Seriously! Go do it now! These sites are built with the goal of pushing people into groups that are always angry at each other. Angry polarized groups spend more time on the site and are easier to sell things to.
The only thing ignoring this trash will do is make you a happier, more functional person.
People in social media spend several hours per day following politics but almost nobody of them is engaged in any real political work. They are engaging with politics to satisfy our own emotional needs and intellectual curiosities. That’s political hobbyism/consumerism.
It's not different from being sports fan. Making noise from the couch but not having no effect in the game and annoying people who don't follow.
They have no serious purpose. They are just wasting energy.
It’s possible to (mostly) avoid political stuff on those websites if one wants to, instead of refusing to use the sites completely. Just as an example, I rarely visit r/all, but I do visit specific subreddits that I’m subscribed to like r/privacy, r/pihole, and r/thinkpad. On Facebook, I never browse my newsfeed, but I am a member of a group for my apartment complex in the Stockholm area which lists local events and people selling stuff or giving away stuff in the community.
My point is that is that it’s possible to filter out a lot of the political garbage on those sites if one wishes, but it does appear to be getting more difficult since political stuff is appearing more and more often in places that I personally wouldn’t expect.
Social media might need to be controlled in the same way cigarettes are. At the end of the day, both are drug dealers. One of them sells nicotine, the other sells dopamine.
Not sure what that would look like though. Cigarettes have scary labels and enforced age requirements. Maybe social media would have to change the way likes/upvotes/etc work to be less polarizing, in addition to an age limit enforcement?
Maybe we should do the opposite. Maybe we should all create thousands of Facebook accounts, with randomized profiles that promote random articles and AI-generated comments. Then that program runs on your machine whenever you're not using it. It would be opt-in, like SETI@Home. It could bring the whole world together in a massive community effort, with the feel-good focus of destroying-Facebook togetherness. I would call it Baseball-and-Apple-Pie@Home. Then we all sit back and enjoy the ensuing utopia of a clean, Facebook-free planet.
"Rivals are alien, unlikable, contemptible" could be a description of feelings in Northern Ireland during its worst days, long before the advent of social media. Poisonous rhetoric definitely made things worse, but the real damage was done by things like gerrymandering, unequal access to jobs and housing, and repressive one-sided policing.
From a distance, it looks like some of those same problems are contributing to the USA's polarisation. Fixing them will be much more important, and much harder, than just tuning out obnoxious media.
The double problem is, we are isolated, often after various moves due to our studies and first years of work, otherwise because we diverge politically from other ex- or people in our family who, themselves, got polarized the other way. So deleting social networks would be a good thing, but we depend on them for out last human interactions on weekends and evenings. Even worse during confinement.
I mean, HN is a "single feed" which avoids the belligerent group dynamics... but culture bleeds.
The narrative dichotomies and other elements of this belligerence dynamic (I think it's more belligerence than polarisation, btw) exist here and other social media that isn't explicitly structured for it like twitter, reddit or fb. Is massive, many-2-many communication a lost cause?
America had this issue before these sites came up.
Ignoring this will make a single individual better, but that will only leave you back at square one - which is being at the mercy of the America news media environment.
For an individual this may be the right call, for the scope and scale of the issue being discussed in this article, it doesn’t seem like it.
Just deleting social media is not a solution. Divisive otherisum is an attack on the social sensibilities of the the last few decades and a lot of it is being promoted by bots. A better solution is to find ways to disrupt the bots creating or amplifying the hate.
Why poison the well that opened up global communication and brought us closer together? Why promote anti-globalism and distrust in journalism while disrupting the lines of communication? Are we being primed for war? genocide? mass-depopulation? Whatever it is, the last thing people should do is comply.
If it wasn’t for Twitter I would have literally no clue about the machinations of the intelligence agencies to undermine the president or the corrupt activities of the Biden family. Unfortunately the mainstream media outlets choose not to report or pursue a lot of stuff, and have an alarming habit of citing dubious statements from “the intelligence community” as legitimate evidence that resolves the matter.
