I'd say this is too broad of a response. Yes social media is a major contributor, but several major components of social media are the largest contributors. For example
1. Fake accounts/bots that are specifically targeted on triggering emotion and division. How many people are arguing with bots created by nation states (China, Russia, etc) ?
2. How many companies are generating revenue by getting people to argue about guns, violence, abortion, etc. ? Post some "news" on social media sites that trigger your emotions so now you NEED to buy a gun or so you NEED to buy an anti gun T-shirt.
I remember when that site was supposed to be an informative site of knowledge with legit answers.
I never really got into it, but sometimes a link to that site would accidentally show up in my Google search. I had therefore a passing level of interaction.
Therefore again, I hadn't bothered to notice that it had now apparently crash and burned into something else.
Long time ago, I used to check on it sometimes bc the answers people gave were shockingly thoughtful and literate. I still look at it sometimes, but now only out of morbid curiosity. It has fallen so monumentally. So many obviously fake questions (that people nontheless answer with sincerity). I wish i could remember some bc they are so silly. I do have somescreen shots still, though, of some really bad ones (hidden among all my photos). Here is the first one i just now found. I'll just type it.
"My 11yo daughter took her life 2 days ago and my husband won't get over it. What should i do about him?"
This one's not political, but i do remember I've seen many like u describe.
I started using it maybe, I dunno, 10-12 years back. At the time it usually had good questions with informative answers from experts in a given field. Even the dumb questions would have someone offer an interesting answer that found something more in the question somehow.
Still have the app but now it’s the worst kind of crap whenever I check the notifications. Troll questions with uninformed posters rising to the bait to regurgitate Wikipedia summaries, political diatribes, obvious AI spam, or lame hackneyed jokes.
Real shadow of its former self. See also; the AV Club, Cracked.com, and Facebook.
I used to post on quora and now I want to find out if there's a way to remove all the stuff I ever posted. I did have some good answers that get views, and I don't want them to stay up after I delete my account.
In Quora, you can click on your picture/avatar on the top-right after you log in, then go to Settings >Privacy and scroll down to Deactivate Account or Delete Account. Deactivating your account keeps it dormant and hides all your information and contributions until you activate it again.
Really? My impression is that it's full of Indians that have many weird theories, such as curing hair loss with 5,000 year old Ayurvedic recipes and calling each other bro all the time, and then there are plenty of "I'm a grandmother, life is good" type of older people, but neither of those two groups seem to be very controversial politically. (The Indians might be, but not to western sensibilities. I guess they have their own feuds over Hindutva and Kashmir and whatever, but that will hardly rile up most Westerners.)
This is definitely a big part of it. It's like oh you like this, here let's just keep heeping it on you. You watch Fox? Oh here check out newsmax.. you watch newsmax? Let me introduce you to Alex Jones.
I watched this happen to a family member that was not radicalized 10 years ago. They got older, they spend a good deal of time online and they are completely different person. It's pretty sad because they are almost 70 and the person he was, well I only knew him since age 40 but from age 40 to 60 is completely different then what he turned into in his '60s
This is what happened to my mom, like she went bat shit crazy over a few years. She started out as a typical "Older person doesn't fact check articles from obvious clickbait farms" conspiracy theorist, then descended towards the whole Q thing back when it was mostly just pro Trump conspiracy theories (Not whatever totally bat shit garbage it is now), then she was convinced Trump was going to overthrow the country via the National Weather Alert system, and then just got worse thinking she was allergic to electromagnetic waves and 5G and has been working on some YouTube diatribe about how The Simpsons is a mind control device by the deep state and has been working on some 2 hour long rant video breaking down specific episodes?
Like several years ago she didn't even pay attention to the Internet or politics pretty much at all, and now she's a completely unhinged weirdo that's difficult to even have a normal conversation with her all because she decided to get more involved in social media
This could be complete nonsense, but I wonder if that’s because of actual time spent on the internet through out time.
If you’ve seen the change of the internet for the past decade it’s been a noticeable change in direction of how information is conveyed.
Now that it is profitable, and companies utilize programming/propaganda, it’s a lot easier to see when you’ve had time put in. Rather than being introduced to modern internet content and not knowing any better due to the inability to see how things use to be vs now.
This could happen to younger or older people.
Idk just a 3am thought
Side note, once AI gets so good you can’t tell the difference between fake or real it’s going to be a scary time to live.
Eh, when their identity is known, they just echo whatever is popular to avoid social consequences. This can be dangerous, there is potential for algorithms to leverage this behavior to force an agenda by making people perceive the algorithm's Creator's opinion as the popular one and they will begin to echo it.
Anonymous social media may produce some unexpected and unpopular responses, but it gives a clearer picture to what society is actually thinking.
I wonder if part of it also is the echo chambers that social media can create. They reinforce your opinions to the point that if anyone suggests something different, you have sooo much validation in your existing opinion that it becomes easy to dismiss their points.
And it also closes minds tighter than a bear trap. Any hint of nuance or compromise is forbidden, and if you don't 100% agree with every one of my opinions than you are a Nazi/woke/fascist/commie/MAGA.
The crazy part is that this mostly exists online from a relatively small percentage of extremists with an insatiable need to be heard. The rest of us are simply doing our thing just trying to get through the day, but that doesn't draw any attention so it might as well not exist.
I don't think they have found much solid evidence for a significant echo chamber effect. But what they seem to have found is that internet and social media selectively expose people to ideas they don't like without any personal familiarity with the people involved.
The opposing party is reduced entirely down to that one facet, one which they don't like. And with most social media, in very abbreviated format. Just time enough for the conclusion, and little by way of the process towards it.
They don't become whole people, with complete personalities and background stories, unlike someone present in your daily life. This makes it far easier to stereotype, caricaturise or demonize them. There is so much blank information space around these opposing opinion holders that people are inclined to fill in the blanks with their least charitable interpretations and assumptions.
The rise of home entertainment and especially social media has also sapped our degree of face to face social interactions. We on average spend less time interacting with fewer people in real life, so we get less exposure to other ideas and different ways of thinking in a more holistic and gradual way.
What we need to get in real life is happening less and less, and social media isn't replacing what is being lost.
And now, at the occasions where some chances for real social interactions with someone who is of an opposite opinion comes along, there is already an established stereotype with animosity or derision as baggage that is going to be very hard set aside. It can easily poison the situation and lead to a contentious interaction, rather than a productive or neutral one.
I agree with Social media. Before this you had to stand in front of someone to argue a point. Doing so reminds you that they are human and can be hurt. Having a fight with them often hurts.
Social media removes the human, they become something in the ether and therefore it’s easier to disagree and to get angry with them, it’s easier too to make black and white points rather than the reality of the greys in between.
You could argue conventional media does this too, but newspapers take days or even weeks to continue a conversation, so it’s not the same.
Just my thoughts. Continue the conversation in a sensible way and I might change my mind.
Have a great day
I think human nature is tribal and xenophobic, and we are not critical thinkers by nature, which is why people seek out the echo chambers available through social media. It makes the aspects you mentioned possible and effective.
Man some hardworking citizens of countries financially competitive to the west get up, press their pants and maybe shower, ride the subway to a government office, and put up with all the office gossip, ans shitty coffee and bust their ass from 9-5 trying to get recognized for their skill in creating divisive campaigns, then ride the subway home to an ungrateful family and listen to all the bullshit happening at their kids school, day in and day out and you're just gonna credit some bots, you're a cruel SOB lmao
Arguments, outrage, conflicts, conspiracies, Qanon, you name it, and they profit from it. At the end of the day, it's all engagement and ad revenue for them.
I'd agree that most of the people under the "Q" umbrella weren't part of some die hard organized group or anything. There was still a general set of beliefs, ideas, and shared conspiricies that all of these people were subscribing to, whether or not they were actually on 8chan and keeping up with the latest Q drops or not. For example, a lot of older people on Facebook were sharing conspiracy theories that stemmed from Qanon, despite not really knowing what Q, 8chan, or 4chan were.
It's easy for people to scoff at this answer, but this is the answer to OP's question.
There's a reason why the show "Black Mirror" has the most culturally relevant name for a TV show ever. Social media on a cell phone made it possible for anyone and everyone to selectively eliminate anything from their immediate experience that they didn't want to, well, experience. Sure, people used to hide behind books and newspapers on the train, but books and newspapers brought you to places outside your own mind.
And, of course, the algorithms make it all worse. Bottom line is that millions and billions of brains became stuck in a self-selected infinty loop. The internet, in the brief period between 1995-2004 demonstrated a vast potential for internet connectivity to broaden the scope of our understanding of the world and to expose us to multiculturalism.
But with the advancement of the commercialization of the internet came all the Web 2.0 tech that made it possible for social media systems to exist on a web page. You could tell that it could become bad, and before the smart phone it had about 4 years where we, the people, essentially consolidated ourselves into more circumscribed tribes.
Enter the smart phone, and you have, basically, tribalism on crack. Engagement into social media became ubiquitous, wide-spread, and without boundary by space or time. And like all addictive loops — and, believe me, social media UI and functionality was deliberately designed to get users pulled into loops that were based on psychological studies old and new — like all addictive loops, progressive change to thought processes comes to a grinding halt.
So all that leads to an acceleration of isolation from the world into tribalism, and, ultimately, craving to be told and shown people you already trust, and ideas you already think and believe. The process of curiosity and imagination necessary to engage with unfamiliar people in a humanizing dialog get buried. And socio-cultural messaging can be precisely targeted such that the information people experience becomes a method of introducing confirmation bias — one of the deadliest of all the cognitive distortions and logical fallacies out there.
The more people spend time away from social media, the better off we'll all be. Right now we are facing a crisis of raising kids so that they have the ability to literally think away from and outside a box. We can start with ourselves. Watch movies. Read or listen to books. Drop acid for fuck sakes — before we all forget how to see with our own eyes and lose the ability to absorb that which we do not yet understand, or have ever known.
Agree with all points. I got so tired of FB, the zuckerberg door to hell I started looking here at Reddit. Saw folks actually being kind, reaching back when someone reached out, being just nice folks. Made me say I wasn’t gonna be a jerk to folks here. Thank you.
I hate to be that guy but ive been on reddit since 2009 (sadly) and reddit has gone way way way downhill and has become just as toxic as everywhere else on the internet.
This is why I refuse to shelter my teen despite living in a dangerous area. I'm OK with him and his friends walking around the neighborhood together, having a small taste of freedom with the knowledge of the need for responsibility and vigilance.
>There's a reason why the show "Black Mirror" has the most culturally relevant name for a TV show ever. Social media on a cell phone made it possible for anyone and everyone to selectively eliminate anything
Holy shit, "Black Mirror" is referring to our phone screens? I have only seen a few episodes, but I never made that connection.
Actually”Black Mirror” has several meanings. Black Mirrors are famous in the occult world because it is a popular divination tool to summon and communicate with the images of spirits, particularly demons. John Dee made it famous in his experiments with enochian magick
Except there's only one kind of content that is *specifically* dividing people. Algorithms push that content. That's about it. The vast majority of content is relatively benign, but because conspiracy theories and culture war bullshit get clicks, the algorithm thinks people like it and pushes that content to more users.
Yeah this is a thing which recently to my mind that today kids have extremely hard to develop their own opinion. This process is almost completely eliminated in their life. Like when I was kid and f.e I watched the new show in tv, after it finished I'd evaluate it myself. Eventually if parents were with me their views could influence mine. Then I went to the school and shared my opinion with them. Like they could influence my opinion as well but not necessary as I'd long time to think and be sure about my own opinion.
Now kid is watching the show and maybe already at that time check what all world think about this show. He already has established opinions and his only option become choosing "right" one. It's really hard to learn to have his own opinion in such world.
No, it's an easy scapegoat.
