A few weeks ago, Instagram - which is owned and operated by Meta, the parent company of Facebook - launched its much anticipated and highly publicized platform, Threads, which was designed as a competitor to Twitter, which has begun to lose its popularity in recent weeks. As a follower of all things related to media of any type, I joined Threads and am actually amazed at how quickly its popularity has grown. It does, of course, have a few warnings attached. But which social media does not face that problem? Tik Tok is being banned in some states, over fear of "spying". The biggest disappointment with Twitter has been its tendency to deactivate accounts at random and threats of having to pay for the service. With Threads, the threat comes from the policy that deleting your account will automatically delete your Instagram account.
In April 2022, The Atlantic published an essay by Jonathan Haidt titled "Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid." In the piece, Haidt - a social psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business and the co-author of a book called The Coddling of the American Mind - argued that social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have constructed a modern-day tower of Babel. The societal chaos that these kinds of services have unleashed, Haidt wrote, have "dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together." (The arguments made in the piece were similar to an earlier Atlantic essay, by Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell, about the "dark psychology" of social networks, which, they argue, have created a world in which "networks of partisans co-create worldviews that can become more and more extreme, disinformation campaigns flourish [and] violent ideologies lure recruits.")
Haidt's essay was the latest in a long line of research papers and articles on the ills of social media, and pushes the idea that, through their recommendation and targeting algorithms, services such as Facebook and Twitter have fractured, polarized, and enraged Americans. Concepts such as the "filter bubble," the "echo chamber," and the idea that social networks can "radicalize" otherwise normal users - by turning them into right-wing conspiracy theorists, for instance - have become commonplace. "Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly," when services such as Facebook and Twitter became widespread, Haidt argued in his most recent essay, "We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past. The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking."
As familiar as some of Haidt's arguments about social media were, his essay did introduce something relatively new to the field. After some criticism of his conclusions, and some of the research he relied on for his piece, Haidt and Chris Bail - a professor of sociology and public policy at Duke University, where he directs the Polarization Lab - made public a collaborative Google document they had created called “Social Media and Political Dysfunction: A Collaborative Review.” The idea behind it, Haidt and Bail explained in a preface, was to collect research that might help to shed light on whether social media is "a major contributor to the rise of political dysfunction seen in the USA and some other democracies."
Taken as a whole, what Haidt and Bail's document suggests is that there is a lot less scientific consensus on the positive or negative impacts of social media than many people might think. In a section of the document concerning the question of whether social media makes people more polarized, for example, 11 studies suggest the answer is yes, and 14 studies either suggest it is no or were inconclusive. In a section about whether social media creates echo chambers, 10 studies suggest the answer is yes, and 25 suggest that the answer is no or were inconclusive. One overview of research into the existence of echo chambers and filter bubbles on social media in Europe notes that "studies of news use on social media have failed to find evidence of echo chambers and/or filter bubbles [and] some studies even find evidence that it increases the likelihood of exposure to opposing views."
As a New Yorker piece by Gideon Lewis-Kraus points out, Haidt and Bail's document suggests that, when it comes to social media, "there’s a general sense that it’s bad for society - which may be right. But studies offer surprisingly few easy answers." Haidt told the magazine he liked the idea of collecting research in a Google document even if it did not support his thesis, saying, "I decided that if I was going to be writing about this, I’d better be confident I’m right. I can’t just go off my feelings and my readings of the biased literature. We all suffer from confirmation bias." Bail said that his conclusions about social media's impact on society are somewhat different from Haidt's. "Yes, the platforms play a role," he told the New Yorker, "but we are greatly exaggerating what it’s possible for them to do, and we’re profoundly underestimating the human element." For example, the idea of a political echo chamber "has been massively overstated," he said. "Maybe it’s three to five per cent of people who are properly in an echo chamber."
Some social researchers believe the same is true of the idea that algorithmic "rabbit holes" radicalize social-media users and turn them into conspiracy theorists. The New Yorker reported that Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, found in a new working paper that almost all extremist content is consumed by subscribers to the relevant channels - "a sign of actual demand rather than manipulation or preference falsification." The most credible research in the field "is way out of line with the takes," Nyhan told the magazine. For example, research into the role of social media in the spread of extremist content and misinformation, Nyhan said, "finds that the people consuming this content are small minorities who have extreme views already.” If nothing else, the research outlined in the Haidt/Bail document suggests that at least some fear-mongering theories about the evils of social media ought to be taken with a grain of salt.
Comments