On some level yes. But the unfortunate side is that it's seeping into the overall culture and previously-benign and relatively apolitical institutions. That makes it dangerous to "ignore" and hope it goes away due to us all deciding to be reasonable and ignore the hateful and prominent voices that use social-media as a megaphone.
Some institutions being actively soaked in identity politics and other divisive elements:
Peoples willingness to line up behind banners, flags and slogans without bothering to look at what those politicians are actually selling baffles me.
I think if people from both sides were willing to ignore that and just sit down and talk about what kind of county they want to live in they would find they have a lot more in common than they think. I think this is what the article is proposing, and I think I agree with it.
Are people willing to line up, or are they being pressured to line up?
In many cases, a person's principles are clear from what they say and do. That being said, a refusal to align one's self with a movement is often construed as supporting the other side. There are many reasons for refusing to align: a preference for independent thought, a realization that ideological movements change, an understanding that one's own principles shift (while labels often stick), or simply not buying into some fundamental points. None of that seems to matter when issues are polarized.
I think I'm starting to realize why sport was pushed so hard until the 00s. It is complete nonsense that you can get your tribalism out on without impacting any part of your life. Imagine how much better the world would be if people checked game scores instead of tweets.
There is no reasonable discussion to be had with people that deny science, deny inclusiveness, promote racism, accept white supremacy, and refuse to condemn violence against groups they don't like.
My wife wrote a paper about this phenomenon. This happens in specific policy contexts as well as generally.
In political science, the phenomenon is called the “devil shift”, coined by Sabatier. Similarly, there is also the “angel shift”: you see people who agree with you as having more virtuous motivations.
Ironically, a lot of the world has seen the USA do this to everyone else for a while too. Too a lesser degree to their anglophone friends of course but the rest of the world is alien and unlikable all the same (with just as little arguments as you see in the political divide).
I suppose one could argue that the isolationism/tribalism has simply expanded inwards as 'the rest of the world' has already been put in the 'other people/cultures' box and only internal boxing up of each other remains.
I doubt the phenomenon has anything to do with the US in the ROW.
Here in NL, a NATO member, it has been primarily the 'left' which has been painting groups with different opinions as 'nazis' 'fascists' etc. Vegans describing other people as murderers.
I blame this culture for our last political murder [0] which already happened in 2002.
This phenomenon is not new, I think it has to do with the dissolution of the USSR and with it, the ultimate defeat of the original ideals of the 'left'.
Yes, the problem is obviously media and social media stoking up tribalism and rage.
No, the problem will not solve itself by simply telling the public to think more critically.
These media and social media companies are incentivized by engagement metrics - which becomes money through ads - to destroy society via enraging their user against one another.
The algorithms that measure engagement and then feed it are the tools of our destruction.
This is not intentional on their behalf but an emergent result of what they've optimize for.
It's something that seems to be happening throughout the west - not just America.
This monster is probably our biggest existential threat today. The question is how do we stop it?
The article goes into specifics, but the general premise is as old as humanity. The subtitle: "The new political polarization casts rivals as alien, unlikable and morally contemptible"
This is tribalism at its core. It's baked into us for evolutionary reasons that helped us survive, but is now a detriment.
Put on a "Make America Great Again" hat and walk through downtown Chicago, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, or Cambridge before or after election day 2016 (or 2020). Now, put on a "I'm With Her" or "Biden/Harris 2020" shirt and walk through Provo, Fort Worth, or Pensacola before or after election day. In which scenario are you more like to be yelled at and/or physically attacked?
I agree, we are all human after all. But that's becoming more and more difficult. The divide between the left and the right is no longer revolving around ideology, politics, regulation, laws, etc. It's now become a matter of "life and death", "racism" and "violence" for a large chunk of the Left (and to some extent more and more from the Right too if I'm being honest). The slogans that are emerging are being sponged by the individuals on the ground, and that is starting to make reasonable non-political discussion next to impossible.
I.e. You can no longer mention in-passing that you support certain parties/politicians/political-beliefs.