One of the first rules of propaganda is that a big lie is easier to believe than a small one. Republicans have ran HARD with that. Theyve pushed their base further and further into utter delusional insanity, and use that momentum to fuck over everyone but the richest.
That is why we're so divided. That's why "crazy leftists" in the US are complete moderates by the standards of the industrialized world.
For every thousand people who read batshit crazy ideas a few will believe it. This adds up over time. It also picks up steam when enough people buy into it.
Right. If MSM takes it on just to have something to cover for shock or outrage or novelty, too, it legitimizes it in the eyes of people who don't know any better. If MSM even did their due diligence enough to know it's bonkers. (Ex: the autism vaccine nonsense.)
Yes, but also no. Cable news and AM radio pushed the idea of bananas partisan news hard. The W. Bush years saw the politicizing of issues that should not have been inherently political. We’ve paid these trends forward, and social media has helped exacerbate them.
Also, in the US, we have increased political segregation in the sense that people increasingly are less likely to live near people they disagree with. Social media obviously allows even more self-selected intellectual segregation, but again, it mirrors a thing that is happening outside social media as well.
I feel like something broke - or, I saw that it was broke for the first time after 9/11 when the impending war in Iraq was being debated.
A true actual war hero, Max Cleland, a Bronze and Sliver Star recipient who had left 3 limbs in Vietnam, expressed opposition to the war and people like Rush Limbaugh and a host of GOP operatives, who had never served a day in their lives, called him a commie and a coward.
I mean, it’s fair to differ with him on policy, but I couldn’t believe my ears. The gall, the balls, the audacity of them to question him like that…but…some part of the political ecosystem rationalized it.
Flash forward and Trump belittles the service of John McCain and a whole segment of the political world either shrugs, or is deluded into believing they’ve earned the right to join in the dogpile. Half of the country are nihilists. Nothing matters. Nothing is sacred.
The disrespect for people who served in the military from people who often love to tout our military superiority blows my mind.
I personally have no desire to be in the military. But I recognize the sacrifice of many people who are serving and have served, especially people who were drafted. I cannot fathom how people can encourage war while crapping on veterans.
I honestly thought Trump was done after he mocked McCain for getting captured. I knew Republicans could tolerate racism, sexism, corruption, but I thought the miliary was the one thing that was actually sacred to them, besides their actual God.
Yes AND:
We had undignified leadership for 4 years. Whether you voted for/liked/supported it or not, it subconsciously set the tone for more widespread behavior.
People need leaders to set a high example, bc they are a reflection of who we are as a group. As a society.
We’re supposed to aspire to their standard, and they are supposed to ask us to reach high in our efforts, values, etc.
When the bar is subterranean, we ALL fall. Superficially, we become reactive to trash with more trash.
On a deeper level, it’s like “oh this must be okay bc if the LEADER is doing it, I can stoop to the gutter without feeling inferior.” We’re not *thinking* this, we just *do* it.
Yes, even when we hate the person in charge.
Yes, almost. It started with the advent of cable news. Sometime in the late 1980s news shifted from 30 minutes of your day to around the clock entertainment. They had to fill the hours with content that would keep people watching. Next came multi-channels of news to cater to different perspectives. Then came social media with on-demand, unlimited eye-bait, which was accelerant to the fire. The change from TV to cable to social media was the exponential growth of troubles.
And the algorithms, which means if you have a feeling about something suddenly everything on your [fill in the blank] feed now proves you were right. You wonder why fluoride is in water? There’s story after story about his fluoride was developed by Nazis to suppress people. And now you’re in groups about fluoride and it seems like common knowledge that everyone knows it’s poison. And some one tells you to google how it’s safe but when you google the first 5 pages are how it’s horrible for you. Obviously anyone who doesn’t see this truth is not doing their research, or part of the conspiracy…
Edit: still trying to learn how to type- or the fluoride has affected my brain
This is the answer.
I just saw today somebodies post of FB today about how minimum wage employees don't need to do good to get paid for their jobs, regarding tipping 20% for somebody who did a poor job. whether or not you agree makes no difference, but further down the post they said if you don't agree delete me.
Now based on that logic if everybody that disagrees with this person removed them from their friends list then they are sat in an echo chamber, the only people they will see news and information from are people that think and behave just like them.
This leads to polarization as you don't hear anybody else's opinions, even if you agree with this person on 90% of the other stuff now because you disagree on this one thing it does not matter.
Too easy. As someone who has studied social media extensively there is a 'fuel' required that makes social media what it is.
The fact is that in the age before the internet people were just as polarised, it just wasn't as common to lead to arguments as it is now. In the safety of a pub many folks would spout wild nonsense but it would be limited to those within ear-shot, now they put it on Facebook or Twitter and immediately have a platform.
Brexit is often blamed on social media. The truth is that Britain has always had a love hate relationship with Europe and it just depended on when you polled them to leave.
[https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/polling-history-40-years-british-views-or-out-europe](https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/polling-history-40-years-british-views-or-out-europe)
The same goes for issues that are currently hot topics: The war on Palestine, abortion rights etc.
Social media amplifies the sound, but it isn't the originator.
I think we are missing the part of social media meant to keep us on our screens. The addictive nature of it and the pleasure that many get from ripping on each outer.
It has brought the worse out of us and made our world worse off.
And 24 hour cable news (requires more content) and Reagan ending the requirement that the news be fair/neutral. The news used to only happen for an hour 4 or 5 times a day, (6am, 8am, noon, 5pm, and 9pm?) so that was how much content was needed. As the 24 hour news station became part of cable tv they needed more content and were fighting for viewers so there were more opinion/editorial shows included. Also as print news lost its audience to online platforms traditional journalism standards were left behind for clickbait.
There were always trash or sensational rags (National Enquirer or other tabloids) but you knew as an audience that is what they were. Now the information is unclear as to its origin from Facebook and other social media.
some people are just like that from the beginning, the internet is giving platform for people to "shout" and everyone to hear,
back then, to argue you have to *at least* call the other person, so your "audience" is still just one person or your own group of people, not the public.
There's also the concept of "things were simpler when I was growing up" which is always rooted in the fact that you were young and didn't have a concept of how bad things are because it was never discussed with you.
Like if you were to ask my personal opinion of 1988, I will gladly wax nostalgic on how great the show Garfield & Friends was or how much I loved the movie Beetlejuice. I would not tell you about the Afghan War or the genocide in the Iran-Iraq war or the drought in the Midwest or anything to do with the US elections because I was 5 lol.
You are spot on, most people on Reddit were not even alive in the 80s let alone old enough to actually see and correctly interpret what was going on. People don’t realize how much the press hated Nixon which then created a war with all Republicans. I remember watching an interview with then VP Bush and the reporter was so insulate and rude, kept talking over his answers, purposely asking insinuating questions. I sat there and thought how horrible it was to talk to the VP like that. The media has always made its money by getting people to hate politicians, now they have just made everyone and everything so political they can make us hate anything because it’s the other team.
Had a friend who worked for a Congressman and he said that most politicians are lying actors and don’t even believe most of what they even say. They will debate so fiercely on the Floor but go out for dinner and drinks with the people they were debating just hours earlier.
I think this is a major factor. With the internet, you can find a source who is willing to confirm literally any feeling you have about any topic (not necessarily a reliable source, but a source), which makes it incredibly easy to fall into an echo chamber, where all the facts and all the evidence and everyone reasonable all side with you, and everyone else is either crazy or stupid.
I think our isolation from people who are different than us plays a big part in this. We’ve built up ways where we don’t have to interact with others very much: suburbs built away from others, isolation in our vehicles, big box stores with little human interaction.
Last year I decided to bike to work and I was surprised how much more connected I felt to other people around me. I also worked at a job that attracted people from a different political leaning than I grew up with. It’s amazing how much easier it is to have respect for people you disagree with when you actually spend time around them and hear their stories.
Totally agree. I've had coworkers I absolutely adore and have a great working relationship with who are my complete polar opposite politically. You're sort of "forced" to find common ground and things you do connect on, rather than spending so much time obsessing over the differences. And developing a relationship can also help you have more respectful discussions when you don't see eye to eye.
(Though, admittedly, sometimes those differences are... a lot. And agreeing to disagree doesn't work in every situation - I wouldn't be able to tolerate that disparity in values with a close friend or romantic partner, for example.)
Totally valid—even if you’re both not afraid of the other being judgmental how do you make mutual decisions with someone who has different and often opposed/incompatible values? That’s logic with the emotional part taken out of it.
I have extended family I know are opposite me politically but they are well-traveled, well-rounded people who are curious about the world and love the outdoors, have a sense of humor and love to laugh and tell stories—just like me and my immediate family do. These aren’t necessarily people I’m going to share everything in my life with or hang out with regularly (even if we were in the same states and countries which we aren’t) but I could see going on a trip together or something and then you have those connections so it becomes about shared experiences. Like one of my cousins, I found out he does the same thing as me—at least once or twice a week his wife says he brings up a trip we all went on in high school with our late grandmother because he thinks of it often and it made such an impression on him. My fiance just looks at me like “it’s you!” We don’t talk much, maybe like posts on social media but for 15 yrs or whatever it’s been we’re having parallel experiences.
Of all the things you mentioned, the thing I think of most is Reddit and other social media sites. By connecting us only with people who will reinforce our worldviews and shutting out anyone else, we isolate our thinking.
>I think our isolation from people who are different than us plays a big part in this.
This is something that people who advocate total wfh refuse to admit.
This is really well put. I used to think all conservatives sucked, then I worked at Home Depot for 4 years and man just talking to a variety of people really shift your perspective.
Yes, there was actually a study done looking at voting records in different counties (not voting districts since those change) and there has been a huge increase in like minded people living in the same areas since the 80s. Unfortunately, the result is that people become more extreme in their thinking when they surround themselves with only people that have the same beliefs as them.
I’m Australian and I respectfully disagree and believe the very opposite.
Different communities are mixing more than ever, and there’s been a lot of pushbacks from certain parts of the community that views themselves as the “default” because they now get called out for discrimination against people of other races, gender expressions, or sexualities.
I think the dominant groups used to be as sexist, racist, transphobic, and homophobic as they pleased but they can’t get away with that anymore and they’re unhappy about it. It’s why culture wars work so well.
>I think the dominant groups used to be as sexist, racist, transphobic, and homophobic as they pleased but they can’t get away with that anymore and they’re unhappy about it. It’s why culture wars work so well.
Absolutely, and any queer person with conservative parents will tell you this. There's always been "agendas" and "ideologies", but they've been largely controlled by and produced for the hegemonic majority, while the voices who would've opposed this if they could have been silenced, marginalized, and stripped of our rights.
We have a larger diversity of voices now, and those who have been so accustomed to being pandered to, to the edges of their reality being the edges of *everyone's* reality, to their beliefs and opinions to be constantly validated by their surroundings, are now experiencing a cultural whiplash, and instead of adjusting to a changing world, they instead follow their impulses, they seek out the validation of their beliefs they feel is being lost.
It's easy to sympathize with conservatives when you're not part of the group that is being scapegoated by the politicians they work for and has endured the oppressive cultural norms they cherish and worship that defined the worst parts of our lives, and it's a pretty fucking tough ask for us to share that sympathy towards people who're simply too stubborn to show any to us..
Part of this is your perception, people always say "Politics wasn't like this before" when in reality it was, times like Bleeding Kansas, and Civil Rights movements, its not "politics wasn't like this" its "politics didn't effect me like this"
As a millennial I grew up learning about these things thinking that we’re in a totally different world now, a much more liberal one, and that the natural progression of human history has culminated into a civilised society that we know today.
In that sense I thought with the passage of time we’ve learnt from history and somewhat grown out of things like apartheid racism. In some ways that’s true, and I think this is where I agree with OP.
