"Facebook"
"I think social media"
"What is the secret behind this social media movement?"
"On social media"
"To what extent are Facebook and Twitter to blame?"
"Facebook"
"Social media"
"The president's latest controversial tweet"
"The way social media has reshaped the news cycle"
"All about social media social media"
"Social media"
"The problem of social media"
"I started Facebook I run it"
"Our social media feeds"
On January 10th, 2017 then
President Obama gave his farewell address in which he reflected on his
years in office and took time to specifically discuss social media,
echo chambers, and the dangers they pose.
For too many of us, it's become safer to
retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods or on college campuses
or places of worship or especially our social media feeds. Surrounded by people
who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge
our assumptions. And the rise of naked partisanship, increasing economic and
regional stratification, the splintering of our media into a channel for every taste.
All this makes this great sorting seem natural even inevitable. And increasingly
we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information,
whether it's true or not that fits our opinions.
Obama's last point is particularly relevant. Social media's design and the way we use it
proliferate echo chambers and the ensuing fragmentation is a divisive and
pernicious influence on good democratic politics in a multicultural society.
Despite its centrality in politics and the potential dangers it poses, most of us
are largely unaware of how social media actually structures and affects our
political engagement and democracy on the whole.
But how is this different from what came before? Well, social media is the modern incarnation of what
German sociologist Jurgen Habermas calls the public sphere.
The public sphere is a broadly conceived of space where people come together to discuss issues
of public or societal importance. Habermas argues that public spheres first coalesced
in spaces such as coffee shop salons and public squares but came to be
restructured and dominated by the mass media. Now mass media, especially in
relation to news, can be traced first to newspapers which spread through Europe
in the 17th century, but our modern conception of mass media really took off
with cinema in the early 1900's. This was directly linked to the birth of mass
news media through the inclusion of newsreels at most movie broadcasts up
through the 50's. Radio news broadcasting, popularized in 20's, brought mass news
media into people's homes, and this expanded with TV news broadcasting in
the 40's. What connects all these mass media forms and what is different about
social media is a generalized target audience.
You see, with a limited number of radio stations and TV channels,
the high cost to start up a broadcasting company, and legal codes such as the now-defunct equal
time rule requiring broadcasts to give equal time to opposing political
candidates, meant that mass media was exactly that: for the masses
However, TV deregulation the 80's followed by the advent of the internet and the 90's
paved the way for much broader pool of mass news media. Now, people are able
more than every before, to pick the news media that most appeals to them and it's
become increasingly easy to self-segregate into partisan echo chambers.
So we find ourselves in the modern social media landscape.
So given more choice, why exactly did echo chambers become so widespread?
Here we turn to the field of political psychology. It has been found that people have a strong tendency
to connect and bond with those similar to them. This tendency is dampened if people
live in an environment that regularly exposes them to lots of different types
of people, but it's heightened if people have a high degree of control over what
they see and who they interact with. Similarly, people like seeing things that
align with or reinforce what they believe, and they dislike seeing things
that challenge their beliefs - a phenomenon known as confirmation bias.
These two tendencies converge on social media, where people have a high degree of
control over what they see and platform designers have a stated goal of showing
people things they like - that is, things they agree with.
Facebook is the most prominent example of this. Its algorithm, whose designers claim neutrality, aggressively
filters content by compiling information on your preferences and
filling your newsfeed with things are predisposed to liking and that will
connect you to others with similar interests and views. Adam Mosseri, VP of
product development at Facebook, said this at a conference:
"The most important input into what you see in your news feed is who you decide the friend and what
publishers you've decided to follow.
This is so you will enjoy using Facebook,
so you will spend more time on Facebook, so at the end of the day Facebook will make
more money off ad revenue. While Facebook is connective on a scale incomparable in
history, the proliferation of echo chambers is directly tied to the way the
platform shows similar people similar content. These echo chambers and their
adverse effects are at the heart of social media and democracy because
Facebook, and social media in general, are perhaps the largest centers of emergent
and ambient political engagement. According to a 2016 Pew Research poll,
62% of U.S. adults get their news from social media and up to 62% of U.S.
social media users post about politics. Facebook is not some isolated part of our lives.