It's hard because so much has become politicized. The dominant item in many people's lives right now is the coronavirus either directly or indirectly, which unfortunately has also become political.
Same topic, list of authors match, recently published, near match on title. I'm pretty sure this is the paper referenced. For the love of the FSM, why can't people use links?
Skim reading this paper, it appears complimentary to other reports. Will read in full shortly.
--
Polarization isn't just one thing. It's the result of everything mushed together.
Ezra Klein's Why We Are Polarized is a terrific summary, synthesis of the research. Connects so many dots. Physical sorting (urbanization) promotes polarization, faceted identities are now super identities, nationalization of media begat the nationalization of our politics, the massive political reorg fallout from LBJ's Great Society ending the Dixiecrat's strangle hold on southern states (aka Nixon's Southern Strategy), and many more.
Klein doesn't much touch on social media in this book. Some of his podcasts episodes are relevant. Two underreported factoids popped out for me, First, how the landscape changed from blogging to social media. Second is the elephant in the room about the algorithms and how most critics are guilty of conflating speech with signal boosting.
(I have my own thoughts about social media, shared piecemeal thru my comment history. No thesis or narrative yet, sorry.)
Whatever the evil of social media today, eliminating it outright (not gonna happen) would only mitigate some of the toxicity and definitely won't unwind polarization.
Disengaging from social media or encouraging others to disengage on it's face appears to be the well-meaning advice of someone genuinely concerned with their own mental health and the mental health of others. For many this is precisely the correct course of action.
But, the vocal minority and ideologues aren't going to disengage. If all those who recognize illusion refuse to retain territory in the cultural and political dialog then the social media landscape would only be populated by the uninitiated and those who seek to initiate them into echo chambers. Those who have discernment enough to be frustrated by the hypocrisies and bias on social media are precisely the people who can de-escalate and bring more balance, reason and rationality to it.
The problem is then that the moderate voices are drowned out, censored, or out-right abused off the platforms (if not by actual people, but by droves of carefully coordinated bots). That leads to a larger discussion of the role of these platforms in societal discourse (or as the town square) and their woefully inadequate protections of free speech and privacy.
This is just an escalation of the "groupthink" pervasive throughout the more progressive circles. Every 100 years or so it seems to explode into a full civil unrest/conflict or war.
IMHO it indicates that we, as a species, are built/evolved to exist in small tribes and cannot cope with large societies or crowds.
Headline: we're so polarized! How awful wrings hands
Body: Republicans are bad Republicans are bad Republicans are bad Republicans are bad Republicans are bad Republicans are bad
I don't even have a problem with a certain amount of contempt for Republicans, or at least their politicians. It's just, if you pretend to be concerned about polarization in the abstract, you might try harder to pretend to be concerned about the ways in which both sides contribute to it. If you only know about the specific ways in which conservatives or Republicans are bad, or "more bad", you're unable to overcome your partisanship in a search for the whole truth.
If you want to learn about how the left contributes to polarization, you can start by having a look at Matt Taibbi's or Jesse Singal's Substack.
For some fresh breath and broader perspective, much of post war western Europe was extremely polarised between religious and non-religiuous (liberals, but especially socialists).
- Near where I work, there's a tiny village. Until recently, there were two competing music bands: the "mice" and the "rats". One group was socialists, the others catholics. By 2010, both were largely composed of octogenarians and dying. But don't think they'd ever play one note together!
- After WWII, my grandfather, being very poor and having been in the resistance, had a right to financial assistance. He never claimed it because his wife was catholic and the resistance group he participated in was socialist. Claiming his benefits would have been social suicide.
- My mother's aunt was a catholic nun, and one of the nicest and most welcoming people, widely respectd by all in the village were she lived. Once, she went to the funeral of a local farmer, a socialist. Her going to that funeral was quite out of the ordinary already, to put it mildly. On her return, she said: "He was a socialist, but a very good and decent man."
> A 2018 study had people who were partisan get exposed to some information on the other side. So if you’re Republican, you get to see what Hillary Clinton is saying, or if you’re a Democrat, you’re exposed to what Donald Trump is saying. And that actually made it worse.