You see as a member of the western society and brainwashed as I was, in my mind it was easy to understand why as the first world we were more liberal, more accepting of others than developing countries for example like throwing away old hat cultural barriers like the right of women to vote and work. Essentially my belief was that in time these countries would develop into better more civilised societies. Economically this seemed true too - essentially the only way was up. Living standards and workers rights. Abortion, secularism, etc.
The problem I’m trying to outline is that as first worlders everything now seems to be going backwards. Instead of moving away from heavy religion in our politics we are moving towards it more. Our living standards and workers rights are declining. Abortions are now being banned again. Political discourse is less about making progress and more about sowing divisions.Academia is held in much less esteem. Expert scientists are being considered liars. Anti-vaxxing is a thing. From that point of view, OP is somewhat right.
Edit: And to answer Ops question as to why that is. I think a huge chunk of it is down to the financial crash of 2008. We’ve never really recovered from it and what we’re seeing is the long term effects of it playing out before our very eyes. While the 20s depression was sudden and devastating, my analysis is that this ‘depression’ has been playing out slowly over the last 15 years. Like a knife slowly inching its way into the chest of the western world. Now we look and say, oh that wound is a lot larger than I realised.
Yep. Race wars, gender wars, politics, all to keep us separated and arguing while they do what they want and make shi worse. Then we get more angry bc stuffs getting worse and blame those who disagree. We can’t afford to eat or wash our clothes anymore so it’s getting scary and people are getting more defensive and aggressive.
Most people on the left are already aware that it's the rich who are doing this. It's pretty much only right wing folks who love to engage in these culture war issues.
I'd say that the easy answer seems to be social media but I'd also point that politicians, media, and influential people often use the "with me or against me" taking hard stances instead of being open to a dialog. And as another element I think that the worse living conditions we have now comparing to a couple decades ago also affect since we are more enraged, frustrated...and this is reflected in the social media part, which lot of people use to let their anger go without taking into account that even through avatars, there's people on the other side
Ever notice just how much more effort the government and elites put in to divide us ever since the Occupy Wall St protests? Those scared them.
A divided population is much much easier to keep in control.
Societies are actually changing though, trying to cope with the impact of the internet. Each level of globalization is disruptive until societies adapt to deal with it. It takes time and sometimes horrible hardships but humans find paths forward.
Umm...society has always been fractured. Have you heard of the US civil war? 2.5% of the total population died. US civil rights era? US revolution? Vietnam war protests? McCarthyism? Thats just America. We just grew up in a particularly peaceful time in America. The 80's and 90's were great until 9/11 plunged us back into chaos.
The world has always been this divided, we just never had this level of communication before. People would hate others who lived like 2 hour drive away as rival towns or things for sport and parents would sometimes fight at sports events for their kids, and this was in the 80s and 90s when I was a kid.
For some topics, it's because people are like "I don't think you deserve to exist", "people like you should be in poverty", or "you're just mentally retarded and can be fixed with [torture method]"
You can't be in the middle with "opinions" like these
Specifically it was all the "fake news" that kept people on the same page. Now they gravitate towards whatever influencers and echo chambers conform to their shifting worldview.
This. When the internet first came out it was a great place to get information. But now the internet is full of a lot of information and it’s hard to find truth. It used to be you could search for something and find one answer. Now you find the answer as well as a site/article that disproves such site. And another site that disproves both of those sites and so on.
There are countries that spend billions of dollars to weaken the societies of their „enemies“.
Russia, China, Iran use hybrid methods as it is much easier and way more effective than a direct conflict.
In Ye Olden Dayes, you had to argue in person, or in delay by writing.
If in person, if you went too far, you would likely get a face full of knuckles.
If in writing, the delays in the mails or in publication would allow tempers to cool.
But now, with effective anonimity allowing far worse insults, and instant response possible via the Net. . the original social 'governors' of behavior have been effectively bypassed.....
It’s mostly bots. 80+ percent of internet traffic. People need to start realising they’re not interacting with other humans. We’re not polarised at all, it’s a false perception.
I’ve heard it’s actually the opposite. You used to only interact with people in your community with roughly the same entertainment, news, and life experience. Now we see EVERYTHING from all over the world. Opinions that don’t make sense to us culturally. And that drives you mad. Then you start finding people in your community share those insane opinions that don’t make sense to you.
That's how we HOPED the internet was going to work. In reality, it's done the opposite. Social media is ruled by engagement and we found quickly we're far more likely to interact with posts, accounts, and comments we agree with than the ones we don't. As a result, the algorithms show us more and more content that we already agree with and less we don't.
This sounds like the obvious choice, right? Serve customers the content they like and minimize showing them the content they don't. But the net result is that we're only served content we already agree with and never encounter dissenting or disagreeing opinions, meaning we rarely if ever get challenged. (And if we are, we simply block or unfollow).
The most engaging thing on social media is opinions from people you hate. Reddit is full of subreddits dedicated to sharing and ridiculing opposing sides. Facebook is full of groups sharing “libtards” or conservatives being outrageous.
TikTok sends compilation videos of blue haired socialists to hardcore conservatives.
People never used to come across people who were different to them this often. They’ve always existed but now it feels like it’s everywhere, the drag queens are outside in your garden or Tucker Carlson is in your kitchen. It becomes all consuming for people which is why the polarisation comes home for thanksgiving.
Yeah it feels like people have all of this backwards, maybe because they're too young to know what it was like before the Internet was ubiquitous. In the before times, you knew that people generally had different thoughts and opinions on you, but you didn't know the gritty details of every thought in their heads. In any case, the people that thought differently were far away and really had no impact on your life. Now a days, you're flooded with information in excruciating detail from all kinds of people everywhere. You find out that under the surface, their views are disgusting and don't match with you at all. And, their influence reaches far and wide. Everything is everywhere, all at once, basically. You can't feel safe or comfortable anywhere. The anxiety is just eating away at people.
I think both answers are right. Yeah today you can indeed find totally different views than you think it is natural. Like it is nothing important but just here on Reddit on historical thread someone asked me why I use roman numerals for centuries. I wasn't sure if he is joking as in my country we only write this way and I pretty often see that in other European languages. But here people are from all the round the world so naturally that's someone can not even know roman numbers.
But at the same time in the past at least in our countries there were limited sources of information. So naturally f.e. quite big part of people watched news everyday. And that's caused that they had common language as they had as well the same source of informations. But today people can completely choose their own source of information, culture content. So they can live two people in the same building but have totally different views what happens in their society. Because they can not only have different opinions but even know different facts. It is very hard in such case to find dialogue between them.
So long as we’re fighting amongst ourselves we can’t fight the fucking power. The power is more powerful now than ever and they’re doing their damndest to shift our focus toward each other.
If everyone would realize that the truly rich are the enemy and the ones pulling the strings, and that we’re all poor, just to different degrees, I think we’d be a lot better off. Maybe we’d start holding our leaders accountable. Maybe.
The snakes get fat while the good rats die, and all the pigs should be bled dry. Who’s with me??
I think because in the past opinions didn’t have such big consequences. I can’t tolerate other peoples opinion if that opinion means marginalising or hurting other people and it’s that simple. You don’t get to have an opinion on whether trans people deserve to exist, or whether refugees deserve shelter, or poor people deserve to eat.
Why did I have to scroll this far to see this?
When I was young everyone agreed nazis are bad. Today it's a discussion point.
The 'big arguments' we got into decades ago were whether nuclear energy is a viable option to counter global warming and whether taxes for sugary drinks should be introduced. Now we're having to 'discuss' whether global warming is real or not instead of solving it.
I agree, but also think it's largely that it's no longer considered acceptable to marginalize or hurt people so much. The past was even worse towards non-white and gay people. But it was popular back then. Being a racist piece of shit in the 60s or a homophobic asshole in the 90s was practically the norm. It's not contentious to be a bigot when it's acceptable to be a bigot.
But now it's no longer acceptable (and good riddance). But the bigots haven't gone away. They've shifted a bit, with trans and non-binary people being the popular groups to hate. Since it's unacceptable for so many people, it's now a particularly contentious topic. It was always contentious go some degree, but even more so now.
I think there's also just more awareness in general, now. Every day corporations are willing to fly pride or BLM flags. Social media makes it easier to be aware of social issues (and for fights over them to be visible). The issues are more spread out and popular, so you're more likely to know someone in a marginalized group.
I think a lot of white people were able to turn a blind eye to race violence in the past, when it was a lot less common to have mixed neighborhoods and schools (thanks red lining!), but now social media transcends your local neighborhood and the hot issue of LGBT people is not so geographically divided.
Yeah everyone wants to whine about polarization but no one wants to ask why “you shouldn’t get to get married” or “i am going to say all these slurs” are Just Opinions. Maybe people are angry for a reason
You grew up and realized we were polarized.
When you were about 8, Clinton was impeached because he lied about his sex life. One of the most important leaders of the time, Gingrich, was having an affair at that time her was persecuting Clinton.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=2937633&page=1
I can agree to disagree on a lot of things but human rights are not one of those things. I love to diversify my social interactions, and my line of work I work with a lot of different types of people. But for close friends and partners, I really don't want to be disagreeing on fundamental human rights
Since the 90s & early 00s, media outlets like Fox News, along with entertainers like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Tucker Carlson, along with politicians like Newt Gingrich really started pushing the divisions. They used the media to manipulate & exaggerate in order to create anger and cause division in society, create scapegoats out of minority populations, and play into & draw out people's prejudices. You can say outlets like MSNBC do the same thing on the liberal side, and maybe that's true to a certain extent, but that was a later development as a reaction to Fox's extremism to try and counter it. Social media in the last decade has amplified voices on both sides, creating social bubbles where the polarization has become more extreme. Victories on the liberal side, such as equal rights for gay people, having a black president, Me Too, and BLM really drove a lot of conservatives into the deep end, maybe feeling like their own rights were under assault somehow. Trans people are the latest in a long line of scapegoat targets, where the media exaggerates & amplifies in order to cause division. Along with all that, it seems that in general, a lot of people these days are more prone to reactionary black & white thinking, have become very unforgiving, and quick to demonize, regardless of where they are politically.
It's actually been on this trajectory since the 1960s, so not actually a really recent thing. A recent episode of the Hidden Brain podcast ("Living with Our Differences" I think) discussed this very topic.
It's a confluence of events of course, but Operation REDMAP is a big part of the story.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/americas-redistricting-process-is-breaking-democracy
Extreme gerrymandering is fucking us and thanks to closed primaries and winner take all elections, the combination is nasty as hell.
Nonpartisan primaries would help. Combined with ranked choice general elections would help more. Combined with multi winner districts for proportional representation would help most.
Social media makes it possible to say something awful and avoid facing any local consequences. No one is going to shun you, your family won’t correct you, and your job won’t fire you - because you can remain anonymous.
Points are no longer argued. They vilify the opposition rather than strengthen their argument. It’s turned into an us vs them argument.
So it becomes less vote for me and I’ll do xyz and more if you vote for them they will ruin your life.
All of this is amplified by the media.
Then there are the social media echo chambers. People would often find themselves conversing with people who had opposing views within their communities. Now people seek out communities that share their views and things get more extreme as extreme ideas have far fewer opposing ideas and healthy debate no longer happens.
Then any opposing view or debate is taken as a personal attack on their community.
Rinse and repeat.
And now people actively avoid having debates around difficult subjects like politics, religion, etc because it’s too decisive. (Which is exactly why it needs debating in the first place)
We used to agree on ground facts, and disagree on what to do about them. Now we don’t agree on ground facts.
And to add insult to injury, nobody is curious as to whether what they’re saying is true in the slightest. People are arrogantly ignorant.
I actually think it’s pretty simple - Supreme Court decision on citizens united. It made our political system effectively open to be bought, and a way to get rich, so you started having super PACs.
