I'm not sure the point that we've somehow gotten worse or gone to a darker point of human nature, is necessarily true. I think history will have to be the judge of that. I don't see us killing each-other in conflicts or letting each-other starve on a greater scale than before, rather the opposite tends to be true if we look at data.

What seems to be true is that people feel more politically divided, but again this is an open question. Do people feel more divided or are they more politically divided? We see from polls that bypass political identification, that people tend to agree far more than if we use identifiers.

It's also worth asking what is the price of political unity. We can use an historic example: On May 4th, 1970, the national guard shot and killed 4 students and wounded nine at Kent State University. In a Gallup poll in the immediate aftermath, 58 percent of respondents blamed the students, 11 percent blamed the National Guard and 31 percent expressed no opinion. I certainly see broad agreement, but in an historic context I have to question that agreement. I'm fairly certain I would have preferred a big political divide if it was the only alternative.

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Now, I'm certainly critical of social media. To handle mass communications between billions with proprietary algorithms that no-one really fully understands (including the people that make them), completely kill privacy as a concept, letting the entire thing be controlled by very few entities and let us all be artificially thrown into social media bubbles outside of our control - now that is something I can certainly agree is a bad idea.

Yeah, I sort of quoted the only section I had disagreement with, and it probably was just more how it was worded. But I think more credence should be given to the notion that online discussions between liberals and conservatives have become so polarized because conservatives have radicalized themselves (partly online) to where it with be a huge mistake for liberals not to be polarized with conservatives.

I want to touch on this for a moment.

We can't pursue this goal unless we delineate between unreasonable and reasonable group-versus-group animosity. There are those who act as if the problem is too much animosity. I would argue that the problem is that people (conservatives especially) have decided to apply animosity to all differences and not to save it for the things that matter the most where it might be justified.

Many of the people who want to lower the temperature and reduce polarization really care most about producing the semblance of order even if it means papering over concerns about truth and justice.

If we have one side that says that the status quo is rotten and we need a more expansive and responsive government and another side that says that the status quo is rotten and government is the cause of our problems, where is the ideological crossing that supposed bridge builders can erect a connection? If one side says abortion is murder and the other side says abortion should always be legal, where is the middle ground?

If we lived in the mid-19th century, would you talk about building bridges to prevent an impending Civil War?

The United States is, in theory, a democracy. Elections are won, in part, by maximizing turnout. Emotional arguments can drive turnout. It can be argued that political parties that are interested in winning elections will maximize their electoral success by fanning emotions and getting people to vote by encouraging them to both vote for one's own party but also to vote against the other party. Polarization is good for politics and one side is a lot better at using social media to polarize their side.

Was it wrong for Williams Jennings Bryan to inflame passions against the gold standard with the line: "you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold"? America has had its share of demagogues. Maybe social media has amplified them and allowed them to reach millions instantaneously, but the receptiveness of the American mindset was always there.

I guess I would say that I see there being reasonable polarization (recognizing the differences between groups; working for things you believe in; directing ire/criticism where it is mainly deserved, e.g. at political figures) and then there's unreasonable polarization (hating people just for being in a political group; acting as if all members in a group are the same or as bad as the worst members; using inaccurate, polarizing language related to that).

If I had to sum up the takeaways from stuff I've been working on it's to be more accurate in our language. E.g., don't use language like "All x are x" and avoid inaccurate insults/categorizations. Not only is doing all that more accurate; it's also more persuasive. Group polarization dynamics are largely related to feelings of groups being insulted so the more people are aware of those dynamics, the better off we'll be.

None of this should take away or restrain people's passions, beliefs, or ability to work towards their goals. I don't feel they've restrained mine.

