In April, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published an essay. atlantic In it, he tried to explain, as the title of the piece says, “why American life over the past decade has been so singularly stupid.” Anyone familiar with Mr. Heidt’s work over the past five years could have predicted his answer: social media. Hite acknowledged that political polarization and sectarian conflict long predate the platform’s rise, and that there are many other factors at play, but Facebook’s “Likes” ” button, the share button, Twitter’s retweet feature, and other viral tools are irreversibly algorithmically corroded. Public life. He determined that the major historical break can be traced with some precision to the period from 2010 to 2014, when these features became widely available on mobile phones.
“What changed in the 2010s?” Haidt asked the audience, reminding the audience that a former Twitter developer once compared the retweet button to offering a 4-year-old a loaded weapon. . “Mean tweets don’t kill anyone. It’s an attempt to publicly shame or punish someone while touting one’s virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalty. More like an arrow than a bullet.” And yet, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter distributed about 1 billion dart guns around the world. While the right thrives on conspiracy theories and misinformation, the left has become punitive. And unfortunately, they were the brains that informed, guided, and entertained most of the country. ” Haidt’s common metaphor for radical fragmentation is the story of the Tower of Babel. The rise of social media has “insidiously dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that held together large and diverse secular democracies.”
Needless to say, these are common concerns. Haidt’s main concern is that social media use makes us especially vulnerable to confirmation bias, or the tendency to cling to evidence that confirms our prior beliefs. Haidt acknowledges that the existing literature on the effects of social media is vast and complex, and that there is something in it for everyone. On January 6, 2021, I was on the phone with Chris Vail, a sociologist at Duke University and author of the recent book “Breaking Through the Prism of Social Media,” when Vail urged me to turn on the TV. Two weeks later, Mr. Hite sent a letter to Mr. Vail expressing his dissatisfaction with the way Facebook officials consistently cited the same small number of studies to defend themselves. He suggested that the two of you collaborate to create a comprehensive literature review and share it with other researchers as a Google Doc. (Mr. Haidt had experimented with such a model before.) Mr. Bale was cautious. he said to me: “What I said to him was, ‘Well, I don’t know if this study supports your theory.’ And he said, ‘Why don’t we take a look?’ ” ”
Bail stressed that he is not a “platform basher.” He continued, “My main take in my book is that yes, platforms play a role, but we have to do what they can do, which is no matter who is at the helm of these companies. “This is a huge exaggeration of how much things can change.” And we vastly underestimate the human element: user motivation. He found Haidt’s idea of Google Docs appealing in that it created a kind of living document that existed “somewhere between academia and archives.” Mr. Hite was eager for a forum to test his ideas. “Around 2014, when things were going crazy on campus and elsewhere, I decided that if I was going to write about what had changed in the universe, I had better be confident again that I was right,” he says. . “You can’t just stop reading your own emotions and biased literature. We all suffer from confirmation bias, but the only cure is other people who don’t share your confirmation bias. ”
Haidt and Beil, along with research assistants, spent several weeks writing the document last year, and invited contributions from about two dozen scholars in November. Haidt told me about the difficulties of social scientific methodology: “Is social media destroying democracy, yes or no?” That’s not a good question. I can’t answer that question.so what can Do you ask and answer? As this document took on a life of its own, a manageable rubric emerged. Does social media make people angrier or more polarized? Does it create a political echo chamber? Does it increase the likelihood of violence? Will foreign governments increase political dysfunction in the United States and other democracies? Haidt continued, “It’s only after you break it down into many questions that you can answer that you see where the complexity lies.”
Mr. Hite had a feeling that, all things considered, social media was actually pretty bad. He was disappointed, but not surprised, that Facebook’s response to his article was based on the same three studies that Facebook has repeated for years. “This is something we often see with breakfast cereals,” he said, noting that cereal companies “may say, ‘Did you know we have 25 percent more riboflavin than the big brands?'” did. They point out features in the evidence that favor them, thereby distracting from the overall fact that the cereal tastes bad and is not healthy. ”
After Haidt’s paper was published, a Google Doc, “Social Media and Political Dysfunction: A Collaborative Review,” was made available to the public. The comments piled up, and a new section was added at the end to include various of Haidt’s Twitter threads and his Substack essays that appeared in response to his interpretation of the evidence. Some of his colleagues and kibitzers agreed with Hite. But while others may have shared his basic intuition, something In our social media experience, we have used the same data set to reach less conclusive or even slightly contradictory conclusions. Even after the initial wave of reactions to Haidt’s article faded into social media memory, this document remained an active artifact insofar as it captured the context of social media debate.
Near the end of their introduction to this collaborative project, the authors caution that “readers should not simply add up the number of studies on each side and declare one side the winner.” There is. The document, which spans more than 150 pages, includes studies for and against each question, with some showing mixed results. According to one paper, “Political expression on social media and online forums was found to (a) reinforce expressors’ partisan thought processes and (b) harden their existing political preferences. ”, but another paper using data collected during the 2016 election found that “media usage and attitudes remained relatively stable over the election period. The results also showed that Facebook news use was associated with a slow depolarization spiral that occurred over time. Furthermore, those who used Facebook for news We found that people were more likely to view news with both pro and anti attitudes. Our results show that exposure to anti attitudes increases over time, which in turn leads to depolarization. If these results seem contradictory, a perplexed reader may want to point out that political polarization on social media is not uniform, given the large differences across platforms. “Our findings show that this phenomenon cannot be conceptualized as a distinct phenomenon.”
Interested in echo chambers? “Our results show that the aggregation of users in the homosexual cluster dominates online interactions on Facebook and Twitter.” This seems convincing. It seems, but as another team says, “We find no evidence to support a strong characterization of an ‘echo chamber.’ The majority of people’s news sources are mutually exclusive and come from both extremes. ” By the end of the file, the vaguely patronizing top-line recommendations for simple sums start to make more sense. It turns out that documents created as a bulwark against confirmation bias can easily function as a kind of generator that confirms anyone’s assumptions. The only sensible response seemed to be to simply throw your hands in the air.
As I spoke to some of the researchers whose work was included, I noticed a combination of widespread and visceral anxiety about the current situation: the vileness of harassment and trolling. Platform opacity. Of course, there is a widespread hunch that social media is evil in many ways, and a contrasting sense that it may not be. devastatingly It’s bad in some specific ways that many of us take for granted to be true. This was no mere contrarianism, and there was no sign of gleeful myth-busting. The problem was important enough to be solved correctly. When I told Bale that nothing seemed clear-cut after all, he suggested that there was at least some solid ground. He sounded less apocalyptic than Haidt.
“A lot of the stories out there are wrong,” he told me. “Political echo chambers are greatly exaggerated. He’s probably 3 to 5 percent of the people who are properly housed in echo chambers.” Echo chambers as hotboxes for confirmation bias, democracy It is counterproductive for However, research shows that most of us are actually exposed to a wider range of opinions on social media than in real life, and that social networks (in the original usage of the term) are rarely heterogeneous . (Mr. Haidt told me that this is a problem that changed his mind in Google Docs. Echo has become convinced that Chambers is probably not as widespread a problem as he once imagined. ) Social media’s echo chamber effects can obscure relevant counterfactuals. Conservatives may abandon Twitter just to watch more Fox News. “When you step out of the echo chamber, you’re supposed to be more moderate, but you might end up being more extreme,” Vail said. Research is incomplete and ongoing, so it is difficult to say anything with absolute certainty on this subject. But this was partly Mr. Bale’s argument. This means we shouldn’t be too sure about the specific effects of social media.