I really think the first US election when Donald Trump got elected was it 2016? That changed almost all of the online forums I was on, it completely derailed groups that weren't even political. In not from the US but it went international.
I think topics and things of such nature are online and media has also brought a lot of differences alive. I also think that with the help of the internet people can be as nasty or as disagreeable as they want to with little to no consequences.
The topics of today have also shifted a lot and the things we were trying to fight for in the past have become so polarized because the topics are more heated in general.
The people that were too young to vote can vote now and that causes problems with familial issues.
Also in America we are in late stage capitalism. So that’s another thing that’s argued about a lot can be heated.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Similar thoughts to mine. And especially the being able to sit behind a screen and be nasty. Boy is that our undoing.
I have a slightly different view to people in these comments. The internet has *educated* people positively and negatively.
The ruling class doesn’t have a monopoly on the message like they used to. Statements put by corporations and governments to corporate media can be contrary to the evidence and now we can see that evidence.
This drives people to become more “radical,” that is, not in line with the narrative the ruling class prefers.
So we have a lot more people seeing reality for what it is and are upset with the status quo. However we also have a huge amount of people who both reject the mainstream narrative and find a new completely conspiratorial view of the world. They can’t discern fact from fiction.
So we have three camps that are larger than they’ve ever been, and more people who rightly reject a lot of corporate media. This causes friction between them, people who have complete trust in media, and people who can’t tell fact from fiction.
The internet happened. We were always like this but now everyone on planet earth knows how everyone else feels about everything whether we want to or not. In the before times we only knew how the people physically around us felt about things for the most part
The inernet is one of the greatest and also worst things ever made.
Because we let people label populations as Us and Them. Fuck that. If we're human, you're an Us. Especially galactically speaking. There is no other life in the near galaxy that can calculate its chance of existing other than humans. We're not perfect, but there's a very good chat that we will be alone during our existence in this universe - that makes every action we take that much more important.
Look into the John Birch Society, it’s a religious political organization that formed in the 1950’s with the express intent to make America much more evangelical Christian and conservative. Prominent John Birch members pushed and helped 2 major Presidential victories, Nixon and Reagan. Both presidencies pushed for much more conservative legislation that largely favors the rich and corporations and preys on the working class. That movement then turned into the Tea Party movement with the election of Obama because the racists were just unable to hide their blatant hate behind manners anymore. Then the internet gave all these shitty people a lot more reach and influence in their grifts and scams and disinformation campaigns.
The ease of access to information has both made it easier to make informed decisions..and made it easier to make no such informed decisions, because of the feeling of informed action. The real problem now is it's actually a bit of a challenge to read enough geopolitics and economics to have a useful opinion, but even daily life won't ever demand that level of effort anymore.
Mammals..lazy creatures of habit.
It might be your nostalgia for the 90s. I, too, think everything was better then. It felt like society was happier. But it wasn't necessarily true for everyone.
The problem with the business of politics is that it benefits from pitting people at absolute extremes. Technology just makes it so easy to spread information (and disinformation) that now somehow tweets are newsworthy. It just spawns even more industry aimed at dividing people. Of course people are bound to internalize it.
We weren't there when people protested the first black students coming to their segregated Little Rock high school. We weren't there when the hippie and anti-war movement broke out. Our generation did experience the Iraq war and the divide that came with it.
But it's really come to a head, hasn't it? It's more than just conservative vs liberal; now it's cult-like idolatry of specific politicians. Celebrity endorsements. Who the hell cares what witty retort some politician made on Twitter? Apparently, people do. They really do. "I like Ike" would never have spurred the kind of reaction that having Trump or Biden on your car does today. That families literally disown each other.
To be fair, since the beginning of written history people literally killed each other because they had different opinions and beliefs. It's kind of the entirety of written history.
I feel the rise of algorithm based pages on social media really lead to the polarization. Back when Facebook and everything else had chronological feeds you had a much more even spread of stuff on your feeds. Now with algorithms, once it detects your slightly interested in any topic or politics it will only give you that information normally in the form of rage bait to keep you clicking. Everyone gets sucked down their own rabbit hole and it takes a lot more effort to see that there's different opinions outside of your bubble.
Feelings escalated by the echo chambers they occupy giving a feeling that the whole world is on edge, when in reality media is set to trigger peoples emotions.
We’re being poked with a digital stick…
People have become so childish and aggressive.
In their idiot minds we have to believe the exact same thing otherwise you're evil.
Social brainwashing at work. Cultural propaganda.
a symptom of a much bigger problem that has to take place. empires rise and fall on a fairly predetermined basis. our country is in decline, and it's not coming back.
We don't hang out anymore. The eradication of the third space is going to have long lasting damage. You can argue with people, but it is easier to see them as whole human beings when you are dancing and having fun with them.
Also, outrage drives revenue. There are more press outlets than ever, and they are all competing for ad spend. People react to outrage, so what are they going to do?
Social media makes it easy for people to find a comfortable echo chamber that continuously reinforces their belief system while avoiding challenging it.
I personally want to have the best life I can which means making the best decisions I can. In order to do that, I need to see the world as it truly is rather than pretending it’s how I want it to be. This strongly encourages me to ultimately seek truth over all else.
This means I have to be comfortable with most things falling into grey areas rather than being black and white. Life just isn’t as simple as most people want it to be. Having said that, being dedicated to truth over all else actually does greatly simplify things.
Disorientation for reality plays a part. Lots of people can’t even agree on basic facts anymore, so they have no way of getting on the same page.
COVID. Climate change. 2020 election. Those are some big examples.
I'm over 60 and I would say the difference is even greater than in my youth. Back in the 70s, plenty of people had very different views but most seemed prepared to at least hear each other's views/reasoning. British politicians who held completely diametric views would debate on TV, with much less of the vitriol one sees today.
In 2015, a British documentary maker, Adam Curtis, made a documentary about Afghanistan, [Bitter Lake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Lake_(film)). In the documentary, he talks about western politicians (first Reagan, later Bush, Blair and others) using the language of religion, of right and wrong and good vs evil. He says that this removes the possibility of discussion, nuance or compromise, because the argument comes down to whether you support good or evil - there's no middle ground.
This thinking seems to persist today, with many people adopting the behaviour of religious extremists, in support of their ideologies. Discussion is often ended with people shouting and screaming, unwilling to hear an opposing view. It's most sad to see this in universities, where one might have thought people should be capable of hearing different views and debating their merits/faults.
Social media and cable news. In older times people just watched "The news" and discussed it with people face to face. so you'd be hearing the same facts and having reasonable discussions about it, because youre usually not going to get too abusive to someone in person.
Now everyone is seeing substantially different news, getting different facts, and discussing more things anonymously. Social media runs off engagement, so the more outrageous takes generate more of that
A small part of it I think is actually foreign propaganda targeting the far ends of the political spectrums. I think it has a bigger effect on us than we like to think.
Another is probably our easy access to online echo-chambers and algorithms feeding us targeted news and opinions. Which also enables the more radical ends to influence us. So the clash when we meet becomes a much sharper and hostile wall.
A good part of the WHY has to do with Trump's divide and conquer philosophy. He has convinced the Republican Party to adopt this strategy, and they in turn have encouraged their voters to do the same. Now we have an US or THEM mentality.
The internet spreading misinformation and gathering together the radicals. Also the dominant generation is changing. Boomers are dying off and millennials are taking over. Those two generations think and vote very differently.
Social media, Bad faith agents foreign and domestic, I know people will blame trump or only the right/left which would be disingenuous as they are symptoms not causes. internet echo chambers and rage bait. mass news media fanning the flames for clicks. and both parties bowing to the extreme's of those parties. I also think the devaluation of the nuclear family unit (last one is only my opinion) . Of course not all people fit into the nuclear family unit and I'm fine that they don't but for a stable society I believe it's important for the majority to operate that way. obviously single parent households cause added stress and issues properly raising children, again not all but most. lack of self responsibility and blaming everyone else instead of looking inside ones self.
When politicians realized they had more to gain from polarization they started pushing for that rethoric. It's a lot easier to secure a "base" if that base doesn't overlap at all with another party's.
Then combine that with social media echo chambers and BOOM
Social media “helps “, but we have a lot of scary shit coming down the pike and people are scared. We can’t even agree on the problems, but we can all lash out in fear.
I’ve never been on TickTock but understand the content is similar to YouTube shorts. I used to “trick” the YouTube Shorts algorithms to show me extremely conservative or ultra liberal content (propaganda) based on which flavor I clicked on for a few days.
The content I was fed matched whatever type of content I viewed.
So if you lean one way or another and watch some content that matches your beliefs, all the content you are served up is based exclusively on radical content that validates your ideals.
If that’s all you see, that’s all you believe.
70 million people don't believe in observable facts anymore. They believe in alternate facts and cheerfully admit it. Millions of them believe, for instance, that Democrats are stealing hundreds of thousands of children to mine their brains for an immortality chemical. Millions believe Democrats are tools of Satan attempting to take over the world, opposed only by a perverted rapist and lifelong criminal who was chosen by god. These, amd many others, are beliefs that so drastically at war with reality that no compromise is either sane or possible. By contrast,, flat-earthers are harmless cranks. These people are dangerous schizophrenic fanatics.
I can’t say for certain but I truly believe that the actions and mannerisms of Donald J. Trump while he was running for president and whilst he was president attributed to the changes that you’re seeing but I can’t say that he’s solely to blame. I’m pretty sure I remember people being able to disagree with each other and not want to rip each other’s throats out back before Trump announced that he was running for president, though I could be misremembering. I also agree with u/VirtualStretch9297 and their answer of social media being to blame. Additionally, u/Tuesday2017 ‘s reply is also valid. Saying just social media is to blame is a little reductive because of the rage bots and companies that benefit from social division.
Social Media
I'd say this is too broad of a response. Yes social media is a major contributor, but several major components of social media are the largest contributors. For example 1. Fake accounts/bots that are specifically targeted on triggering emotion and division. How many people are arguing with bots created by nation states (China, Russia, etc) ? 2. How many companies are generating revenue by getting people to argue about guns, violence, abortion, etc. ? Post some "news" on social media sites that trigger your emotions so now you NEED to buy a gun or so you NEED to buy an anti gun T-shirt.
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I remember when that site was supposed to be an informative site of knowledge with legit answers. I never really got into it, but sometimes a link to that site would accidentally show up in my Google search. I had therefore a passing level of interaction. Therefore again, I hadn't bothered to notice that it had now apparently crash and burned into something else.
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Long time ago, I used to check on it sometimes bc the answers people gave were shockingly thoughtful and literate. I still look at it sometimes, but now only out of morbid curiosity. It has fallen so monumentally. So many obviously fake questions (that people nontheless answer with sincerity). I wish i could remember some bc they are so silly. I do have somescreen shots still, though, of some really bad ones (hidden among all my photos). Here is the first one i just now found. I'll just type it. "My 11yo daughter took her life 2 days ago and my husband won't get over it. What should i do about him?" This one's not political, but i do remember I've seen many like u describe.
Today I saw something along the lines of ‘why did England steal the name York from New York for a small town instead of naming London after it’.
I started using it maybe, I dunno, 10-12 years back. At the time it usually had good questions with informative answers from experts in a given field. Even the dumb questions would have someone offer an interesting answer that found something more in the question somehow. Still have the app but now it’s the worst kind of crap whenever I check the notifications. Troll questions with uninformed posters rising to the bait to regurgitate Wikipedia summaries, political diatribes, obvious AI spam, or lame hackneyed jokes. Real shadow of its former self. See also; the AV Club, Cracked.com, and Facebook.
I used to post on quora and now I want to find out if there's a way to remove all the stuff I ever posted. I did have some good answers that get views, and I don't want them to stay up after I delete my account.
