer a slightly different take though. There's a more MacLuhanist view that see changes in media technology and media culture that then have cognitive and cultural consequences.
In this story, social media (in the sense of two-way media or something similar. Large scale email groups did the same thing 20 years before, just at a smaller scale) facilitates new ways of social engagement and social imagination. This allows some groups to self-organize and even appreciate themselves as groups in ways that they hadn't before.
It lowers the barriers to self-organization in ways that previous required more social and/or economic capital to do.
And these newly organized people aren't formed by the same social mores that were necessary to acquire the social or economic capital to organize.
So they really are the barbarians at the gates.
But this isn't breaking. This is a perfectly normal cultural change that has deep social consequences.
Thoughts?
The MacLuhan take is the one I go for. It’s very hard to say what precisely the impact of the printing press was on the wars of religion and the age of revolutions, but it seems likely that the qualitative change in the media environment was relevant somehow. No one is ever going to be able to properly separate the effects of newspapers from pamphlets from books from bibles, and we are going to be able to say whether the net political effect was good or bad. But it’s implausible that it was irrelevant. And the same thing is true with the next great waves of broadcast media (radio and television). And then the internet and social media had a very different character from many of these, enabling peer-to-peer communication and algorithmic self-organization.
I would want to be cautious about claiming any *particular* effect being due to this. But saying “we can’t prove it, so the people who say it has a particular effect are wrong” misses half the point.
With much less cause, as I have not done the research you have done, I agree with you completely that social media is not the underlying driver of any of the problems we are experiencing today, across the whole of the political spectrum. To me, a central point, if not the central point, you note is this: “Media bias is largely demand-driven, not supply-driven).”
So, social media can be a facilitator for transmitting a point of view, but it is not the creator of that view. I hope I will not be too tiresome in quoting again from Arendt, who here is also quoting from someone else, “Propaganda is not ‘the art of instilling an opinion in the masses. Actually it is the art of receiving an opinion from the masses.’”
I readily acknowledge that, in my hands, a little knowledge of what Arendt is discussing is likely a dangerous thing. That said, it struck me over and over in reading your article that people, in desperation for finding a way out of our current fix, are latching on to symptoms—with AOC’s comment appearing to me as an astonishingly extreme example of this—rather than doing the intellectual work required to get underneath the symptoms toward locating the causes (which are multifaceted and very messy).
I want to take a little bit of issue with you about the relative dysfunction of the two parties here in the US, in this respect: the Democratic Party (my party for all my adult life, and still is) is, to my mind, in a complete state of dysfunction right now, utterly unable to manage the simplest of course corrections it absolutely must take to have any chance of regaining power. To that extent, I also question whether your bullet beginning “A better explanation of this “asymmetric polarization” is a good take. Speaking as one who is among that class of over-educated liberal, urban professionals, I am astounded by how easily people of my ilk can be gulled into believing the most preposterous, science-denialist tripe. As one commenter on Substack I have found quite sound recently observed:
“It’s hard for me to tell if the Democratic Party is really doubling down on fringe trans causes or just running on fumes with them, having difficulty figuring out what to do with this rotten hot potato. It hasn’t quite dawned on many Democratic elites that this is really the motherload of wedge issues and would be the gift to Trump’s ilk that keeps on giving if a Democratic leader doesn’t step up and turn the ship around in 2028. That figure hasn’t appeared yet, as Rahm Emanuel has too much baggage, too little charisma, and too little to offer the Democratic base in other areas to get the job done. But my sense is that we’ll need to figure out who can turn the ship around soon because the writing’s on the wall that this particular set of issues will likely drag the party down for the rest of its existence if it doesn’t course-correct.”
I don't want to debate the whole topic of trans, since it's turned into the Israel/Palestine of US liberal culture. Just let me say, it's not that people are stupid. Many critics here just don't comprehend the visceral revulsion that many core Democrats have at the seething brew of bullying and hatred in right-wing ranting. Something like the above reads to them as "You must beat up on the weakest and most vulnerable, as a blood sacrifice to the right-wing hate-mongers. Punch down, down, down, to appease bigots. It's necessary to join the attacks and throw the abused under a bus, then drive the bus back and forth over the screaming victims, to make their abusers happy". Note, I'm not saying that's an accurate analysis. But I understand where it's coming from.