As Tim Highfield writes in his book Social Media and Everyday Politics,
"Social media are rooted in wider social political and technological context and
norms the offline in the online are closely interlinked and impact upon one
another. For this reason, delineating between the two is rather redundant."
Thus, simply living in echo chambers, online or off, causes a phenomenon known as
group polarization, whereby the members of a homogeneous political group tend to
slowly shift their views in the direction of the more extreme members.
When echo chambers are widespread, people's views slowly shift in more
extreme directions, further from the center and from each other,
increasing political polarization on the whole. Echo chambers do not simply
reinforce someone's pre-existing beliefs, but actually radicalize people.
This point is so key because it means we often do not form our views in rational
or measured ways. Rather, our personal and political beliefs and values come about
and change based on the beliefs and values of those around us and what we're
repeatedly exposed to. Political campaigns are aware of this and play off
of echo chambers and group polarization and influence voters. It's why political
ads and fake news have a noticeable aggregate effect. Facebook markets itself
to political campaigns based on their proven effectiveness in getting
out voters and influencing opinion, as seen with this page on their business
site advertising their services in the reelection campaign of Pennsylvania
Senator Pat Toomey
One study has shown that Facebook's messaging directly results in hundreds
of thousands of additional voters turning out for elections. Regarding fake
news on Facebook, some argue that its effective was negligible:
"There's nothing new about fake news."
And while it's unlikely that fake news single-handedly
got Trump elected, the important point is that fake news can and did influence
people's opinions. Fake news is a direct result of echo chambers because of the
decreased likelihood of encountering anything that counteracts the fake news'
assertions and the documented difficulty people have in telling the
difference between fake news and real news. This wouldn't be as troubling if fake news
hadn't spread far and wide, however according to a Stanford University study,
fake news articles in their databases have 38 million Facebook shares and all
the top fake news articles were heavily conservative. Fake news is able to spread
far and wide because they can move through echo chambers without
significant ideological or factual counters. Fake news conspiracies gain
more and more adherents through processes of information exchange known
as cascades, in which a certain supposed fact or point of view becomes widespread
simply because so many people seem to believe it.
Thus in echo chambers perception precipitates reality. The concept of
cascades help explain how false beliefs can become widespread and also how once
fringe political figures like Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders can become
mainstream. Many people end up supporting these political figures because, in their
echo chambers, it seems like everyone does. At this point it needs mentioning
that Facebook and social media did not themselves cause the increasing trend of
political polarization in America, the resurgence of white supremacy, or even the rise of Donald Trump.
"I doubt I'd be here if it weren't social media, to be honest with you."
At least, not on their own. Political polarization has
been worsening in America for over a half a century now. Furthermore, these
tendencies are not hard and fast laws, simply tendencies. That said, Facebook and
its structure of fragmentation has amplified polarization and played a part
in a modern political landscape because of the unprecedented ease of
self-segregation into partisan echo chambers and the way Facebook themselves outright
encourages this through their algorithm.
Political scientist Jody Dean argues in her book The Communist Horizon that the ultimate problem with social
is that we do not own these platforms.
"So the problem of social media is the
problem of capitalism: private property and ownership. Communication under
communicative capitalism is a primary means of production but it doesn't
belong to us. Our basic communicative acts, our affects and feelings, hopes and
ideas, to the extent that we express them electronically, belong to another."
"Whereas industrial capitalism exploited labor, the industry of workers, communicative
capitalism adds in the exploitation of communication. Our very efforts to engage,
respond, connect, and critique, in other words, it adds in the exploitation of the
essential media of our sociality."
Facebook commodifies our interpersonal discourse by turning into content. Every post we make, every photo we upload, every
article we share, is all kind of content for others to consume and thus increase
facebook's ad revenue. She goes further, criticizing any
potential for subversive uses of these platforms, writing that "[By]
enthusiastically participating in social media [...] we build the trap that captures us."
And this is true insofar as we uncritically perpetuate echo chambers.
But Dean doesn't allow for any beneficial side to social media.
The flowering of social justice movements online has proven their benefit. The
Women's March was largely organized online and mobilized millions in protest.
the #MeToo movement has spread through social media, connecting survivors of
sexual assault and harassment the world over, helping them break through the
isolation, and start a movement of solidarity demanding change.