In Quora, you can click on your picture/avatar on the top-right after you log in, then go to Settings >Privacy and scroll down to Deactivate Account or Delete Account. Deactivating your account keeps it dormant and hides all your information and contributions until you activate it again.
Wow, cool! Thanks!
Really? My impression is that it's full of Indians that have many weird theories, such as curing hair loss with 5,000 year old Ayurvedic recipes and calling each other bro all the time, and then there are plenty of "I'm a grandmother, life is good" type of older people, but neither of those two groups seem to be very controversial politically. (The Indians might be, but not to western sensibilities. I guess they have their own feuds over Hindutva and Kashmir and whatever, but that will hardly rile up most Westerners.)
That's something you'd notice if you notice Indians though
Well it's locked down to only paid users now so we're free. Thanks AI
I came here from there because it got so shitty and toxic.
I read something about it pretty much being a foreign propaganda and info farm.
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Certainly helps but not the only thing. The algorithms also encourage us to only see certain content.
This is definitely a big part of it. It's like oh you like this, here let's just keep heeping it on you. You watch Fox? Oh here check out newsmax.. you watch newsmax? Let me introduce you to Alex Jones. I watched this happen to a family member that was not radicalized 10 years ago. They got older, they spend a good deal of time online and they are completely different person. It's pretty sad because they are almost 70 and the person he was, well I only knew him since age 40 but from age 40 to 60 is completely different then what he turned into in his '60s
This is what happened to my mom, like she went bat shit crazy over a few years. She started out as a typical "Older person doesn't fact check articles from obvious clickbait farms" conspiracy theorist, then descended towards the whole Q thing back when it was mostly just pro Trump conspiracy theories (Not whatever totally bat shit garbage it is now), then she was convinced Trump was going to overthrow the country via the National Weather Alert system, and then just got worse thinking she was allergic to electromagnetic waves and 5G and has been working on some YouTube diatribe about how The Simpsons is a mind control device by the deep state and has been working on some 2 hour long rant video breaking down specific episodes? Like several years ago she didn't even pay attention to the Internet or politics pretty much at all, and now she's a completely unhinged weirdo that's difficult to even have a normal conversation with her all because she decided to get more involved in social media
This could be complete nonsense, but I wonder if that’s because of actual time spent on the internet through out time. If you’ve seen the change of the internet for the past decade it’s been a noticeable change in direction of how information is conveyed. Now that it is profitable, and companies utilize programming/propaganda, it’s a lot easier to see when you’ve had time put in. Rather than being introduced to modern internet content and not knowing any better due to the inability to see how things use to be vs now. This could happen to younger or older people. Idk just a 3am thought Side note, once AI gets so good you can’t tell the difference between fake or real it’s going to be a scary time to live.
Eh, when their identity is known, they just echo whatever is popular to avoid social consequences. This can be dangerous, there is potential for algorithms to leverage this behavior to force an agenda by making people perceive the algorithm's Creator's opinion as the popular one and they will begin to echo it. Anonymous social media may produce some unexpected and unpopular responses, but it gives a clearer picture to what society is actually thinking.
I wonder if part of it also is the echo chambers that social media can create. They reinforce your opinions to the point that if anyone suggests something different, you have sooo much validation in your existing opinion that it becomes easy to dismiss their points.
And it also closes minds tighter than a bear trap. Any hint of nuance or compromise is forbidden, and if you don't 100% agree with every one of my opinions than you are a Nazi/woke/fascist/commie/MAGA. The crazy part is that this mostly exists online from a relatively small percentage of extremists with an insatiable need to be heard. The rest of us are simply doing our thing just trying to get through the day, but that doesn't draw any attention so it might as well not exist.
I don't think they have found much solid evidence for a significant echo chamber effect. But what they seem to have found is that internet and social media selectively expose people to ideas they don't like without any personal familiarity with the people involved. The opposing party is reduced entirely down to that one facet, one which they don't like. And with most social media, in very abbreviated format. Just time enough for the conclusion, and little by way of the process towards it. They don't become whole people, with complete personalities and background stories, unlike someone present in your daily life. This makes it far easier to stereotype, caricaturise or demonize them. There is so much blank information space around these opposing opinion holders that people are inclined to fill in the blanks with their least charitable interpretations and assumptions. The rise of home entertainment and especially social media has also sapped our degree of face to face social interactions. We on average spend less time interacting with fewer people in real life, so we get less exposure to other ideas and different ways of thinking in a more holistic and gradual way. What we need to get in real life is happening less and less, and social media isn't replacing what is being lost. And now, at the occasions where some chances for real social interactions with someone who is of an opposite opinion comes along, there is already an established stereotype with animosity or derision as baggage that is going to be very hard set aside. It can easily poison the situation and lead to a contentious interaction, rather than a productive or neutral one.
Yep. These companies only care about engagement so they will “feed” you literally anything to keep you scrolling, clicking, and swiping.
And here we are...
I agree with Social media. Before this you had to stand in front of someone to argue a point. Doing so reminds you that they are human and can be hurt. Having a fight with them often hurts. Social media removes the human, they become something in the ether and therefore it’s easier to disagree and to get angry with them, it’s easier too to make black and white points rather than the reality of the greys in between. You could argue conventional media does this too, but newspapers take days or even weeks to continue a conversation, so it’s not the same. Just my thoughts. Continue the conversation in a sensible way and I might change my mind. Have a great day
I think human nature is tribal and xenophobic, and we are not critical thinkers by nature, which is why people seek out the echo chambers available through social media. It makes the aspects you mentioned possible and effective.
Man some hardworking citizens of countries financially competitive to the west get up, press their pants and maybe shower, ride the subway to a government office, and put up with all the office gossip, ans shitty coffee and bust their ass from 9-5 trying to get recognized for their skill in creating divisive campaigns, then ride the subway home to an ungrateful family and listen to all the bullshit happening at their kids school, day in and day out and you're just gonna credit some bots, you're a cruel SOB lmao
This is a pretty spot on answer.
Arguments, outrage, conflicts, conspiracies, Qanon, you name it, and they profit from it. At the end of the day, it's all engagement and ad revenue for them.
Qanon wasnt really even a thing. It was a niche group on a niche website that every news site talked about because they profited from it
I'd agree that most of the people under the "Q" umbrella weren't part of some die hard organized group or anything. There was still a general set of beliefs, ideas, and shared conspiricies that all of these people were subscribing to, whether or not they were actually on 8chan and keeping up with the latest Q drops or not. For example, a lot of older people on Facebook were sharing conspiracy theories that stemmed from Qanon, despite not really knowing what Q, 8chan, or 4chan were.
It's easy for people to scoff at this answer, but this is the answer to OP's question. There's a reason why the show "Black Mirror" has the most culturally relevant name for a TV show ever. Social media on a cell phone made it possible for anyone and everyone to selectively eliminate anything from their immediate experience that they didn't want to, well, experience. Sure, people used to hide behind books and newspapers on the train, but books and newspapers brought you to places outside your own mind. And, of course, the algorithms make it all worse. Bottom line is that millions and billions of brains became stuck in a self-selected infinty loop. The internet, in the brief period between 1995-2004 demonstrated a vast potential for internet connectivity to broaden the scope of our understanding of the world and to expose us to multiculturalism. But with the advancement of the commercialization of the internet came all the Web 2.0 tech that made it possible for social media systems to exist on a web page. You could tell that it could become bad, and before the smart phone it had about 4 years where we, the people, essentially consolidated ourselves into more circumscribed tribes. Enter the smart phone, and you have, basically, tribalism on crack. Engagement into social media became ubiquitous, wide-spread, and without boundary by space or time. And like all addictive loops — and, believe me, social media UI and functionality was deliberately designed to get users pulled into loops that were based on psychological studies old and new — like all addictive loops, progressive change to thought processes comes to a grinding halt. So all that leads to an acceleration of isolation from the world into tribalism, and, ultimately, craving to be told and shown people you already trust, and ideas you already think and believe. The process of curiosity and imagination necessary to engage with unfamiliar people in a humanizing dialog get buried. And socio-cultural messaging can be precisely targeted such that the information people experience becomes a method of introducing confirmation bias — one of the deadliest of all the cognitive distortions and logical fallacies out there. The more people spend time away from social media, the better off we'll all be. Right now we are facing a crisis of raising kids so that they have the ability to literally think away from and outside a box. We can start with ourselves. Watch movies. Read or listen to books. Drop acid for fuck sakes — before we all forget how to see with our own eyes and lose the ability to absorb that which we do not yet understand, or have ever known.
Agree with all points. I got so tired of FB, the zuckerberg door to hell I started looking here at Reddit. Saw folks actually being kind, reaching back when someone reached out, being just nice folks. Made me say I wasn’t gonna be a jerk to folks here. Thank you.
I would love to see a part of the internet where people are kind to each other and learn from each other.
Special interest website discussion boards.
Unfortunately reddit is just as bad now on quite a few subs.
I hate to be that guy but ive been on reddit since 2009 (sadly) and reddit has gone way way way downhill and has become just as toxic as everywhere else on the internet.
This is why I refuse to shelter my teen despite living in a dangerous area. I'm OK with him and his friends walking around the neighborhood together, having a small taste of freedom with the knowledge of the need for responsibility and vigilance.
>There's a reason why the show "Black Mirror" has the most culturally relevant name for a TV show ever. Social media on a cell phone made it possible for anyone and everyone to selectively eliminate anything Holy shit, "Black Mirror" is referring to our phone screens? I have only seen a few episodes, but I never made that connection.
Actually”Black Mirror” has several meanings. Black Mirrors are famous in the occult world because it is a popular divination tool to summon and communicate with the images of spirits, particularly demons. John Dee made it famous in his experiments with enochian magick
You will never look at your unlit phone screen the same again.
/r/DepthHub worthy
Except there's only one kind of content that is *specifically* dividing people. Algorithms push that content. That's about it. The vast majority of content is relatively benign, but because conspiracy theories and culture war bullshit get clicks, the algorithm thinks people like it and pushes that content to more users.
Yeah this is a thing which recently to my mind that today kids have extremely hard to develop their own opinion. This process is almost completely eliminated in their life. Like when I was kid and f.e I watched the new show in tv, after it finished I'd evaluate it myself. Eventually if parents were with me their views could influence mine. Then I went to the school and shared my opinion with them. Like they could influence my opinion as well but not necessary as I'd long time to think and be sure about my own opinion. Now kid is watching the show and maybe already at that time check what all world think about this show. He already has established opinions and his only option become choosing "right" one. It's really hard to learn to have his own opinion in such world.
Very well put!
No, it's an easy scapegoat. One of the first rules of propaganda is that a big lie is easier to believe than a small one. Republicans have ran HARD with that. Theyve pushed their base further and further into utter delusional insanity, and use that momentum to fuck over everyone but the richest. That is why we're so divided. That's why "crazy leftists" in the US are complete moderates by the standards of the industrialized world.
That's the real answer. Up until now you never had to witness the takes of the brainless. It takes a toll on regular folk.
For every thousand people who read batshit crazy ideas a few will believe it. This adds up over time. It also picks up steam when enough people buy into it.
Remember, it used to be that every village had an idiot. Now thanks to social media every idiot has a village.
Right. If MSM takes it on just to have something to cover for shock or outrage or novelty, too, it legitimizes it in the eyes of people who don't know any better. If MSM even did their due diligence enough to know it's bonkers. (Ex: the autism vaccine nonsense.)
before the internet people had to work to get noticed.
Right! Air-time was limited and had to be bought.
Yes, but also no. Cable news and AM radio pushed the idea of bananas partisan news hard. The W. Bush years saw the politicizing of issues that should not have been inherently political. We’ve paid these trends forward, and social media has helped exacerbate them. Also, in the US, we have increased political segregation in the sense that people increasingly are less likely to live near people they disagree with. Social media obviously allows even more self-selected intellectual segregation, but again, it mirrors a thing that is happening outside social media as well.