Thank you for weighing in. What I would note is that there is a great deal of misunderstanding that needs to be addressed. The people I know, all Democrats, who are raising issues about protecting women’s sports and medicalization of distressed children with complex presentations are thoughtful, knowledgeable, and eager to discuss how we, as Democrats, can get through this. There is, for example, the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group. The group met for three years, working through all the issues assiduously to arrive at analysis and recommendations that would be both fair and decent for all involved. They then reached out to a host of Democratic Congress members to discuss their findings, and not a single one would even meet with the group. Here’s a link to their website: https://womenssportspolicy.org/ What I have recommended (albeit with my wee small voice) is that we all contact our Democratic Congress members and urge them to meet with this group, hammer out a fair and compassionate approach, including legislative proposals, and take this issue away from the Republicans.
I would certainly agree there are many well-intentioned people involved in the issue. Similarly, I think there's a huge number of Israelis and Palestinians who don't hate anyone for religious or ethics reasons, and just want to live their lives in peace. Sadly, that doesn't neutralize structural conflicts. With a nod to the topic of the post here, I think the "weaker than you think" contention discounts the effectiveness of using social media to inflame people - as part of, not apart from - the long history of setting people against one another. The problem is that "take this issue away from the Republicans" runs into the difficulty that unless you give Republicans everything they want, and agree everyone else is wrong and should be punished, and that Republicans are put-upon victims for which they deserve grovelling apologies forever, they will continue to attack. That's the simple political logic which makes it a bad idea for any member of Congress to meet with a compromise group, because they know it's a losing calculation. It won't help them fend off attacks from the right, and they'll get grief from the left - lose-lose.
I really have no idea how to solve this. There's just a lot of "moving parts" that are opposed to one another.
I just want to clarify that my comment is not aimed toward trying to convince Republicans of anything, it is rather about how to overcome the deep divisions among Democrats so that Democrats are better positioned to win in 2026. In my own volunteer work with Democratic groups working on this most contentious of issues, I have seen and experienced some success, particularly on the state and local level, in working through differences to find common ground. One-on-one, in person conversations between Democrats and Democratic leaners with differing perspectives can be particularly fruitful to get past positioning toward mutually beneficial problem-solving. The biggest problem is to get past what divides us, as Democrats, so the conversations can begin, and quickly, so that we can all row together toward 2026. Thanks for the conversation.
I appreciate your comments about objection 6 and the quote from Scott Alexander. I guess that I am an oddball whose prior is the opposite of Alexander's or Haidt's. My intuition is that the whining about social media is cope for the declining influence of the pre-2008 neo-liberal consensus, and a superficial analysis of the social conflicts caused by the rise of the "Brahmin Left" and the "diploma divide." And the anti-social media intuition generates pro-censorship policy ideas that I consider more dangerous to democracy than social media itself.
So, I'm glad that Alexander lacks the evidence to justify his prior. THB, I am kind of surprised that he believes in the wrecking ball thesis. He wouldn't be what he is today without social media. His type of writing success just wasn't an option available to anyone in the pre-Internet days. Does he believe that his own popularity and influence (within certain circles) is a danger to American democracy?
I love your writing and contributions to the public conversation. But I think you're missing the mark here. As you note, there have been harmful, extreme socio-political movements through modern history. Social media doesn't have to be the explanation. But I think you underestimate one thing you have granted and miss a key factor that should bias us towards thinking there are broad, negative effects of SM that are hard to measure.
First, as you grant, the timing correlation of the rise of social media and populism is at least plausibly supported by features of social media we all agree on. I wouldn't claim populism = broken democracy. But decrease in institutional trust and gatekeepers, and explosion of speed and vitality of conspiracy theories feels like a pretty big subset of the factors you might imagine break democracy, or at least catalyze breaking democracy in the presence of other stressors.
Second, I think it's really hard to argue that the rise in social media hasn't had very strong negative effects on the mental health of young people, especially girls/women. I think it's blinkered to interpret that independently. While not simple, that's a wildly simpler thing to measure than "breaking democracy", and concentrated effects in a particularly vulnerable and exposed demographic (teen girls in the free for all first wave of mass social media and smartphones) make it doubly easier to identify. I find it hard to believe that there were these horrible effects on mental health of teens across the rich world but magically those similar kinds of effects had zero or near zero effects on every other demo in every other area of concern.