The messenger matters just as much as the message. People on both sides carry strong Bayesian priors associated with Trump and Clinton, as well as with most major news outlets now, so they’re predisposed to assume words coming from messengers of “the other side” are inherently untrustable or malicious.
A more interesting study would be to expose partisans to identical content (an argument for something wonky, like trade policy or entitlement reform) through venues that otherwise look like their ideological stomping grounds, and watch how quickly people from both sides would agree.
Another part of the problem is that many of the current polarizing topics (gun control and abortion come to mind) are rooted in fundamental moral differences that don’t allow for rational discussion of the middle ground. Either the government can take guns away or it can’t. Either people can terminate a pregnancy or they can’t. Slippery slope arguments dominate these conversations and make people afraid to give any ground.
This is actually why I see promise for an AI tool like GPT-3 (or -6 or -7, more like) in politics. Prompt it with content from both sides and see how it answers debate questions. Maybe it would just learn how to give political non-answers. Maybe it would just lead to the politicization of AI, which currently enjoys healthy distrust from both sides. Or maybe people find that they’re more comfortable trusting a machine than a human from the other side.
Polarization means the increased tendency to see the worst of the “other side.” But how can we honestly talk about the assymetry of today’s polarization without the analysis being accused of being political? After all, “Nazis are bad” is hardly a poltical statement.
According to the article, this phenomenon is most obviously manifested in the humorous expression “own the libs”, and not, say, by shrieking scaremongering about fascism and comparing the other side to the Nazis.
The interesting thing is that the claims about fascism at least have the possibility of being true while "owning the libs" betrays its own disingenuous purpose of not even trying to make a point other than winning against the other team.
Well yes, there's a wide gulf between voicing concerns about conduct and rhetoric, and being combative simply for the joy of watching your opponent suffer.
[+] [-] swiley|5 years ago|reply
Seriously! Go do it now! These sites are built with the goal of pushing people into groups that are always angry at each other. Angry polarized groups spend more time on the site and are easier to sell things to.
The only thing ignoring this trash will do is make you a happier, more functional person.
[+] [-] nabla9|5 years ago|reply
It's not different from being sports fan. Making noise from the couch but not having no effect in the game and annoying people who don't follow.
They have no serious purpose. They are just wasting energy.
[+] [-] navidfarhadi|5 years ago|reply
My point is that is that it’s possible to filter out a lot of the political garbage on those sites if one wishes, but it does appear to be getting more difficult since political stuff is appearing more and more often in places that I personally wouldn’t expect.
[+] [-] bogwog|5 years ago|reply
Not sure what that would look like though. Cigarettes have scary labels and enforced age requirements. Maybe social media would have to change the way likes/upvotes/etc work to be less polarizing, in addition to an age limit enforcement?
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Lendal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ploika|5 years ago|reply
From a distance, it looks like some of those same problems are contributing to the USA's polarisation. Fixing them will be much more important, and much harder, than just tuning out obnoxious media.
[+] [-] cblconfederate|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laurent92|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netcan|5 years ago|reply
I mean, HN is a "single feed" which avoids the belligerent group dynamics... but culture bleeds.
The narrative dichotomies and other elements of this belligerence dynamic (I think it's more belligerence than polarisation, btw) exist here and other social media that isn't explicitly structured for it like twitter, reddit or fb. Is massive, many-2-many communication a lost cause?
[+] [-] intended|5 years ago|reply
Ignoring this will make a single individual better, but that will only leave you back at square one - which is being at the mercy of the America news media environment.
For an individual this may be the right call, for the scope and scale of the issue being discussed in this article, it doesn’t seem like it.
[+] [-] agumonkey|5 years ago|reply
Now I still suggest people to reduce online activities as much as possible. It's probably a long term neurological disease.
[+] [-] tomohawk|5 years ago|reply
How does civil society survive if we're just a collection of tribal groups pursuing divided interests and throwing rocks at each other?