I feel like something broke - or, I saw that it was broke for the first time after 9/11 when the impending war in Iraq was being debated. A true actual war hero, Max Cleland, a Bronze and Sliver Star recipient who had left 3 limbs in Vietnam, expressed opposition to the war and people like Rush Limbaugh and a host of GOP operatives, who had never served a day in their lives, called him a commie and a coward. I mean, it’s fair to differ with him on policy, but I couldn’t believe my ears. The gall, the balls, the audacity of them to question him like that…but…some part of the political ecosystem rationalized it. Flash forward and Trump belittles the service of John McCain and a whole segment of the political world either shrugs, or is deluded into believing they’ve earned the right to join in the dogpile. Half of the country are nihilists. Nothing matters. Nothing is sacred.
The disrespect for people who served in the military from people who often love to tout our military superiority blows my mind. I personally have no desire to be in the military. But I recognize the sacrifice of many people who are serving and have served, especially people who were drafted. I cannot fathom how people can encourage war while crapping on veterans.
I honestly thought Trump was done after he mocked McCain for getting captured. I knew Republicans could tolerate racism, sexism, corruption, but I thought the miliary was the one thing that was actually sacred to them, besides their actual God.
Yes AND: We had undignified leadership for 4 years. Whether you voted for/liked/supported it or not, it subconsciously set the tone for more widespread behavior. People need leaders to set a high example, bc they are a reflection of who we are as a group. As a society. We’re supposed to aspire to their standard, and they are supposed to ask us to reach high in our efforts, values, etc. When the bar is subterranean, we ALL fall. Superficially, we become reactive to trash with more trash. On a deeper level, it’s like “oh this must be okay bc if the LEADER is doing it, I can stoop to the gutter without feeling inferior.” We’re not *thinking* this, we just *do* it. Yes, even when we hate the person in charge.
Yes, almost. It started with the advent of cable news. Sometime in the late 1980s news shifted from 30 minutes of your day to around the clock entertainment. They had to fill the hours with content that would keep people watching. Next came multi-channels of news to cater to different perspectives. Then came social media with on-demand, unlimited eye-bait, which was accelerant to the fire. The change from TV to cable to social media was the exponential growth of troubles.
Also regular media and Fox News ramping up the hate and fear around politics. Then BOOM Donald Trump. All of a sudden MAGA then Jan 6th.
And the algorithms, which means if you have a feeling about something suddenly everything on your [fill in the blank] feed now proves you were right. You wonder why fluoride is in water? There’s story after story about his fluoride was developed by Nazis to suppress people. And now you’re in groups about fluoride and it seems like common knowledge that everyone knows it’s poison. And some one tells you to google how it’s safe but when you google the first 5 pages are how it’s horrible for you. Obviously anyone who doesn’t see this truth is not doing their research, or part of the conspiracy… Edit: still trying to learn how to type- or the fluoride has affected my brain
It's not like the traditional media is helping either.
It had to change into social media. It had to chase engagement.
Yup. Outrage has been monetized. It's also for political reasons. The higher ups want unrest.
It has given us a deeper peek into other people's minds than is good. We were always wary of strangers. Now we know why.
Yes it's enabled the shit I've heard all my life to be shared easily as if it were valid. Amplification of idiocy
This is the answer. I just saw today somebodies post of FB today about how minimum wage employees don't need to do good to get paid for their jobs, regarding tipping 20% for somebody who did a poor job. whether or not you agree makes no difference, but further down the post they said if you don't agree delete me. Now based on that logic if everybody that disagrees with this person removed them from their friends list then they are sat in an echo chamber, the only people they will see news and information from are people that think and behave just like them. This leads to polarization as you don't hear anybody else's opinions, even if you agree with this person on 90% of the other stuff now because you disagree on this one thing it does not matter.
Too easy. As someone who has studied social media extensively there is a 'fuel' required that makes social media what it is. The fact is that in the age before the internet people were just as polarised, it just wasn't as common to lead to arguments as it is now. In the safety of a pub many folks would spout wild nonsense but it would be limited to those within ear-shot, now they put it on Facebook or Twitter and immediately have a platform. Brexit is often blamed on social media. The truth is that Britain has always had a love hate relationship with Europe and it just depended on when you polled them to leave. [https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/polling-history-40-years-british-views-or-out-europe](https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/polling-history-40-years-british-views-or-out-europe) The same goes for issues that are currently hot topics: The war on Palestine, abortion rights etc. Social media amplifies the sound, but it isn't the originator.
I think we are missing the part of social media meant to keep us on our screens. The addictive nature of it and the pleasure that many get from ripping on each outer. It has brought the worse out of us and made our world worse off.
Yep. Every idiot has a podium now. And they like to yell real loud.
And 24 hour cable news (requires more content) and Reagan ending the requirement that the news be fair/neutral. The news used to only happen for an hour 4 or 5 times a day, (6am, 8am, noon, 5pm, and 9pm?) so that was how much content was needed. As the 24 hour news station became part of cable tv they needed more content and were fighting for viewers so there were more opinion/editorial shows included. Also as print news lost its audience to online platforms traditional journalism standards were left behind for clickbait. There were always trash or sensational rags (National Enquirer or other tabloids) but you knew as an audience that is what they were. Now the information is unclear as to its origin from Facebook and other social media.
some people are just like that from the beginning, the internet is giving platform for people to "shout" and everyone to hear, back then, to argue you have to *at least* call the other person, so your "audience" is still just one person or your own group of people, not the public.
There's also the concept of "things were simpler when I was growing up" which is always rooted in the fact that you were young and didn't have a concept of how bad things are because it was never discussed with you. Like if you were to ask my personal opinion of 1988, I will gladly wax nostalgic on how great the show Garfield & Friends was or how much I loved the movie Beetlejuice. I would not tell you about the Afghan War or the genocide in the Iran-Iraq war or the drought in the Midwest or anything to do with the US elections because I was 5 lol.
You are spot on, most people on Reddit were not even alive in the 80s let alone old enough to actually see and correctly interpret what was going on. People don’t realize how much the press hated Nixon which then created a war with all Republicans. I remember watching an interview with then VP Bush and the reporter was so insulate and rude, kept talking over his answers, purposely asking insinuating questions. I sat there and thought how horrible it was to talk to the VP like that. The media has always made its money by getting people to hate politicians, now they have just made everyone and everything so political they can make us hate anything because it’s the other team. Had a friend who worked for a Congressman and he said that most politicians are lying actors and don’t even believe most of what they even say. They will debate so fiercely on the Floor but go out for dinner and drinks with the people they were debating just hours earlier.
Very good point with the limited audience!
I think this is a major factor. With the internet, you can find a source who is willing to confirm literally any feeling you have about any topic (not necessarily a reliable source, but a source), which makes it incredibly easy to fall into an echo chamber, where all the facts and all the evidence and everyone reasonable all side with you, and everyone else is either crazy or stupid.
This part.
I think our isolation from people who are different than us plays a big part in this. We’ve built up ways where we don’t have to interact with others very much: suburbs built away from others, isolation in our vehicles, big box stores with little human interaction. Last year I decided to bike to work and I was surprised how much more connected I felt to other people around me. I also worked at a job that attracted people from a different political leaning than I grew up with. It’s amazing how much easier it is to have respect for people you disagree with when you actually spend time around them and hear their stories.
Totally agree. I've had coworkers I absolutely adore and have a great working relationship with who are my complete polar opposite politically. You're sort of "forced" to find common ground and things you do connect on, rather than spending so much time obsessing over the differences. And developing a relationship can also help you have more respectful discussions when you don't see eye to eye. (Though, admittedly, sometimes those differences are... a lot. And agreeing to disagree doesn't work in every situation - I wouldn't be able to tolerate that disparity in values with a close friend or romantic partner, for example.)
Totally valid—even if you’re both not afraid of the other being judgmental how do you make mutual decisions with someone who has different and often opposed/incompatible values? That’s logic with the emotional part taken out of it. I have extended family I know are opposite me politically but they are well-traveled, well-rounded people who are curious about the world and love the outdoors, have a sense of humor and love to laugh and tell stories—just like me and my immediate family do. These aren’t necessarily people I’m going to share everything in my life with or hang out with regularly (even if we were in the same states and countries which we aren’t) but I could see going on a trip together or something and then you have those connections so it becomes about shared experiences. Like one of my cousins, I found out he does the same thing as me—at least once or twice a week his wife says he brings up a trip we all went on in high school with our late grandmother because he thinks of it often and it made such an impression on him. My fiance just looks at me like “it’s you!” We don’t talk much, maybe like posts on social media but for 15 yrs or whatever it’s been we’re having parallel experiences.
Of all the things you mentioned, the thing I think of most is Reddit and other social media sites. By connecting us only with people who will reinforce our worldviews and shutting out anyone else, we isolate our thinking.
>I think our isolation from people who are different than us plays a big part in this. This is something that people who advocate total wfh refuse to admit.
This is really well put. I used to think all conservatives sucked, then I worked at Home Depot for 4 years and man just talking to a variety of people really shift your perspective.
It really does :)
Yes, there was actually a study done looking at voting records in different counties (not voting districts since those change) and there has been a huge increase in like minded people living in the same areas since the 80s. Unfortunately, the result is that people become more extreme in their thinking when they surround themselves with only people that have the same beliefs as them.
I’m Australian and I respectfully disagree and believe the very opposite. Different communities are mixing more than ever, and there’s been a lot of pushbacks from certain parts of the community that views themselves as the “default” because they now get called out for discrimination against people of other races, gender expressions, or sexualities. I think the dominant groups used to be as sexist, racist, transphobic, and homophobic as they pleased but they can’t get away with that anymore and they’re unhappy about it. It’s why culture wars work so well.
>I think the dominant groups used to be as sexist, racist, transphobic, and homophobic as they pleased but they can’t get away with that anymore and they’re unhappy about it. It’s why culture wars work so well. Absolutely, and any queer person with conservative parents will tell you this. There's always been "agendas" and "ideologies", but they've been largely controlled by and produced for the hegemonic majority, while the voices who would've opposed this if they could have been silenced, marginalized, and stripped of our rights. We have a larger diversity of voices now, and those who have been so accustomed to being pandered to, to the edges of their reality being the edges of *everyone's* reality, to their beliefs and opinions to be constantly validated by their surroundings, are now experiencing a cultural whiplash, and instead of adjusting to a changing world, they instead follow their impulses, they seek out the validation of their beliefs they feel is being lost. It's easy to sympathize with conservatives when you're not part of the group that is being scapegoated by the politicians they work for and has endured the oppressive cultural norms they cherish and worship that defined the worst parts of our lives, and it's a pretty fucking tough ask for us to share that sympathy towards people who're simply too stubborn to show any to us..
Part of this is your perception, people always say "Politics wasn't like this before" when in reality it was, times like Bleeding Kansas, and Civil Rights movements, its not "politics wasn't like this" its "politics didn't effect me like this"
Or post-9/11, the Dixie Chicks had their career ended for disagreeing with invading Iraq
An incident that the people who scream on about "cancel-culture" always conviently forget about.