As in, on the one hand it's clear that social media caused a huge increase in group nastiness and bullying among teens that led to increased depression and suicide. But that manifested in adults in the socio-political realm not at all? Especially when we know there was an excellent foundation to be catalyzed in the two generation buildup of paranoid, right wing talk radio and cable TV? It beggars belief. Especially since you've already granted that it probably has some effect on the rise in populism, which seems a clear outcome from the adult version of that effect.
I think these underlying causal mechanisms supporting that prior are difficult to overwhelm with the experimental data at hand.
- Social media makes it easier to find echo chambers and catalyzes political sorting.
- It erodes chances of face-to-face interactions with people of different backgrounds.
- It encourages snarky behavior through anonymity, likes, and the lure of going viral.
- It prioritizes keeping you hooked and grabbing your attention (dunking on the "other" group is naturally the most effective way of doing this, and algorithms discover that without the need for malicious guidance).
- The absence of journalistic standards opens the way for audience capture (the emergence of demand-side bias is certainly more frictionless without institutional norms or standards of accountability).
- Reputation can be lost as quickly as its gained if you fall out of the party line (cancel culture in both sides).
I'll make some assertions. I offer no proof, but you didn't say "Prove me wrong"; you merely said "Tell me why I'm wrong."
You say "Platforms do not run different algorithms for conservatives and liberals." No, they don't, but the algorithms are not run on the same set of data. The effect is a positive feedback loop amplifying whatever the reader consumes. And that effect is not necessarily positive. Social media may not be the cause of many of today's problems, but it amplifies them. (So, yes, "Media bias is largely demand-driven, not supply-driven.")
I'm not convinced that "the Republican Party is much more dysfunctional than the Democratic Party." I don't know how to measure this, but to me they both seem terribly dysfunctional, and they both seem to be home for many "resentful, anti-establishment, low-trust, conspiracy-minded cranks." What each party considers to be "the establishment" is often different, of course, but essentially means "those we believe to be in power."
I'm not convinced that the media environment has ever been constrained by basic scientific knowledge, but the scientific establishment has certainly been badly tarnished by abandoning scientific principles in favor of politics in recent years. And neither the "right" nor the "left" seem to be much interested in scientific principles or processes, with absurdities being promoted from both ends of the political spectrum.
Professional journalistic standards have been openly abandoned by once-mainstream media institutions, and there are enough savvy consumers that this has opened the door for "independent journalism" where professional standards still apply, at least as much as they used to in the mainstream media.
Regarding the "straw man" argument, hyperbole has always been an effective rhetorical device, and I when someone makes an absurd claim I often cannot tell whether it's a deliberate lie, an actual belief, or a rhetorical device.
As you can probably tell, these are mostly quibbles rather than outright disagreement. Where I seem to actually disagree with you is on the relative dysfunction on the opposite ends of the political spectrum. I find the disingenuousness and manipulation and misinformation coming from both sides to be utterly appalling, and the more I've learned the more appalled I've become. But in that regard, social media is a tool, not a cause, and unscrupulous political actors will - and do - use whatever tools they have available to them.
One worry I have is how the use of AI and the use of social media will evolve together for the propagation of misinformation. These are both amplifying tools which are constrained by neither truth nor consequences.
Regarding: "I'm not convinced that "the Republican Party is much more dysfunctional than the Democratic Party."
Pounds table: AN ANTI-VACCINE LUNATIC IS *SECRETARY OF HEALTH*. MEASLES IS BACK.
Republican Senators could have stopped this, and they almost all went along with it! This is a level of dysfunctional which is not "Both Sides". It is simply not comparable to what some journalist messes up about, or some pandering political speech. It is an nutcase rejection of a core civilization advance.
I could argue that that is not an example of dysfunction, but is instead an example of the Republican Party coming together despite some amount of internal disagreement. When someone within the party expresses a position which is at odds with the majority of the party, it makes sense for a senator to ask how much of an effect that position will have on what is actually likely to happen, and to balance the (guess at an) answer against the question of whether making an issue of it will cause schisms within the party to widen to the extent that the party itself loses power.
You may not like the outcome, but a political calculation does not inherently signal dysfunction. Are the machinations within the Democratic Party which led to the late switch of the 2024 Democratic Presidential nomination to a highly unpopular candidate, which in turn led to loss of the election itself, any less an example of dysfunction?