[+] [-] mc32|5 years ago|reply
Traditional Mainstream media take sides and present one side as orthodox and the other as heterodox.
Google is guilty of soft censorship (either deranks, or with autocomplete refuses to autocomplete search phrases that are contrarian to orthodoxy).
[+] [-] golergka|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ecocentrik|5 years ago|reply
Why poison the well that opened up global communication and brought us closer together? Why promote anti-globalism and distrust in journalism while disrupting the lines of communication? Are we being primed for war? genocide? mass-depopulation? Whatever it is, the last thing people should do is comply.
[+] [-] Tycho|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zo1|5 years ago|reply
Some institutions being actively soaked in identity politics and other divisive elements:
Higher education
Lower Education
United Nations
Local government bodies
Charity Organizations
Sports
[+] [-] mnd999|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] II2II|5 years ago|reply
In many cases, a person's principles are clear from what they say and do. That being said, a refusal to align one's self with a movement is often construed as supporting the other side. There are many reasons for refusing to align: a preference for independent thought, a realization that ideological movements change, an understanding that one's own principles shift (while labels often stick), or simply not buying into some fundamental points. None of that seems to matter when issues are polarized.
[+] [-] konjin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cozuya|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zackkatz|5 years ago|reply
In political science, the phenomenon is called the “devil shift”, coined by Sabatier. Similarly, there is also the “angel shift”: you see people who agree with you as having more virtuous motivations.
My wife, Dr. Juniper Katz, wrote about these shifts in the fracking context: https://www.academia.edu/37275520/The_Space_Between_Demoniza...
[+] [-] oneplane|5 years ago|reply
I suppose one could argue that the isolationism/tribalism has simply expanded inwards as 'the rest of the world' has already been put in the 'other people/cultures' box and only internal boxing up of each other remains.
[+] [-] the-dude|5 years ago|reply
Here in NL, a NATO member, it has been primarily the 'left' which has been painting groups with different opinions as 'nazis' 'fascists' etc. Vegans describing other people as murderers.
I blame this culture for our last political murder [0] which already happened in 2002.
This phenomenon is not new, I think it has to do with the dissolution of the USSR and with it, the ultimate defeat of the original ideals of the 'left'.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pim_Fortuyn
[+] [-] throwaway13337|5 years ago|reply
No, the problem will not solve itself by simply telling the public to think more critically.
These media and social media companies are incentivized by engagement metrics - which becomes money through ads - to destroy society via enraging their user against one another.
The algorithms that measure engagement and then feed it are the tools of our destruction.
This is not intentional on their behalf but an emergent result of what they've optimize for.
It's something that seems to be happening throughout the west - not just America.
This monster is probably our biggest existential threat today. The question is how do we stop it?
[+] [-] the__alchemist|5 years ago|reply
This is tribalism at its core. It's baked into us for evolutionary reasons that helped us survive, but is now a detriment.
[+] [-] TMWNN|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] im3w1l|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bogwog|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zo1|5 years ago|reply
I.e. You can no longer mention in-passing that you support certain parties/politicians/political-beliefs.
[+] [-] matwood|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] specialist|5 years ago|reply
Political Sectarianism: A Dangerous Cocktail of Othering, Aversion, and Moralization
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/political-sectarianism.pdf
Same topic, list of authors match, recently published, near match on title. I'm pretty sure this is the paper referenced. For the love of the FSM, why can't people use links?
Skim reading this paper, it appears complimentary to other reports. Will read in full shortly.
--
Polarization isn't just one thing. It's the result of everything mushed together.
Ezra Klein's Why We Are Polarized is a terrific summary, synthesis of the research. Connects so many dots. Physical sorting (urbanization) promotes polarization, faceted identities are now super identities, nationalization of media begat the nationalization of our politics, the massive political reorg fallout from LBJ's Great Society ending the Dixiecrat's strangle hold on southern states (aka Nixon's Southern Strategy), and many more.
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Were-Polarized-Ezra-Klein/dp/1476...
