Opinion analysis by Anthony Ahrend, Featured Writer

August 11th, 2021

Social media. Are we underestimating its power? It allows us to connect one end of the world to another. However, this online world can have repercussions on the real world, as we saw with Facebook and its owner Mark Zuckerberg who got accused of contributing with dark money and enabling election fraud in 2020. The border between online and reality is really thin. Users are confronted with information from the whole world, directly or indirectly. But what are the consequences of social media on our society, especially on the political aspect of society? I will divide this article into four parts: old vs young, transparency, polarization and last but not least: cancel culture

Let’s start with old and young. Older people tend to read newspapers and watch the news on TV  to get information, whereas younger people sweep over the news in apps or by following news stations online and on social media (Nielsen, 2017). In general, people are still using the TV as a source of news, whereas the press is declining, and the usage of social media is increasing and exceeding the press in a lot of countries like the USA, Denmark, and soon in Germany (Newman, 2015). A few years back, you had to be able to get screen time or appear in an article in order to be able to talk to your audience to present your agenda. Political parties know that, and for them, what is better than communicating with your target audience directly? Parties spend millions on social media networking and on buying data to find exactly who they want to direct their advertisements to. Each time a user accepts cookies, the data is stored and then sold and resold.

Of course, not everything you see on social media (SM) is considered objective. But where else is that the case? As Lippman (1922) said, newspapers also go through a process to select what, where, and how much space everything gets, which are clearly not objective standards. TV channels and newspapers have a predisposition in the way they select, cover and report stories. This is called the media bias. A lot of news we see are opinions that tell us how to feel about a topic. The news is shaped for its voters and social media has therefore an effect on young voters’ bases.

This leads us to transparency.

Some of us have had the chance to live in a democracy where the freedom of expression and press is part of the constitution. Nonetheless, there are still examples where governments have had complete control over information exposure and only served unilateral and biased information, like the Nazi propaganda by way of radio, TV, newspapers, and movies during the third Reich. A more modern example is North Korea, where the access to the internet is extremely limited and monitored by the state.

In autocracies, populations are not allowed to look beyond what the elites want them to see. A positive example about how social media helped to counter this is the Arab Spring: in countries where the government has everything under its command, through SM, the participants in Tunisia and Egypt were able to spread information quickly and were able to communicate and interact (Gire, 2012). This led to the first revolutions and resulted in a domino effect where protests were erupting in neighboring countries, like Algeria or Morocco. Via SM, populations get better access to information, more opportunities to engage in public speech, and as Shirky (2011) stated, it enhances the ability of undertaking collective action.

The only function of the media in general is not only information exposure, but also to investigate the political class, including the government. Three people who did exactly that are Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Alexei Navalny. These whistleblowers, who are called traitors by some and heroes by others, leaked classified governmental information, respectively with the Wikileaks website, the NSA leaks, and the YouTube channel where Navalny explains and shows the system of corruption behind the Russian state between Putin and his oligarchs. We can see that social media can make a difference.

Social media doesn’t only make a difference, but it also polarizes our societies: instead of connecting us, it can drive us apart. The magic bullet theory explains how mass audiences react to mass media and basically states that the media is capable of activating and reinforcing already existing opinions but cannot convert these. So, if you are a left or middle left person, you won’t become a conservative, but you will probably become a more extreme leftist. The same goes for someone from the right or middle right sphere. Robichaud (2020) shows in an example from the US from 1994 to 2014 where the median of democrats and republicans’ ideologies is drifting more and more apart. Social media could be a reason for that. Opinions are diverging instead of going for a compromise, and that hurts the political discourse and the debates in parliaments and society.

Polarization is directly linked to the cancel culture we are nowadays witnessing. Cancel culture is the practice of no longer supporting people, especially celebrities or products that are regarded as unacceptable or problematic. You can already see the problem in the definition, as it is subjective. For some vegans, eating meat or being a butcher is unacceptable. Social media plays an enormous role in that, and Twitter is the perfect example: a single person could reach millions of people in real time. Donald Trump had 89 million followers on his account, he tweeted and retweeted over 59,000 posts. He had a bigger reach than the New York Times! Now that he is blocked on nearly all the main social media accounts, he created his own website. This leads to the fact that people who like him, will still have a platform to follow him and this will create a bubble where only like-minded people will gather. This does not help the debate, and definitely does not help democracy.

After him, many celebrities, and activists from all around the world are being removed from social media applications. By deleting and “canceling” people we do not agree with, we are hurting the political debate and creating closed communities that have no contact with each other. Generally speaking, people will rather follow accounts they agree with then someone with whom they do not. The algorithms of these apps are basically made to analyze your activity and propose feeds and other accounts that you’ll probably like. By joining these groups or accounts, people will think that everyone agrees with them, when in fact, they are not. In other words, you are surrounding yourself with accounts that confirm and support your pre-existing views; this is called an echo chamber. A theory explaining this phenomenon is called the false consensus effect (Ross et al., 1977): people assume that others think and act the same as themselves, which in the case of social media and politics, leads to users that incorrectly assume that the majority of the population share their political views, despite the fact that the majority could be disagreeing with them.

We can see that social media has facilitated our lives in a lot of ways, but on the other hand, it unconsciously changes how we work and talk to each other as a society. A lot of people use SM for political awareness: Rainie showed in 2012 that about two in five Americans used SM for political purposes. About one in three said they had encountered messages on social media promoting one of the candidates in the month leading up to the election. Four years later, more Americans named Facebook as the site they most often used for political information in the month leading up to Election Day 2016 (Garrett, 2019).

In regard to cancel culture, if everyone of us had a tracker for everything we said and done, we would probably all be cancelled. I believe that someone that did something wrong should be held accountable, not cancelled. Communicating instead of avoiding.

As the Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma” states: Technology connects us, but it also controls, manipulates, polarizes, distracts, and divides us.

References:

-          Garrett, R.K. 2018. Social media’s contribution to political misperceptions in US Presidential elections. PloS ONE

-          Gire, Sabiha. N.d. The Role of Social Media in the Arab Spring. Pangaea journal

-          Lippmann, Walter. 1922. Public Opinion. Book, Second printing 1998

-          Newman, Nic. 2015. Executive Summary and Key Findings of the 2015 Report. Digital News Report from Reuters Institute and University of Oxford

-          Nielsen, Rasmus K. 2017. Where do people get their news? Oxford-university article

-          Rainie, Lee. 2012. Social Media and Voting. Pew research center

-          Robichaud, Emilie. 2020. How Social Media Algorithms Drive Political Polarization. The startup

-          Ross, L; Greene, D; House, P. 1977. The False Consensus Effect: An Egocentric Bias in Social Perception and Attribution Processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

-          Shirky, Clay. 2011. The Political Power of Social Media. Council on Foreign Relations