Well, that's using a different meaning of "dysfunction" (maybe lack of organization) than I thought was meant (more at ability to govern with some reasonableness - note it'll never be perfect). By that definition, a murderous dictatorship is not "dysfunction", since it's maintaining strong ruling faction unity. The fact that anti-vaccine lunacy is the position of "the majority of the party" should be an unarguable condemnation of the Republican Party as beyond the pale of reason, not anything to laud for party discipline.
I feel kind of alone in my views of the Biden drop-out as a complicated event where one can make reasonable choices in a risky situation, but still have it all blow up anyway. Nobody seems to care that the White House physician kept issuing clean reports, that "bounces off". It's all about echoing right-wing accusations against institutions.
Yeah, you're right: I don't think dysfunction has much to do with executing reasonable policies, and an efficiently run dictatorship isn't necessarily dysfunctional. (I have other objections to dictatorships.)
The question of what policies are reasonable is a different one. From what I can tell the issues surrounding vaccine policy are more nuanced than mere "lunacy" and I am not convinced that the majority of the Republican Party should be painted with the "anti-vaccine" brush, but I find it difficult to see past the rhetoric from both sides. That's not really relevant to the article which triggered this discussion, though.
For what little it's worth, I do agree that the clean reports from the White House physician should not be ignored, but what count as "reasonable choices" for dealing with that situation is again subjective. From my outside perspective there was a lot of incomprehensibly bizarre stuff happening, but I have no idea what it looked like from the inside, or what choices might have been better.
“Nobody seems to care that the White House physician kept issuing clean reports, that ‘bounces off’.”
Huh? Is this your version of “Trust the Science”?
Doctors are both infallible and more importantly never lie?!?
Obviously the doctor was in on the cover-up - as his taking the 5th rather than answer questions in front of Congress strongly suggests (Yes, yes, I know it by itself doesn’t prove this…).
How much the doctor did it willingly versus being pressured by Jill and the other Biden advisers we will likely never know. Nor does it matter much at all.
I commend you for at least being willing to forthrightly face the implications. Almost everyone seems very reluctant to do so. Yes, indeed, it's my version of "Trust The Science". It seems obvious to me that we should look at the best-sourced material possible, and that's the White House physician's reports. Moreover, it's key, since if any of e.g. Biden's aides started saying privately there might be a problem with his capacity, they'd likely be told that Biden had a complete physical which gave him a clean bill of health, and you are not a doctor and haven't examined him, versus someone who both is a doctor and has examined him. And that would strike me as quite a reasonable response. Yet I've almost never seen this considered. It follows that someone who claims there was a cover-up must contend these reports were all a complete lie, that the physician was part of the (literal) conspiracy. That's not inconceivable, but it seems something most such proponents aren't willing to say (I wonder if they don't like the implications as applied to the current president who is the oldest ever elected and has a family history of Alzheimer's Disease).
We can't infer anything from his taking-the-Fifth. Nobody with any sense at all would say anything to Republicans, even if they (Republicans) weren't so obviously malicious. That's basic legal defense 001 (aka "Don't Talk To The Cops").
So you hide behind the patina of plausible deniability, basically.
Richard Nixon would be very proud…
You’re really trying to claim that Biden was fully competent to be the president the whole time? That he was mentally fit? Really?!?
You are also completely wrong about not being able to infer anything from taking the 5th. That is only true if the question is a criminal trial to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
And despite your implicit claim to the contrary, beyond a reasonable doubt is not the standard for making judgements about the political skullduggery that went on here.
The story I would tell is that America has several features that make it especially prone to polarization like having a large and diverse population, a two-party system, strong freedom of speech, etc. As such, the country started to become polarized decades ago but social media came along and accelerated the trend that would have happened anyways. How does this thesis hold up against the evidence?
Dan, have you ever actually spent time marinating in social media? Like hours every day, like most people? Just go on Twitter and scroll what's recommended, not who you follow? It's incomprehensible to me how anyone who has done so can maintain this "scepticism" of yours.