--
Klein doesn't much touch on social media in this book. Some of his podcasts episodes are relevant. Two underreported factoids popped out for me, First, how the landscape changed from blogging to social media. Second is the elephant in the room about the algorithms and how most critics are guilty of conflating speech with signal boosting.
(I have my own thoughts about social media, shared piecemeal thru my comment history. No thesis or narrative yet, sorry.)
Whatever the evil of social media today, eliminating it outright (not gonna happen) would only mitigate some of the toxicity and definitely won't unwind polarization.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] meekmind|5 years ago|reply
But, the vocal minority and ideologues aren't going to disengage. If all those who recognize illusion refuse to retain territory in the cultural and political dialog then the social media landscape would only be populated by the uninitiated and those who seek to initiate them into echo chambers. Those who have discernment enough to be frustrated by the hypocrisies and bias on social media are precisely the people who can de-escalate and bring more balance, reason and rationality to it.
The problem is then that the moderate voices are drowned out, censored, or out-right abused off the platforms (if not by actual people, but by droves of carefully coordinated bots). That leads to a larger discussion of the role of these platforms in societal discourse (or as the town square) and their woefully inadequate protections of free speech and privacy.
[+] [-] lazyjones|5 years ago|reply
IMHO it indicates that we, as a species, are built/evolved to exist in small tribes and cannot cope with large societies or crowds.
[+] [-] civilized|5 years ago|reply
Body: Republicans are bad Republicans are bad Republicans are bad Republicans are bad Republicans are bad Republicans are bad
I don't even have a problem with a certain amount of contempt for Republicans, or at least their politicians. It's just, if you pretend to be concerned about polarization in the abstract, you might try harder to pretend to be concerned about the ways in which both sides contribute to it. If you only know about the specific ways in which conservatives or Republicans are bad, or "more bad", you're unable to overcome your partisanship in a search for the whole truth.
If you want to learn about how the left contributes to polarization, you can start by having a look at Matt Taibbi's or Jesse Singal's Substack.
[+] [-] markvdb|5 years ago|reply
You may want to watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Camillo_and_Peppone#Films as an accessible example, but everyone from Western Europe speaking to people who were adults between 1940 and 1960 will dig up countless stories.
Here's some of mine:
- Near where I work, there's a tiny village. Until recently, there were two competing music bands: the "mice" and the "rats". One group was socialists, the others catholics. By 2010, both were largely composed of octogenarians and dying. But don't think they'd ever play one note together!
- After WWII, my grandfather, being very poor and having been in the resistance, had a right to financial assistance. He never claimed it because his wife was catholic and the resistance group he participated in was socialist. Claiming his benefits would have been social suicide.
- My mother's aunt was a catholic nun, and one of the nicest and most welcoming people, widely respectd by all in the village were she lived. Once, she went to the funeral of a local farmer, a socialist. Her going to that funeral was quite out of the ordinary already, to put it mildly. On her return, she said: "He was a socialist, but a very good and decent man."
[+] [-] plaidfuji|5 years ago|reply
The messenger matters just as much as the message. People on both sides carry strong Bayesian priors associated with Trump and Clinton, as well as with most major news outlets now, so they’re predisposed to assume words coming from messengers of “the other side” are inherently untrustable or malicious.
A more interesting study would be to expose partisans to identical content (an argument for something wonky, like trade policy or entitlement reform) through venues that otherwise look like their ideological stomping grounds, and watch how quickly people from both sides would agree.
Another part of the problem is that many of the current polarizing topics (gun control and abortion come to mind) are rooted in fundamental moral differences that don’t allow for rational discussion of the middle ground. Either the government can take guns away or it can’t. Either people can terminate a pregnancy or they can’t. Slippery slope arguments dominate these conversations and make people afraid to give any ground.
This is actually why I see promise for an AI tool like GPT-3 (or -6 or -7, more like) in politics. Prompt it with content from both sides and see how it answers debate questions. Maybe it would just learn how to give political non-answers. Maybe it would just lead to the politicization of AI, which currently enjoys healthy distrust from both sides. Or maybe people find that they’re more comfortable trusting a machine than a human from the other side.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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