You might like my last post. As you say: it's about distinguishing between unreasonable and reasonable polarization. The reasonable part is recognizing where the differences lie and working towards trying to change things. The unreasonable part is where people are just hating groups as monoliths and don't recognize that there is actually a lot of overlap in actual issues; for one example, 3 out of 10 people in Democrat party and Republican party don't agree with their side on abortion, and there is lot of evidence that ideologically speaking we aren't that divided but are mainly group-animosity-divided. (some info on this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...ally-polarized and https://www.npr.org/2015/11/27/45738...ou-might-think, but there's a lot more). Obviously, unfortunately, the more group animosity goes up, the more willing each group is to take drastic measures (like refusing to acknowledge elections, or being increasingly willing to listen to and support obvious bad actors) to defeat the other side. No easy answers. To be clear; i'm not advocating accepting these things or not fighting against them, but am trying to understand root causes.

Oh yeah. I am def not arguing internet/social media is the main factor here. We've been becoming increasingly polarized (in terms of animosity and political elite/leader polarization) for decades. Nobody who's studied this stuff thinks internet is only or biggest factor. It's more that many people believe them to be amplifiers, and experts/researchers disagree about how big a factor they are.

Я не могу отделаться от мысли, что в связи с этим обсуждением в комнате находится довольно большой слон.

KS: Engrish onry preez.

KS2: "I cannot help but think that there is a rather large elephant in the room in connection with this discussion."

I definitely agree that you shouldn't judge entire groups by isolated examples of the worst. But I think it's fair to judge all republicans and conservatives by Trump. And that's pretty dam bad given all the stuff he says. He only has a twitter account because of special protections.

One reason that we are more polarized is that the political parties have become sorted into ideological buckets. We used to have liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. Now we don't even have moderate Republicans and Blue Dogs are a dying breed. This began happening before we had Facebook and Twitter.

The modern party system was created by the slow migration of conservative, white Southerners to the Republican Party due to their distaste for Democrats embracing the civil rights movement. We are where we are because of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. More conservative white Northerners have been slow to follow suit. The Reagan revolution was a jolt, but Trump may have been the thing to push white working class Northerners firmly into the Republican camp.

Social media may be more of a catalyst than an amplifier, speeding us up in the direction we were already headed. It's kind of like a COVID divorce. Two people, forced to spend more time with each other due to lockdowns, discover just how incompatible they really are. Social media is forced engagement with the other side. Even if you are not on a device 24/7, it's percolating in your head. You find out a lot quicker that you don't like the other person. Eventually, you decide to start pruning your interactions to people who you don't hate and who don't make your brain hurt through cognitive dissonance.

The end result is two factions with irreconcilable differences where it is as hard to find a compromise as it was in the 1850s. And we saw how that turned out.

I would argue that the way to end polarization is to identify the biggest rifts around which the polarization has developed and to deliver one side a clear and convincing victory. Only then will people be able to move on and pay attention to other issues.

No.

While I might agree with you that social media (or at least parts of it (like the algorythm as it is now)) are partially at fault, clearly there are far more dominating factors at work.

"What if social media, no matter the form it takes, is a society-fracturing tool simply because it amplifies human nature and, as you might have noticed, we humans have some dark qualities."

Okay, explain this to me:
Why would the dark qualities amplify stronger than the good qualities?

Would you agree that anger doesnt work the same way on every person?
As in, you spilled beer on someone a) guy laughs it off / b) guy punches you in the face.

Just look at the polls you did, how come there are 30% saying it happens a lot and 30% saying it happens almost never? Would that poll be 50/10 in the future? Was it 1/59 in the beginning? If so, why did the good not amplify as strong as the bad?

If not, you already got proof that SM cant be the deciding factor.

Ill give you an example from myself. Im one of those crazy "covid isnt as bad as its made out to be, the measurements taken by the government are inappropiate and seem to be designed to fit certain interrest more than saving lifes" guys.

Within my circle of friends, Im not the only one, but certainly the strongest proponent of said perspective. Im still cool with all my friends. If I go into one of the protest groups however I find a lot of people who claim to have lost friends, marriages divorced, families broken into pieces over this issue.