But some very non-academic points in push-back:
1. America is different bc we're a nation of crazy people. We are barely a nation, we're a giant collection of vastly different subcultures, and all descended from people who were either driven out of their home countries bc no one liked them, or imagined they'd find gold and fairy dust here, or are just straight up risk-taking and insane and think moving across the planet to a brand new empty place where no one knows who you are sounds like a great idea. You can't compare us to most places, we are simply more anti-social people with more nonsense, fairy dust, gigantic unfounded egos, and dreams that we'll all be millionaires than anywhere else. We have little to no regard for social norms or etiquette. We're cowboys and Indians and gangsters and snake oil salesmen and gold prospectors and puritans and religious fundamentalists, all mixed up together.
2. I think the burden lies on you to explain how a new technology that reveals to you on a daily, hourly basis just exactly how cruel, selfish, malicious, envious, grasping, and nasty other people really are, as soon as they have anonymity, does NOT have a negative impact on social and political stability. You can't find literally a single Insta post or YouTube video about ANYTHING...someone showing off their new woodworking project, someone giving advice on helping their infant sleep, someone showing how they walk their dog...literally anything, without there being dozens of nasty comments about how the OP is basically a horrible wrong evil stupid human who should probably die. Forget politics, it's not just that, it's EVERYTHING. We are a social species that requires manners and etiquette and many little customs and rituals to grind down the rough edges and prevent us from wanting to kill each other. Social media dissolves those, and we get to see exactly how hateful people are and exactly how much they hate us. Just the fact that it is considered perfectly normal to tell a total stranger that they are scum who deserve to die a slow death ... That happens a million times over every day. You think that doesn't impact people??
3. Any study that looks at political influence or persuasion that looks at all users is flawed, because 80% of users have zero interest in politics and could care less. It's the 20% who care who get polarized, and they're the only ones that matter. They set agendas, they vote, they raise issues or put them down.
4. Political accounts are often dedicated to doing nothing more than finding and curating the absolute worst examples of the other side, to put in the haters' faces so they can hate even harder. How is it possible for someone to spend two hours a day watching videos of the worst, most hysterical, most insane, scariest seeming people from behind enemy lines and NOT be radicalized? Honestly how?
5. What does demand driven versus supply driven have to do with anything? I don't see how it's relevant. Meth and fentanyl are also demand driven, so what?
6. Of course people have been crazy and gone through moral panics and mass hysteria up to and including slaughter in the past. What's notable now is that they are riled up acting as if it's time for pitchforks and war when everyone is literally living in the safest, most healthy, most prosperous, most convenient, most full of ease and entertainments and pleasures time in all of history. Unemployment has been incredibly low for a decade. Everyone's lives are materially better. Yet they're angry as if we've been living through the Great Depression or something. I would say one needs an alternative explanation for why people are so angry when actually their lives are pretty damn good, if you claim it's not social media.
7. I get told literally EVERY SINGLE DAY on this platform, one of the more civil and highbrow ones we have, that I'm a degenerate whore who is also frigid and a prostitute at the same time, who deserves to die alone and soon, by at least one man. And, um ... I'm just a very boring married lady in my 40s who lives in the middle of the country, is nice to almost everyone on this site, and most of what I post is like married people jokes or other humor type content. I can't even imagine what others get. You think that doesn't effect me? It certainly does. I have to try...like truly make an effort...to talk myself down from not just deciding I want all men castrated, some days. And I've spent my whole life really loving and liking men. But online, good god they are so full of bile and hatred and pure black-hearted nastiness. I just can't imagine how you think there can be a medium where people blast all the worst parts of themselves at other people, where we now just accept this thing called "trolls" as a fact of life, and NOT have that effect people's social and ultimately political way of understanding and viewing the world.
Re: your point 2, I don’t believe DW said social media doesn’t have a negative impact. He said that it is not the *main* driver of our divisions.
I don’t think anyone serious would claim it not to be a contributing factor.
Then what is? Just Trump? A one-man cause? I can't think of much else that is different between now and 12 years ago, and we are far more polarized now. Also, even if one is inclined to put the blame on Trump for causing TDS and MAGA mania, he never would've become President in the first place without social media, so it all still points back to that.