Yes, Facebook and Twitter have profited off these movements, but that doesn't
diminish the tangible good they have achieved and the marginalized voices
they have raised up. As Highfield writes, "A single tweet might not change policy
but spread widely as part of a growing groundswell of protests and a dissent,
these factors might bring about change. 'Awareness' is not some minor irrelevant
benefit of social media; if more people are aware and conscious of these
problems then a greater drive to do something about the might result."
Yet the question remains: why has Facebook been able to amass such prominence in our
political process with so little backlash?
I believe this relates to differing views on sovereignty in our democracy.
Many argue that in America sovereignty - or political power - resides not with
citizens, but with consumers. Granted these two groups overlap, but the
difference is where societal value is placed.
America has explicitly and implicitly valued consumers from the foundation of
this country when only land-owning white males could vote. In the modern-day, consumer
sovereignty manifests in a widespread belief that people should be able to
spend their money as they choose. On social media , few question the
assumption that everyone made self-segregate and echo chambers because it's
their right as consumers to conduct themselves as they please.
"Welcome to The Bubble. Coming in January 2017, The Bubble is a planned community of like-minded
free thinkers - and no one else."
While this unlimited choice is a kind of freedom - one rooted in consumer sovereignty - it's worth considering an
alternative: the freedom of education and belief formation. As we have seen with
the way echo chambers influence opinion, people's core beliefs are not formed in
a vacuum. Preferences and beliefs are product of existing institutions and
practices. And our existing institutions, such as echo chambers, deprive people of
the exposure to competing ideas and viewpoints.
"Go to a bar and engage with a wide array of diverse viewpoints!"
"Yes" "Yes"
"Exactly" "Totally" "Right"
Growing up and living in a society where echo chambers are the norm
denies people the opportunity to free and informed belief formation.
And this deprivation of opportunity is a deprivation of freedom.
So what a future with fewer, or even no, echo chambers look like? Well first,
intergroup discourse and exposure to politically varied people and viewpoints
increases shared experiences among a citizenry, especially across political lines.
Echo chambers, in addition to causing polarization, radicalization, and
disinformation, also fundamentally reduce our ability to empathize with each other
due to a lack of shared experiences. In his book #Republic, legal scholar
Cass Sunstein describes shared experiences as a kind of social glue
necessary for a functioning democracy. Shared experiences, he writes, help make it
possible for diverse people to believe - to know - that they live in the same
culture and to view each other as fellow citizens with shared hopes, goals, and
concerns. Without a sense of fellow citizenship, how can elected leaders in a
democracy by the people, for the people, govern with any real legitimacy?
And with increased exposure to competing viewpoints, comes increased tolerance for
the people who hold those competing viewpoints, and thus a greater
willingness to extend civil liberties even to groups whose viewpoints you
disagree with. This kind of increased tolerance of viewpoint has been
instrumental across history from the Civil Rights Movement to marriage equality.
It is easy to look at the modern political situation, of our deeply
divided country, and believe it was brought on by forces beyond our control.
As Sunstein writes, "Sometimes we give an aura of inevitability to social
developments, with a thought that deep cultural forces have led to (for instance)
an increase in smoking, protesting, or a candidate's success, when in fact social
influences have led to an outcome that could easily have been avoided."
This is eminently true of the way social media has failed to connect us across
political lines and allowed dangerous radical movements to prosper. In this,
social media poses a continuing danger to the health of our very democracy. If we
cannot come together as fellow citizens, polarization will only increase
resulting in further tribalism and an inability to empathize with those around us.
But by better understanding what has brought us to this point we can try
to envision different ways of being, different ways of engaging politically
and relating to each other. And I'll admit I don't have the answer as to what
a radically different social media ecosystem would look like, but together,
I believe we can change the system and change the way we relate to one another,
online and off. We can imagine a system that doesn't fetishize unlimited
choice and homogeneous communities. We can and we must break through the echo
chamber design of social media and our own tendencies to self-segregate if we
want our democracy to continue and to one day work for all of us, not just some of us.
Thanks for watching everyone. Special thanks to Professor Bob Rehak and
Professor John Blanchar at Swarthmore College for aiding with the
research and to the entire Swarthmore Film and Media Studies department and the
2018 capstone class. Couldn't have done this without you. I put all my sources in
the doobly-doo and if you want to know more, I put some video and book
recommendations down there as well. Have a good one.
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