Social media is the worst manifestation of modern-day technology. I say this as someone who used to spend nearly an hour or two a day on social media. There are obvious effects that everyone knows about, but I am not sure people grasp the gravity of the full form those effects take.
For one, there is the oft-studied negative effect on teen mental health from seeing all the cool things everyone else seems to be doing always. Additionally, all the present-day fears surrounding AI (like generating deepfake images, video and audio) are things made potent by being spread on social media. However, I do not wish to restate the conclusions of numerous studies, articles and documentaries. I wish to emphasize the impact that social media has on another sphere for people of all ages: politics.
When Bill Maher used to decry social media on his show, saying it is one of the leading causes of political polarization as well as a key factor behind the anti-democratic movements among the fringe, I took him as another old guy complaining about technology. However, from my own forays into social media as well as from reading the experiences of many others online, I realized this is something that is alarmingly accurate.
The chain of logic behind Maher’s and others’ reasoning is surprisingly simple. Social media, being run by a for-profit organization, has the goal of attracting more users and more time from existing users. To do this, it generates content it thinks will get you hooked so you maximize the time you spend looking at its content, its ads and more. For those with even slight political leaning when it comes to content, it traps you in a world of reels, posts and stories that align with your views and make you want to see more. That is where the term echo chamber comes from – the media environment that reinforces your views simply because it wants your views.
For some of you, this is exceedingly obvious, and I apologize for wasting your time. What I assumed incorrectly was since I did not fall all the way into this trap (or so I thought at the time), I assumed very few people did as well and that a social media-induced fringe Republican or Democrat was a very rare case. In reality, a massive number of Americans – on both the left and the right – have fallen into this. Although every political event of significance in the past year has increased my awareness of social media’s role in political polarization and hostility, the Israel-Gaza conflict, more than any other incident, has made it obvious to me the social media echo chamber is not a potential threat – it’s a real crisis impacting the decision-making abilities of individuals on both sides of the aisle.
Thus, I offer a solution. The first is that no matter your political affiliation, you stop using social media for your news unless it is for literal eyewitness accounts of an event. Secondly, I ask you return to print (or the electronic version of print) media – but not just any print media. If you are an extremely liberal New York Times reader, I ask you read an opinion column from a moderate conservative outlet, like the Wall Street Journal, or at least a moderate columnist within the Times, like Bret Stephens. I read Stephens’s pieces because he is smarter than me and does not perfectly align with me politically; thus, there is space for me to learn something meaningful from him. I ask the opposite from conservative consumers of news – try your hand at more moderate yet reputable outlets like the Associated Press. The path to healing our rift is learning to have a dialogue again, which requires a common reputable source of information. This dialogue is critical to the survival of our democracy.