Ah, how do I divide thee? Let me count the ways:
[not in priority order, and loosely chronological. The seeds go back much more than 12 years]
* Roe v. Wade (the original decision; the recent overturn is just an additional increment)
* Election 2000 (Florida recount^nth)
* gerrymandered districts (politicians choose their voters)
* loss of Mainstream Media (MSM) monopoly on information and narrative
a) rise of cable (more channels), Fox and talk radio across late ‘80s and ‘90s
b) rise of the Internet: email, competing news sites, Google search, early Facebook
c) mobile devices plus full-fledged social media and algorithmic amplification
d) all of the above combined to make MSM less profitable, bleed viewers/readers, encouraging focus on partisan niches vs centrist mass appeal
- outrage sells on both sides
* relatively “conservative” Southern Democrats in office ceasing to be (and so the parties are less overlapping in ideology)
* the Dem party moved hard left on both social issues and economic issues. Became the party of elites and the poor; abandoned non-unionized white working class voters
* the GOP drifted left on social issues (save abortion), moved somewhat right on most economic issues (except spending), moved substantially right on illegal immigration
* the end of the Cold War made it easier for the left to drift leftward on not just foreign policy but also respect for the military (presidential candidates no longer need to have served in the Armed Forces to win)
- leaving politics at the waters edge re: foreign policy vanished
* the rise of Trump
- first as symptom of elites (both sides) failure on illegal immigration, Dems abandonment of the working class
- media used Trump as an excuse to become more openly partisan
- the man himself is vulgar and uses Dem tactics against the left, which they can’t stand
- Dems used Trump as reason to disparage large classes of *voters* (bitter clingers, basket of deplorables, racists/bigots) not just opposition candidates
- lawfare used against Trump, which wasn’t obvious to most in 2016-2020, but *very* obvious 2022-2024
* academia and Hollywood become openly highly leftist versus merely clear lean; combined with MSM and the masses noticed and resisted/resented
* the left pushed identity politics - woke / DEI / intersectionality / oppressor-oppressed - despite large majorities of the country being opposed - and used cancel culture on those who opposed them
- big corporations jumped in 2018-2024 after previously largely staying out of politics
* geographic self-sorting into economic and political identity groups
I’m sure I’ve left out a few. And some are indeed overlapping and mutually reinforcing.
I’d surely agree that the 3 most important bullets are the loss of the MSM monopoly, the rise of Trump (at least as much the reaction to him as the man himself), and the rise of constant social media with algorithmic amplification “optimizations”.
But to claim that the last or even the last 2 are the entire reason is to ignore huge fractions of the story.
See https://graboyes.substack.com/p/bicker-battle-broil-and-brawl for an in-depth look at a few of these.
Lol well okay, but that is a rather complicated explanation. 😊 Easier to just say "social media". FWIW, I dont think it just arise out of nowhere and caused a drastic shift, I see it more as a culmination of a long one-way descent generally caused by mass visual media, so starting in roughly the 70s which is when half of US households got a color TV, and accelerating in intensity and speed every year thereafter. And AI will be the next step and put it on warp speed, where there's no longer any relation between what is being out in people's minds during most of their waking hours, and "real life".
😊
I can’t tell if you’re disagreeing with me (“Easier to just say ‘social media’") or actually now agreeing (most everything else you wrote), since most of what I cite and you cite occurred before “social media”, and certainly before social media became the dominant force it now is.
Both 😉
Social media seems to be an exhibition of our epistemic crises, rather than a significant cause.
My personal anecdotal experience on social media, is that I have yet to initiate any blocks on BlueSky (I do return block), but several dozen have initiated blocks against me.
Even though I mostly vote Democrat and consider myself a social liberal, I am a political independent who is more critical analytical than political, so I fail party purity and loyalty testing. Willful partisan blindness and excessively blaming other parties is the norm exhibited on political social media, not the exception.
I used to perceive Democrats as far more interested in reason. But all the people on BlueSky blocking me for unpleasant and contradictory facts, have done me the kindness of shattering that delusion into a million tiny bits. So there is that cheerful benefit of social media, for those who wish to see it.
One could say all of the causes for diabetes and obesity are “demand driven”…
one possible explanation is that social media makes us personally unhappy, and so we assume it has a similar effect on society, or we just want an excuse to ban it
Since you asked "So why are so many people convinced it did?" in your subheading but didn't answer this, I wanted to add something (and I suspect that you already know this):
1) the claims about the amazing powers of social media to change the world come from the companies themselves who aim to juice their stock market valuation, and whose message gets boosted by media, pundits and politicians. Before social media was the "wrecking ball" destroying US democracy, it was supposedly the singular tool enabling democratic revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa and the toppling of decades-old dictatorships (and by now we know how this turned out).
