#readwise # Yes, Social Media Really Is Undermining Democracy  ## Metadata - Author: [[Jonathan Haidt]] - Full Title: Yes, Social Media Really Is Undermining Democracy - URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/social-media-harm-facebook-meta-response/670975/ ## Highlights The lack of consensus leaves open the possibility that social media may not be very harmful. Perhaps we’ve fallen prey to yet another moral panic about a new technology and, as with television, we’ll worry about it less after a few decades of conflicting studies. A different possibility is that social media is quite harmful but is changing too quickly for social scientists to capture its effects. The research community is built on a quasi-moral norm of skepticism: We begin by assuming the null hypothesis (in this case, that social media is *not* harmful), and we require researchers to show strong, statistically significant evidence in order to publish their findings. This takes time—a couple of years, typically, to conduct and publish a study; five or more years before review papers and meta-analyses come out; sometimes decades before scholars reach agreement. Social-media platforms, meanwhile, can change dramatically in [just a few years](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/social-media-democracy/600763/). So even if social media really did begin to [undermine democracy](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/james-madison-mob-rule/568351/) (and [institutional trust](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/) and [teen mental health](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/facebooks-dangerous-experiment-teen-girls/620767/)) in the early 2010s, we should not expect social science to “settle” the matter until the 2030s. By then, the effects of social media will be radically different, and the harms done in earlier decades may be irreversible. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt1fapdkcsqhg01y9skq68zr)) --- Meta’s response motivated me to look for additional publications to evaluate what had happened to democracies in the 2010s. [I discovered four.](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vVAtMCQnz8WVxtSNQev_e1cGmY9rnY96ecYuAj6C548/edit#heading=h.xoki8gcqv2iq) One of them [found no overall trend](https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/american-affective-polarization-in-comparative-perspective/1E3584B482D51DB25FFFB37A8044F204) in polarization, but like the study by Boxell, Gentzkow, and Shapiro, it had few data points after 2015. The other three had data through 2020, and *all three* reported substantial increases in polarization and/or declines in the number or quality of democracies around the world. One of them, a [2022 report](https://v-dem.net/media/publications/dr_2022.pdf) from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, found that **“liberal democracies peaked in 2012 with 42 countries and are now down to the lowest levels in over 25 years.” It summarized the transformations of global democracy over the past 10 years in stark terms:** > Just ten years ago the world looked very different from today. In 2011, there were more countries improving than declining on every aspect of democracy. By 2021 the world has been turned on its head: there are more countries declining than advancing on nearly all democratic aspects captured by V-Dem measures. The report also notes that **“toxic polarization”—signaled by declining “respect for counter-arguments and associated aspects of the deliberative component of democracy”—grew more severe in at least 32 countries.** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt1fmkzd80qxwczsdhwqekdm)) --- Yunus E. Orhan, [found](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13510347.2021.2008912) a global spike in democratic “backsliding” since 2008, and linked it to affective polarization, or animosity toward the other side ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt1fqy160wz88bw7wcm8kzrr)) --- the [Economist Intelligence Unit](https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/02/09/a-new-low-for-global-democracy?utm_content=article-link-1&etear=nl_today_1&utm_campaign=a.the-economist-today&utm_medium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=2/9/2022&utm_id=1045717) reported a global decline in various democratic measures starting after 2015, according to its Democracy Index ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt1fq39avat640xrcjpmwdsj)) --- **Social media sorts users into echo chambers––closed communities of like-minded people. Lack of contact with people who hold different viewpoints allows a sort of tribal groupthink to take hold, reducing the quality of everyone’s thinking and the prospects for compromise that are essential in a democratic system.** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt1fs2mkfebp56nbsgs835kw)) ^f07ipb --- Lewis-Kraus wrote in *The New Yorker*: “The upshot seemed to me to be that exactly nothing was unambiguously clear.” He is certainly right that nothing is unambiguous. But as I have learned from curating [three](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1diMvsMeRphUH7E6D1d_J7R6WbDdgnzFHDHPx9HXzR5o/edit) [such](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w-HOfseF2wF9YIpXwUUtP65-olnkPyWcgF5BiAtBEy0/edit) [documents](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vVAtMCQnz8WVxtSNQev_e1cGmY9rnY96ecYuAj6C548/edit), researchers often reach opposing conclusions because they have “operationalized” the question differently. That is, they have chosen different ways to turn an abstract question (about the prevalence of echo chambers, say) into something concrete and measurable. For example, researchers who choose to measure echo chambers by looking at the diversity of people’s news consumption typically find little evidence that they exist at all ... But **researchers who measure echo chambers by looking at social relationships and networks usually find evidence of “homophily”—that is, people tend to engage with others who are similar to themselves** --- So should we throw up our hands and say that the findings are irreconcilable? No, we should integrate them, as the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci did in a [2018 essay](https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/14/240325/how-social-media-took-us-from-tahrir-square-to-donald-trump/). Coming across contrary viewpoints on social media, she wrote, is “not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone.” Rather, she said, “it’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium … We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one.” Mere exposure to different sources of news doesn’t automatically break open echo chambers; in fact, it can reinforce them. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt1g046bk6axcqnqb77k5fp9)) --- **This fear of getting shamed, reported, doxxed, fired, or physically attacked is responsible for the self-censorship and silencing of dissent that were the main focus of my essay. When dissent within any group or institution is stifled, the group will become less perceptive, nimble, and effective over time.** Social media may not be the *primary* cause of polarization, but it is an important cause, and one we can do something about. I believe it is also the primary cause of the epidemic of structural stupidity, as I called it, that has recently afflicted many of America’s key institutions. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt1g9zhf698nfyprh4dar2e5)) --- **My essay presented a series of structural solutions that would allow us to repair some of the damage that social media has caused to our key democratic and epistemic institutions. I proposed three imperatives: (1) harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, (2) reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and (3) better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.** I believe that we should begin implementing these reforms now, even if the science is not yet “settled.” *Beyond a reasonable doubt* is the appropriate standard of evidence for reviewers guarding admission to a scientific journal, or for jurors establishing guilt in a criminal trial. It is too high a bar for questions about public health or threats to the body politic. A more appropriate standard is the one used in civil trials: the *preponderance* of evidence. Is social media *probably* damaging American democracy via at least one of the seven pathways analyzed in our [collaborative-review document](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vVAtMCQnz8WVxtSNQev_e1cGmY9rnY96ecYuAj6C548/edit), or *probably not*? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt1gd0rhfdeh2mam5wapnd3y)) --- Social media has put us all in the middle of a Roman coliseum, and many in the audience want to see conflict and blood. But once we realize that we are the gladiators—tricked into combat so that we might generate “content,” “engagement,” and revenue—we can refuse to fight. We can be more understanding toward our fellow citizens, seeing that we are all being driven mad by companies that use largely the same set of psychological tricks. We can forswear public conflict and use social media to serve our own purposes, which for most people will mean more private communication and fewer public performances. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gt1gmgzcryz1j00j98md9z5f))