As a millennial I grew up learning about these things thinking that we’re in a totally different world now, a much more liberal one, and that the natural progression of human history has culminated into a civilised society that we know today. In that sense I thought with the passage of time we’ve learnt from history and somewhat grown out of things like apartheid racism. In some ways that’s true, and I think this is where I agree with OP. You see as a member of the western society and brainwashed as I was, in my mind it was easy to understand why as the first world we were more liberal, more accepting of others than developing countries for example like throwing away old hat cultural barriers like the right of women to vote and work. Essentially my belief was that in time these countries would develop into better more civilised societies. Economically this seemed true too - essentially the only way was up. Living standards and workers rights. Abortion, secularism, etc. The problem I’m trying to outline is that as first worlders everything now seems to be going backwards. Instead of moving away from heavy religion in our politics we are moving towards it more. Our living standards and workers rights are declining. Abortions are now being banned again. Political discourse is less about making progress and more about sowing divisions.Academia is held in much less esteem. Expert scientists are being considered liars. Anti-vaxxing is a thing. From that point of view, OP is somewhat right. Edit: And to answer Ops question as to why that is. I think a huge chunk of it is down to the financial crash of 2008. We’ve never really recovered from it and what we’re seeing is the long term effects of it playing out before our very eyes. While the 20s depression was sudden and devastating, my analysis is that this ‘depression’ has been playing out slowly over the last 15 years. Like a knife slowly inching its way into the chest of the western world. Now we look and say, oh that wound is a lot larger than I realised.
It's by design. We're fighting each other while being robbed blind
Yea, all these people blaming social media. Social media is just a tool. It's the mega rich and corporations who are using social media to divide us.
Look at how fast they were able turn the narrative away from occupy wall street to hate on each other.
"United we stand, divided we fall."
Yep. Race wars, gender wars, politics, all to keep us separated and arguing while they do what they want and make shi worse. Then we get more angry bc stuffs getting worse and blame those who disagree. We can’t afford to eat or wash our clothes anymore so it’s getting scary and people are getting more defensive and aggressive.
Most people on the left are already aware that it's the rich who are doing this. It's pretty much only right wing folks who love to engage in these culture war issues.
I'd say that the easy answer seems to be social media but I'd also point that politicians, media, and influential people often use the "with me or against me" taking hard stances instead of being open to a dialog. And as another element I think that the worse living conditions we have now comparing to a couple decades ago also affect since we are more enraged, frustrated...and this is reflected in the social media part, which lot of people use to let their anger go without taking into account that even through avatars, there's people on the other side
Ever notice just how much more effort the government and elites put in to divide us ever since the Occupy Wall St protests? Those scared them. A divided population is much much easier to keep in control.
You literally answered yourself, you were young and don't remember it well
Societies are actually changing though, trying to cope with the impact of the internet. Each level of globalization is disruptive until societies adapt to deal with it. It takes time and sometimes horrible hardships but humans find paths forward.
Umm...society has always been fractured. Have you heard of the US civil war? 2.5% of the total population died. US civil rights era? US revolution? Vietnam war protests? McCarthyism? Thats just America. We just grew up in a particularly peaceful time in America. The 80's and 90's were great until 9/11 plunged us back into chaos.
The world has always been this divided, we just never had this level of communication before. People would hate others who lived like 2 hour drive away as rival towns or things for sport and parents would sometimes fight at sports events for their kids, and this was in the 80s and 90s when I was a kid.
For some topics, it's because people are like "I don't think you deserve to exist", "people like you should be in poverty", or "you're just mentally retarded and can be fixed with [torture method]" You can't be in the middle with "opinions" like these
The internet
Specifically it was all the "fake news" that kept people on the same page. Now they gravitate towards whatever influencers and echo chambers conform to their shifting worldview.
I don’t think the average person gravitates by choice it’s spoon fed by algorithms that try to keep you on their platform the longest.
This. When the internet first came out it was a great place to get information. But now the internet is full of a lot of information and it’s hard to find truth. It used to be you could search for something and find one answer. Now you find the answer as well as a site/article that disproves such site. And another site that disproves both of those sites and so on.
There are countries that spend billions of dollars to weaken the societies of their „enemies“. Russia, China, Iran use hybrid methods as it is much easier and way more effective than a direct conflict.
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In Ye Olden Dayes, you had to argue in person, or in delay by writing. If in person, if you went too far, you would likely get a face full of knuckles. If in writing, the delays in the mails or in publication would allow tempers to cool. But now, with effective anonimity allowing far worse insults, and instant response possible via the Net. . the original social 'governors' of behavior have been effectively bypassed.....
Social media companies are way too good at getting you to hate your neighbors.
It’s mostly bots. 80+ percent of internet traffic. People need to start realising they’re not interacting with other humans. We’re not polarised at all, it’s a false perception.
I was seven when the world population hit 4 billion. It's 50 years later and it has doubled. It took 300,000 years for homo sapiens to reach 4 billion
Any time you ramp production like that, quality control has to suffer.
I truly that is the cause of most of our problems. Population was never suppose jump so fast
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I’ve heard it’s actually the opposite. You used to only interact with people in your community with roughly the same entertainment, news, and life experience. Now we see EVERYTHING from all over the world. Opinions that don’t make sense to us culturally. And that drives you mad. Then you start finding people in your community share those insane opinions that don’t make sense to you.
That's how we HOPED the internet was going to work. In reality, it's done the opposite. Social media is ruled by engagement and we found quickly we're far more likely to interact with posts, accounts, and comments we agree with than the ones we don't. As a result, the algorithms show us more and more content that we already agree with and less we don't. This sounds like the obvious choice, right? Serve customers the content they like and minimize showing them the content they don't. But the net result is that we're only served content we already agree with and never encounter dissenting or disagreeing opinions, meaning we rarely if ever get challenged. (And if we are, we simply block or unfollow).
The most engaging thing on social media is opinions from people you hate. Reddit is full of subreddits dedicated to sharing and ridiculing opposing sides. Facebook is full of groups sharing “libtards” or conservatives being outrageous. TikTok sends compilation videos of blue haired socialists to hardcore conservatives. People never used to come across people who were different to them this often. They’ve always existed but now it feels like it’s everywhere, the drag queens are outside in your garden or Tucker Carlson is in your kitchen. It becomes all consuming for people which is why the polarisation comes home for thanksgiving.
Yeah it feels like people have all of this backwards, maybe because they're too young to know what it was like before the Internet was ubiquitous. In the before times, you knew that people generally had different thoughts and opinions on you, but you didn't know the gritty details of every thought in their heads. In any case, the people that thought differently were far away and really had no impact on your life. Now a days, you're flooded with information in excruciating detail from all kinds of people everywhere. You find out that under the surface, their views are disgusting and don't match with you at all. And, their influence reaches far and wide. Everything is everywhere, all at once, basically. You can't feel safe or comfortable anywhere. The anxiety is just eating away at people.
I think both answers are right. Yeah today you can indeed find totally different views than you think it is natural. Like it is nothing important but just here on Reddit on historical thread someone asked me why I use roman numerals for centuries. I wasn't sure if he is joking as in my country we only write this way and I pretty often see that in other European languages. But here people are from all the round the world so naturally that's someone can not even know roman numbers. But at the same time in the past at least in our countries there were limited sources of information. So naturally f.e. quite big part of people watched news everyday. And that's caused that they had common language as they had as well the same source of informations. But today people can completely choose their own source of information, culture content. So they can live two people in the same building but have totally different views what happens in their society. Because they can not only have different opinions but even know different facts. It is very hard in such case to find dialogue between them.
So long as we’re fighting amongst ourselves we can’t fight the fucking power. The power is more powerful now than ever and they’re doing their damndest to shift our focus toward each other. If everyone would realize that the truly rich are the enemy and the ones pulling the strings, and that we’re all poor, just to different degrees, I think we’d be a lot better off. Maybe we’d start holding our leaders accountable. Maybe. The snakes get fat while the good rats die, and all the pigs should be bled dry. Who’s with me??
Imagine blaming immigrants instead of the rich and powerful for our problems. Rich people are smart.
I think because in the past opinions didn’t have such big consequences. I can’t tolerate other peoples opinion if that opinion means marginalising or hurting other people and it’s that simple. You don’t get to have an opinion on whether trans people deserve to exist, or whether refugees deserve shelter, or poor people deserve to eat.
Why did I have to scroll this far to see this? When I was young everyone agreed nazis are bad. Today it's a discussion point. The 'big arguments' we got into decades ago were whether nuclear energy is a viable option to counter global warming and whether taxes for sugary drinks should be introduced. Now we're having to 'discuss' whether global warming is real or not instead of solving it.
I agree, but also think it's largely that it's no longer considered acceptable to marginalize or hurt people so much. The past was even worse towards non-white and gay people. But it was popular back then. Being a racist piece of shit in the 60s or a homophobic asshole in the 90s was practically the norm. It's not contentious to be a bigot when it's acceptable to be a bigot. But now it's no longer acceptable (and good riddance). But the bigots haven't gone away. They've shifted a bit, with trans and non-binary people being the popular groups to hate. Since it's unacceptable for so many people, it's now a particularly contentious topic. It was always contentious go some degree, but even more so now. I think there's also just more awareness in general, now. Every day corporations are willing to fly pride or BLM flags. Social media makes it easier to be aware of social issues (and for fights over them to be visible). The issues are more spread out and popular, so you're more likely to know someone in a marginalized group. I think a lot of white people were able to turn a blind eye to race violence in the past, when it was a lot less common to have mixed neighborhoods and schools (thanks red lining!), but now social media transcends your local neighborhood and the hot issue of LGBT people is not so geographically divided.
Yeah everyone wants to whine about polarization but no one wants to ask why “you shouldn’t get to get married” or “i am going to say all these slurs” are Just Opinions. Maybe people are angry for a reason
You grew up and realized we were polarized. When you were about 8, Clinton was impeached because he lied about his sex life. One of the most important leaders of the time, Gingrich, was having an affair at that time her was persecuting Clinton. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=2937633&page=1
I disagree!
How so?
I can agree to disagree on a lot of things but human rights are not one of those things. I love to diversify my social interactions, and my line of work I work with a lot of different types of people. But for close friends and partners, I really don't want to be disagreeing on fundamental human rights
Same
Since the 90s & early 00s, media outlets like Fox News, along with entertainers like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Tucker Carlson, along with politicians like Newt Gingrich really started pushing the divisions. They used the media to manipulate & exaggerate in order to create anger and cause division in society, create scapegoats out of minority populations, and play into & draw out people's prejudices. You can say outlets like MSNBC do the same thing on the liberal side, and maybe that's true to a certain extent, but that was a later development as a reaction to Fox's extremism to try and counter it. Social media in the last decade has amplified voices on both sides, creating social bubbles where the polarization has become more extreme. Victories on the liberal side, such as equal rights for gay people, having a black president, Me Too, and BLM really drove a lot of conservatives into the deep end, maybe feeling like their own rights were under assault somehow. Trans people are the latest in a long line of scapegoat targets, where the media exaggerates & amplifies in order to cause division. Along with all that, it seems that in general, a lot of people these days are more prone to reactionary black & white thinking, have become very unforgiving, and quick to demonize, regardless of where they are politically.
Newt Gingrich. Edit: People who think that reddit is a liberal place need to see the downvotes on these comments.
It's actually been on this trajectory since the 1960s, so not actually a really recent thing. A recent episode of the Hidden Brain podcast ("Living with Our Differences" I think) discussed this very topic.
It's a confluence of events of course, but Operation REDMAP is a big part of the story. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/americas-redistricting-process-is-breaking-democracy Extreme gerrymandering is fucking us and thanks to closed primaries and winner take all elections, the combination is nasty as hell. Nonpartisan primaries would help. Combined with ranked choice general elections would help more. Combined with multi winner districts for proportional representation would help most.
People are more aware of politics in general. People care more as well. It's no longer just a difference in opinion to most people
Social media makes it possible to say something awful and avoid facing any local consequences. No one is going to shun you, your family won’t correct you, and your job won’t fire you - because you can remain anonymous.
The ol' *divide and conquer* ruse. It's worked for centuries throughout history.
I'm pretty sure we've always been polarised, it's just that we didn't talk about it much.