It's the same as for the AI companies, who promise paradise and the apocalypse, anything really that communicates "our technology is so powerful and valuable!".
2) social media makes a so convenient scapegoat that political decision makers of the last fifty years can use to deflect responsibility for the state of the world, and the resulting distrust in traditional elites.
You point out correctly, that the extreme polarization of the voters for the two legacy parties in the US is not found (to this degree) in other countries but this is, I think, a side effect of the US political system. In France, the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, all the legacy parties, as more-or-less interchangeable managers of neoliberalism, have lost a lot of trust and votes, as new parties arise.
And it's just so much easier to point to social media (and Russian interference) than admitting that past policies were wrong and changing course.
#2 is very important to understand why the social media wrecking ball idea dominates. There is a belief common among establishment and well off liberal circles that everything was just fine until very recently. The rise of social media appears as a reasonably timed caused within that time frame. Brexit and 2016 Trump other examples. It's a wilful ignorance of how the policies of reigning left parties of 1990s and 2000s have built the current reality. This is particularly necessary for those politicians who idolize those leaders and seek to continue the policies of that era.
I mostly agree with this.
I’d argue, however, that with the *enormous* exception of immigration - and in the U.S. in particular, illegal immigration - the establishment policies of the 1990s were actually overall quite successful.
The 2000s, by contrast, I don’t defend.
And perhaps it was somewhat different in Europe.
And again, the immigration issue is indeed a massive exception.
Hi Dan, thanks for the thoughtful piece. I make a similar argument here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-024-00804-1 Maybe interesting to you?
Sure, everyone gets an opinion. It is, it isn't, please buy my book explaining why.
All the kids I talk with think it's the problem. They all hate it, and like true addicts, can't dig out from under it.
On this axis, you could in fact both be correct.
I.e. that for society writ large, social media is nowhere near the primary cause of our problems and divisions, in particular re: politics.
While for young people, it could well be the single biggest cause of their problems and their personal unhappiness.
I’m personally > 85% confident that DW is correct on the first point (the main thesis of this piece), but I remain very open to the idea that you are basically correct as to the second point.
Great comment. The internet can still show intelligence. Thank you.
I disagree with the 85% correctness coefficient in the same manner that I disagree with my own assessment, i.e., 98.4% of this way of looking at stuff is moronic. It's like an offshoot disease of the main disease of social media, which is still being determined ad infinitum.
I was aware of the phenomenon long before, but it all came home when I was locked up in the Wuhan quarantine in early 2020 in the Covid hysteria, before it became a world issue. Having little else to do, I ricocheted around the internet reading all I could. The pattern was some previously unknown expert came down in favor of quarantine. The next day would bring the next expert explaining how quarantines were useless. Then there was the pile on of every possible iteration of opinion vs. countervailing opinion. After a while, it would all start over again. It all lead to general confusion and nobody know WTF was going on or what to do about it.
Which is where I'm at on the "social media being the cause of all problems thesis". It is, it isn't, it's unprovable, it's proven, this academic department has irrefutable evidence it's one thing and this social scientist says....etc.,etc.,...and it provides endless opportunity for the new internet thought leaders to fill their daily requirement of column inches and the perfect go to for when they're out of editorial fuel because everyone's on it and (in general) hates it.
So, I'm comfortable with the idea of everyone being full of shit on the topic. I'm very certain I don't know for sure, and equally certain DW doesn't either.
Thanks again.
👍
To be clear, I didn’t say 85% correct. I said that north of 85% was my approximate confidence level that he is correct.
I totally agree that this answer, and ones like it, are unknown, uncertain and unprovable.
But that said, it doesn’t mean anything that is unknown is 50-50.
To claim or believe that (which you didn’t quite do, to be fair, but skirted the edge of) is to misunderstand probability.
Though I do agree with your claim that (most, anyway, including all who don’t show the proper epistemic humility) everyone is full of shit on this topic.
I was (kind of) making a joke by citing percentages. I have NFI on percentages. Per probabilities, my spidey sense sez the probability that SM and phones are at the root of accelerated craziness is high.
I'm an old guy. PC's didn't happen until I was a young adult. IOW, I have substantial life experience in the "before times".
It's different now. My non-scientific observations indicate it's WAY different...in a bad way.