So what is the difference between those people and people like me? It cant simply be social media, because we use it both.

Id like to entertain the idea that the issue on social-disruption in the 21th century is quite a lot more complex/abstract than simply social media.

I really don't think so. Social Media removes the veil of ignorance people have had with how people think. It's always existed, in all it's peculiarities (good and bad, and there is way more good than bad). People were just not aware.

Social media can be a dangerous vehicle.
Lets say you were both given a brandnew porsche 911 and you managed to bring it back in one piece, that doesnt mean the other one is able to do so.

I hope people read the piece, because a lot of the responses have points that are addressed in there.

In short:

a) Nobody knowledgeable thinks internet/social media is the primary cause; polarization and breakdown of society are common patterns regardless of technology. There could just be an amplifying effect, and experts disagree on how big that effect might be (and it could be that the amplifying effect is enough to reach abnormal amounts of conflict that wouldn't otherwise be reached).
b) There are plenty of indirect paths through which social media can directly affect a small % of population but still result in big effects. One researcher, Jaime Settle (author of book Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America), shows how one such pathway is exposing the political/cultural views of our distant contacts/acquaintances to us, in ways that we would in past never have known, and due to this we put them in buckets and judge them more, and even the apolitical "I don't want to talk politics" people amongst us (most of us actually) start to become more politically aware, mainly in the sense of wanting to spend more time w/ in-group members and having more disdain for opposite political party members. In short, she showed how people who use Facebook dislike people in opposite political party more. And another pathway is social media being covered as news (esp in showcasing worst views of other political side, ramping up division).

Piece again: https://apokerplayer.medium.com/how-...s-c8070e0847d4

I would say they probably don't always overcome the good qualities. But if you needed just one reason why they might: it's because we are distant from each other online, and treat each other worse. And I could point to other reasons, which are in my piece, but probably they mostly stem from that simple fact.

What's up with all the people commenting without reading the article?

Hi Everyone:

I read about half this paper and stopped. In my opinion, it's silly and this can easily be seen from history. Here are two quick examples:

1. The election of 1860. This election was completely undisputed yet the result of Abraham Lincoln being elected caused the country to split apart and the hatred towards Lincoln and the Republicans has never been duplicated, and there was no social media at the time although the newspapers of the day might have been some sort of equivalent. The main issue that caused the hatred was the idea of "slave labor versus free labor" with the Republicans saying that slavery was morally wrong and the Southern Democrats, who had split from the Northern Democrats defending their "peculiar institution." (For those interested, the terms I have put in quotes were the terms that were used at that time.)

Then you have the election of 1876. Here the Democrat Samuel Tilden received more votes but in the states of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina each party produced election results showing that their candidate had won. To resolve the mess, a compromise was worked out where where the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes would become President and the period known today as Reconstruction would end with all federal troops being removed from the South. (For those who don't know, this meant that the South had now won the second civil war and the problems related to Jim Crow would soon follow.) And again, there was no social media at the time.

If you look at history, there are many examples like this and for those who want to research more, you may want to start with Andrew Jackson and the "Corrupt Bargain" of 1824.

Best wishes,
Mason

That has nothing to do with his point, which is whether social media amplifies political animosity. Not whether there would be no political animosity without social media, which is of course trivially false. That's sort of a pre logic 101 concept.

If you enjoyed the piece: on my podcast I've been focused on political polarization and animosity and the psychology behind that. Last few episodes have been on that but if I had to recommend one, it'd be this one, as a polarization/democracy expert talks about how these patterns play out in countries. In America, we tend to think of ourselves as unique, or special, but I think having knowledge of how the process we're going through is similar to many other similar scenarios that have played out elsewhere, is helpful.

