The Danger of "Unfollow"
Being the communications person for an organization committed to transforming relationships through in-person dialogue, I have—at best—a fraught relationship with social media. On the one hand, it’s part of my job, one that I mostly enjoy. It’s one of many ways I engage with our community, and share stories of the organization’s values, interests, and impact. It’s the manifestation of Essential Partners’ public conversations, engaging both those who care about us already and those who don’t know about our work yet, but should. Social media is a tool for connection and conversation – pillars of our work.
But who hasn’t read about, or personally railed against, the polarizing effects of social media? So often we hear lamentations of how our worlds are becoming increasingly connected and partisan, as we curate our connections and information according to our preferences and beliefs. In the age of “unfollow,” it follows, we rarely have to confront that with which we disagree, and we certainly can’t be bothered to engage across ideological differences. This is the infamous “echo chamber” of the internet, according to researchers from the Laboratory of Computational Social Science: “Users tend to aggregate in communities of interest, which causes reinforcement and fosters confirmation bias, segregation, and polarization. This comes at the expense of the quality of the information and leads to proliferation of biased narratives.”
Given my role and EP’s ethos, you can see why I’ve been eager to investigate whether widely held beliefs about polarization are caused, or at least deepened by, social media. No surprise: studies show that where there’s smoke, there’s [insert fire emoji]. According to a recent study, “researchers found that people’s networks of friends and the stories they see are in fact skewed toward their ideological preferences.” The “filter bubble” has been confirmed by numerous outlets, including the National Bureau of Economics, which concluded that as far as political communication on social networks goes, “we find that groups are disproportionately exposed to like-minded information.”
But the story isn’t that simple. A scholar from NYU has claimed that social media in fact reduces mass political polarization, due in large part to the fact that our social networks reflect not only close friends who likely share our values, but also acquaintances whose views are more likely to diversify the political portfolio of our feed. According to the New York Times, “His analysis also shows that those American users who are embedded in even modestly diverse networks tend to follow a less ideologically homogeneous group of people over time.”
The first study cited here concluded that, on average, 23% of a user’s friends take opposing political positions. Almost one third of the information or news articles users encounter deviate significantly from their ideology. It’s not ideal, and it’s not necessarily engagement, but it’s also not a filter-happy world devoid of differences. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Stanford agreed that apocalyptic fears about the Internet’s echo chambers are overblown, though the trend is real. Finally, research continues to explore important nuances beyond the “good witch or a bad witch?” verdict on whether social media erodes our civil society and our democracy.
For one thing, social media doesn’t exist in a vacuum and can’t be solely vilified for reflecting broader trends in our consumption of media biased towards our own political leanings.
Rather, social media becomes the platform through which we advertise—and argue about—that which we know to be “true” (and the politics of information could be several more blogs), particularly on Twitter. Referencing research by the Pew Internet Project, Journalist Research notes, “political discussions on Twitter often show “polarized crowd” characteristics, whereby a liberal and conservative cluster are talking past one another on the same subject, largely relying on different information sources.” The echo chambers, moreover, are not evenly divided. Studies show that liberals are less likely than conservatives to be connected to, or to engage with, those expressing differing political views.
In conclusion, it’s complicated. Polarization and social media are intertwined, but the relationship remains complex and we still have a lot to learn. For my part, I will try to hold true to the values of Essential Partners and not fear or vilify that which I do not fully know. Of course, none of us really know the future of the Internet. The only thing we know is that it’s a reflection of us, of humanity, and as much as we can bemoan the unsettling trends in which it is implicated, we can’t do so without acknowledging our own complicity in these patterns. So we need to acknowledge both the intricacy of social media and our own agency in navigating an undeniably increasingly polarized world. Social media doesn’t happen to us, after all. Where will the conversation go next? You’ll have to follow us on Facebook to find out ;)