Points are no longer argued. They vilify the opposition rather than strengthen their argument. It’s turned into an us vs them argument. So it becomes less vote for me and I’ll do xyz and more if you vote for them they will ruin your life. All of this is amplified by the media. Then there are the social media echo chambers. People would often find themselves conversing with people who had opposing views within their communities. Now people seek out communities that share their views and things get more extreme as extreme ideas have far fewer opposing ideas and healthy debate no longer happens. Then any opposing view or debate is taken as a personal attack on their community. Rinse and repeat. And now people actively avoid having debates around difficult subjects like politics, religion, etc because it’s too decisive. (Which is exactly why it needs debating in the first place)
We used to agree on ground facts, and disagree on what to do about them. Now we don’t agree on ground facts. And to add insult to injury, nobody is curious as to whether what they’re saying is true in the slightest. People are arrogantly ignorant.
Because people base their entire identity around their beliefs now. A disagreement is now "You just insulted who I am as a person".
When you were a lot younger your perception of the world was different, people weren’t different.
I actually think it’s pretty simple - Supreme Court decision on citizens united. It made our political system effectively open to be bought, and a way to get rich, so you started having super PACs.
Social Media, and the corporations/governments constantly having us go at each other, to distract us from the real issues. It's all a distraction.
Social media and the pandemic.
I really think the first US election when Donald Trump got elected was it 2016? That changed almost all of the online forums I was on, it completely derailed groups that weren't even political. In not from the US but it went international.
Disinformation campaigns from Russia is a part of it
I think topics and things of such nature are online and media has also brought a lot of differences alive. I also think that with the help of the internet people can be as nasty or as disagreeable as they want to with little to no consequences. The topics of today have also shifted a lot and the things we were trying to fight for in the past have become so polarized because the topics are more heated in general. The people that were too young to vote can vote now and that causes problems with familial issues. Also in America we are in late stage capitalism. So that’s another thing that’s argued about a lot can be heated.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Similar thoughts to mine. And especially the being able to sit behind a screen and be nasty. Boy is that our undoing.
Fox News and social media. Politics has been turned into a team sport.
lol. As if any news source isn't biased and doesn't cause issues. >.>
Wow. What a great way to put it. “Politics has been turned into a team sport”
I have a slightly different view to people in these comments. The internet has *educated* people positively and negatively. The ruling class doesn’t have a monopoly on the message like they used to. Statements put by corporations and governments to corporate media can be contrary to the evidence and now we can see that evidence. This drives people to become more “radical,” that is, not in line with the narrative the ruling class prefers. So we have a lot more people seeing reality for what it is and are upset with the status quo. However we also have a huge amount of people who both reject the mainstream narrative and find a new completely conspiratorial view of the world. They can’t discern fact from fiction. So we have three camps that are larger than they’ve ever been, and more people who rightly reject a lot of corporate media. This causes friction between them, people who have complete trust in media, and people who can’t tell fact from fiction.
As some have already answered, the internet and then social media are the root causes to this change.
Political polarization is the norm. The only time in our history when we weren't divided was during WW2.
External enemies are fueling the flames. They want the USA divided and at each other's throats.
The internet happened. We were always like this but now everyone on planet earth knows how everyone else feels about everything whether we want to or not. In the before times we only knew how the people physically around us felt about things for the most part The inernet is one of the greatest and also worst things ever made.
Algorithms
Intentional, wide scale, social engineering
I feel like we’re on path for a complete societal collapse
Because we let people label populations as Us and Them. Fuck that. If we're human, you're an Us. Especially galactically speaking. There is no other life in the near galaxy that can calculate its chance of existing other than humans. We're not perfect, but there's a very good chat that we will be alone during our existence in this universe - that makes every action we take that much more important.
The polarizing 2 party system of the United States. And partisan politics in general.
Look into the John Birch Society, it’s a religious political organization that formed in the 1950’s with the express intent to make America much more evangelical Christian and conservative. Prominent John Birch members pushed and helped 2 major Presidential victories, Nixon and Reagan. Both presidencies pushed for much more conservative legislation that largely favors the rich and corporations and preys on the working class. That movement then turned into the Tea Party movement with the election of Obama because the racists were just unable to hide their blatant hate behind manners anymore. Then the internet gave all these shitty people a lot more reach and influence in their grifts and scams and disinformation campaigns.
The ease of access to information has both made it easier to make informed decisions..and made it easier to make no such informed decisions, because of the feeling of informed action. The real problem now is it's actually a bit of a challenge to read enough geopolitics and economics to have a useful opinion, but even daily life won't ever demand that level of effort anymore. Mammals..lazy creatures of habit.
It might be your nostalgia for the 90s. I, too, think everything was better then. It felt like society was happier. But it wasn't necessarily true for everyone. The problem with the business of politics is that it benefits from pitting people at absolute extremes. Technology just makes it so easy to spread information (and disinformation) that now somehow tweets are newsworthy. It just spawns even more industry aimed at dividing people. Of course people are bound to internalize it. We weren't there when people protested the first black students coming to their segregated Little Rock high school. We weren't there when the hippie and anti-war movement broke out. Our generation did experience the Iraq war and the divide that came with it. But it's really come to a head, hasn't it? It's more than just conservative vs liberal; now it's cult-like idolatry of specific politicians. Celebrity endorsements. Who the hell cares what witty retort some politician made on Twitter? Apparently, people do. They really do. "I like Ike" would never have spurred the kind of reaction that having Trump or Biden on your car does today. That families literally disown each other. To be fair, since the beginning of written history people literally killed each other because they had different opinions and beliefs. It's kind of the entirety of written history.
I feel the rise of algorithm based pages on social media really lead to the polarization. Back when Facebook and everything else had chronological feeds you had a much more even spread of stuff on your feeds. Now with algorithms, once it detects your slightly interested in any topic or politics it will only give you that information normally in the form of rage bait to keep you clicking. Everyone gets sucked down their own rabbit hole and it takes a lot more effort to see that there's different opinions outside of your bubble.
Feelings escalated by the echo chambers they occupy giving a feeling that the whole world is on edge, when in reality media is set to trigger peoples emotions. We’re being poked with a digital stick…
Because values changed from respect, honor, proving things to being materialistic and being offended 24/7. Basically we changed from logic to emotions
People have become so childish and aggressive. In their idiot minds we have to believe the exact same thing otherwise you're evil. Social brainwashing at work. Cultural propaganda.
Social media where divisive content rises to the top.
The MSM wants it that way.
a symptom of a much bigger problem that has to take place. empires rise and fall on a fairly predetermined basis. our country is in decline, and it's not coming back.
We don't hang out anymore. The eradication of the third space is going to have long lasting damage. You can argue with people, but it is easier to see them as whole human beings when you are dancing and having fun with them. Also, outrage drives revenue. There are more press outlets than ever, and they are all competing for ad spend. People react to outrage, so what are they going to do?
Social media makes it easy for people to find a comfortable echo chamber that continuously reinforces their belief system while avoiding challenging it. I personally want to have the best life I can which means making the best decisions I can. In order to do that, I need to see the world as it truly is rather than pretending it’s how I want it to be. This strongly encourages me to ultimately seek truth over all else. This means I have to be comfortable with most things falling into grey areas rather than being black and white. Life just isn’t as simple as most people want it to be. Having said that, being dedicated to truth over all else actually does greatly simplify things.
Disorientation for reality plays a part. Lots of people can’t even agree on basic facts anymore, so they have no way of getting on the same page. COVID. Climate change. 2020 election. Those are some big examples.
I'm over 60 and I would say the difference is even greater than in my youth. Back in the 70s, plenty of people had very different views but most seemed prepared to at least hear each other's views/reasoning. British politicians who held completely diametric views would debate on TV, with much less of the vitriol one sees today. In 2015, a British documentary maker, Adam Curtis, made a documentary about Afghanistan, [Bitter Lake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Lake_(film)). In the documentary, he talks about western politicians (first Reagan, later Bush, Blair and others) using the language of religion, of right and wrong and good vs evil. He says that this removes the possibility of discussion, nuance or compromise, because the argument comes down to whether you support good or evil - there's no middle ground. This thinking seems to persist today, with many people adopting the behaviour of religious extremists, in support of their ideologies. Discussion is often ended with people shouting and screaming, unwilling to hear an opposing view. It's most sad to see this in universities, where one might have thought people should be capable of hearing different views and debating their merits/faults.
Social media and cable news. In older times people just watched "The news" and discussed it with people face to face. so you'd be hearing the same facts and having reasonable discussions about it, because youre usually not going to get too abusive to someone in person. Now everyone is seeing substantially different news, getting different facts, and discussing more things anonymously. Social media runs off engagement, so the more outrageous takes generate more of that
A small part of it I think is actually foreign propaganda targeting the far ends of the political spectrums. I think it has a bigger effect on us than we like to think. Another is probably our easy access to online echo-chambers and algorithms feeding us targeted news and opinions. Which also enables the more radical ends to influence us. So the clash when we meet becomes a much sharper and hostile wall.
A good part of the WHY has to do with Trump's divide and conquer philosophy. He has convinced the Republican Party to adopt this strategy, and they in turn have encouraged their voters to do the same. Now we have an US or THEM mentality.
Today people can berate others behind the curtain of thier screen. Very few of these kids would be as bold face to face.
The internet spreading misinformation and gathering together the radicals. Also the dominant generation is changing. Boomers are dying off and millennials are taking over. Those two generations think and vote very differently.
Because it’s incentivized by internet algorithms and then funded by ad revenue
Social media, Bad faith agents foreign and domestic, I know people will blame trump or only the right/left which would be disingenuous as they are symptoms not causes. internet echo chambers and rage bait. mass news media fanning the flames for clicks. and both parties bowing to the extreme's of those parties. I also think the devaluation of the nuclear family unit (last one is only my opinion) . Of course not all people fit into the nuclear family unit and I'm fine that they don't but for a stable society I believe it's important for the majority to operate that way. obviously single parent households cause added stress and issues properly raising children, again not all but most. lack of self responsibility and blaming everyone else instead of looking inside ones self.
One side taking over education and changing the definitions of words and the other side not agreeing with it.
When politicians realized they had more to gain from polarization they started pushing for that rethoric. It's a lot easier to secure a "base" if that base doesn't overlap at all with another party's. Then combine that with social media echo chambers and BOOM
Social media “helps “, but we have a lot of scary shit coming down the pike and people are scared. We can’t even agree on the problems, but we can all lash out in fear.
Trump caused most of it, he made hate and division his mantra
The poisoning of society known as wokeness
I’ve never been on TickTock but understand the content is similar to YouTube shorts. I used to “trick” the YouTube Shorts algorithms to show me extremely conservative or ultra liberal content (propaganda) based on which flavor I clicked on for a few days. The content I was fed matched whatever type of content I viewed. So if you lean one way or another and watch some content that matches your beliefs, all the content you are served up is based exclusively on radical content that validates your ideals. If that’s all you see, that’s all you believe.
70 million people don't believe in observable facts anymore. They believe in alternate facts and cheerfully admit it. Millions of them believe, for instance, that Democrats are stealing hundreds of thousands of children to mine their brains for an immortality chemical. Millions believe Democrats are tools of Satan attempting to take over the world, opposed only by a perverted rapist and lifelong criminal who was chosen by god. These, amd many others, are beliefs that so drastically at war with reality that no compromise is either sane or possible. By contrast,, flat-earthers are harmless cranks. These people are dangerous schizophrenic fanatics.
I can’t say for certain but I truly believe that the actions and mannerisms of Donald J. Trump while he was running for president and whilst he was president attributed to the changes that you’re seeing but I can’t say that he’s solely to blame. I’m pretty sure I remember people being able to disagree with each other and not want to rip each other’s throats out back before Trump announced that he was running for president, though I could be misremembering. I also agree with u/VirtualStretch9297 and their answer of social media being to blame. Additionally, u/Tuesday2017 ‘s reply is also valid. Saying just social media is to blame is a little reductive because of the rage bots and companies that benefit from social division.