Episode: https://www.readingpokertells.video/...ennifer-mccoy/

I also at end do my small part to ramp down unreasonable hatred and anger of Trump supporters (because I have a mainly liberal audience). One of my reasons for doing that was seeing how much unreasonable, inaccurate things my own liberal acquaintances have said on social media, and seeing directly how that ramps up hatred and polarization and worst-case scenarios.

Really interesting piece, I enjoyed it a lot and it sums up the literature very nicely on a lot of related topics.

One thing that I think is interesting is that one of the main things that has changed with the advent of social media is that we have so much more data available to do studies on things like this which really affects our ability to make comparisons to the pre-Internet age - I'm aware that it wasn't the goal of your article to say that things were worse now. I often see the media stating the the Internet has completely changed discourse and polarisation for the worse. It probably has, but we don't have any good base rates and there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that may appear to confirm the narrative.

Another thing that underlies a lot of the points that you made is the role of algorithms on social media. You do a great job of layout out our psychological predispositions to homogeneous groups, but it's also likely that content algorithms play a role here too - although the literature tends to suggest it's less important than users' own choices. Part of the reason that I like talking about this topic is that it allows me to rudely talk about my own research on the topic, which looks at how far-right content interacts with these algorithms (https://rusi.org/publication/other-p...algorithms-and).

Anyway, I will stop rambling. Great job.

So are you Joe Whitaker? If so, awesome job. I'm pretty sure I've read about that study (or possibly a similar study, not sure).

Yeah, algorithms and specific product features are def big deal. I specifically set out to examine the inherent aspects as it seems like many people know about the potential negative effects of the algorithms these days, through docs like Social Dilemma and such. I agree they are big potential amplifiers. I cut out a part in my piece about how sometimes the tech experts/workers who talk about these things have an incentive to focus on product features (algorithms, buttons, format/layout) because they are pitching their own expertise, and trying to get hired for various jobs to fix the problems. They have less of an incentive to say "There might be inherent aspects of this that are hard to fix and that transcend product features/algorithms" because that will tend to weaken their ability to pitch themselves.

I keep watching these social media docs, or reading pieces, expecting to find someone saying "Hey, this might be inherently divisive for these reasons" but I keep being disappointed, which was one reason I worked on this.

Good work and nice to meet you.

There is a documentary on Netflix right now about this subject

https://www.thesocialdilemma.com/

Yes that's me

I found the social dilemma an interesting watch. Most of the info wasn't new, but (like a lot of netflix docs) presented it in a really one-sided way.

I research the more extreme ends of these things, and the social media platforms say that they do take evasive action with content that they deem problematic but not bad enough to ban (Facebook and YouTube do this). However, they also repeatedly state that they don't want to get dragged into matters of mainstream politics and be seen as an arbiter of truth.

But why would you treat someone worse just because they are far away?
Is this an ultimate truth about human nature?
I dont feel it is true to me. I can hurt people close to me just as much and even more than people being distant.

On the other hand, I get to know and befriend people around the globe, because of it. Despite different cultures, religions, etc...

To me, all those issues we face right now, are "personality issues". Greed, Arrogance, Pressumptions, Fear.... In combination with the idea that unity means you and I have to be the same or at least on the same page. And that unity is some sort of end goal.

In short:
We dont allow others their freedom to be, because of our personality issues.

Thats the reason for extreme views and political animosity. No matter what forms of community or communication you have.

Of course it has. The premise is: We are divided as never before -> Could it be because Social Media amplifies...

Masons answer is: "No, because historically we used to be much more divided than what we experience now."

Compare today to say Europe in the 1930s.
Wouldnt you agree that there were far more extreme views and political animosity?

Did OP say "We are divided as never before"? I thought the article was simply exploring how social media amplifies existing political rifts.

No, he didnt. But it doesnt take away from the argument that we were much more extreme in our political diversity back in the day.

So, pointing to a new technology is kind of odd. Its like claiming the reason we became less extreme after WW2 is because of the TV as it was the stand-out technology at that time.