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.
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.
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 say 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
I’d have liked to see a bit more hard data, of the kind that John Burns-Murdoch deploys so well in the FT. In one of his articles (18/1/25) he shows that the proportion of time spent alone by 18-24-year-old men went from about 40% in 2010 to 60% by 2022. I believe that data on depression also show a rise starting around 2010 -though I may be wrong. Of course these changes don,t demonstrate that social media was responsible, but do justify a search for changes that happened in that timeframe which might be responsible. Growth in use of cellphones and social media seems plausible, but this idea should be rejected if and when some alternative cause has been identified.
. “Third, the very fact that America’s most acute challenges are concentrated on the political right”, and “the Republican party is more dysfunctional than the right” is where you lost me and at least half your potential readers.
There continue to be many premises throughout that put me off. It’s hilarious for instance, that the big issue is “right wing populism “ and not the large illiberal arm clamping down on right wing populism. Look at Germany and the UK. I do think he is dismissive of algorithms siloing people into their information holes. I hope someone with more time than me will go through it critically piece by piece.
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.
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.
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 say 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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?
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.
One could say all of the causes for diabetes and obesity are “demand driven”…
I’d have liked to see a bit more hard data, of the kind that John Burns-Murdoch deploys so well in the FT. In one of his articles (18/1/25) he shows that the proportion of time spent alone by 18-24-year-old men went from about 40% in 2010 to 60% by 2022. I believe that data on depression also show a rise starting around 2010 -though I may be wrong. Of course these changes don,t demonstrate that social media was responsible, but do justify a search for changes that happened in that timeframe which might be responsible. Growth in use of cellphones and social media seems plausible, but this idea should be rejected if and when some alternative cause has been identified.
. “Third, the very fact that America’s most acute challenges are concentrated on the political right”, and “the Republican party is more dysfunctional than the right” is where you lost me and at least half your potential readers.
Doesn't take much to lose you then.
There's a lot more than that in this piece.
There continue to be many premises throughout that put me off. It’s hilarious for instance, that the big issue is “right wing populism “ and not the large illiberal arm clamping down on right wing populism. Look at Germany and the UK. I do think he is dismissive of algorithms siloing people into their information holes. I hope someone with more time than me will go through it critically piece by piece.