Divided We Stand: Social Media Disrupts American Democracy

Last Tuesday’s election proved social media isn’t real life. It rewards strident, extreme, irreconcilable statements, often made to a foe who isn’t reading. It makes viral the most ridiculous and contemptible, rather than the most persuasive. It thwarts those who are honestly curious and undecided. Instead of compromise and conciliation, it rewards “end of discussion” and unfriending. Worst of all, it tells you what you want to believe.

Facebook and Twitter provided us with personalized, convincing, raw, abundant, and totally wrong evidence of the national mood. Not only did they promote histrionics and hysteria, they efficiently kept the bulk of opposing viewpoints from soiling our screens. That’s what we want, their builders say. That’s what we click on. That’s what we deserve.

I spent the week leading up to Election Day in the northernmost part of Maine, my home state, diligently going door to door for the state’s Democratic party to get out the vote. State-level politicians I met in October had told me there’s no substitute for knocking on doors and meeting your voters in their own homes. You’ll learn things no poll will tell you, they promised. It’s truer than I would have thought possible.

Over time, the caricature stereotypes thrown around online seemed less and less connected to anyone I’d actually met. I realized the Internet plays up the outliers as the norm. It glosses over everyday concerns like employment and healthcare in favor of the most divisive issues: race, gender, religion.

My online friends glibly explain to me that the weak turnout for Hillary in northern Maine was because rural rednecks are racists who won’t vote for a woman. My online friends are idiots. They haven’t looked it up that local voters vanquished Mitt Romney in favor of President Obama four years ago. Or that these supposedly backwards backwoods natives rank their lady U.S. Senator, Susan Collins, second only to Bernie Sanders in constituent approval. She, a Republican, pushed hard for a bipartisan gun control bill after the Orlando massacre. Yeah, that wasn’t in your News Feed.

On foot, I learned the folks up along the Canadian border are largely union Democrats. But many are practicing Catholics, some of whom will tell you in person that Clinton’s overt pro-choice stance made them unsure, ambivalent about voting this year. A minority of Republicans chomping at the bit to get to the polls outvoted them. The Internet, driven by lazy data, simply paints most of Maine red. We don’t even get an It’s Complicated.

I myself am a social media dupe, too. I was as misinformed as Nate Silver on Donald Trump’s chances for the White House. I had canvassed largely Democrat-voting areas, and my social media feeds had long ago purged themselves of Trump supporters for my convenience. There was surely a Trump Facebook somewhere, but it must be kind of small since I never see it, right?

It’s human nature not to change our minds, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. We discredit the source. We twist the facts to fit our pet narrative. Proven wrong, we find a way to feel even more right. Those who swore only KKK sympathizers would vote for Trump are now changing their worldviews to OMG there are 60 million secret neo-Nazis in America! Social media is its own reality: If enough people share a falsehood, it might as well be true.

I’m disappointed in an online world I had a hand in building. In our vision, social media would make it easy to learn who was voting for Trump and why. It would be easy to see that an Obama-sized turnout for Hillary wasn’t going to happen. The technology, after all, has the power to connect anyone to anyone. Yet like our political system, the Internet seems destined to create two quantum Americas that exist in the same space and time, but cannot communicate with each other.

I like to goad people of all political stripes to go offline and spend time meeting and talking to real people who aren’t like them. Do some canvassing, I say. You might change some minds. You’ll certainly refine your own. Who am I kidding? Our ever-increasing reliance on social media as primary information source means even we door-knockers retreat into our one-sided worlds, expelling from our networks anyone who doesn’t profess enough hate for the enemy.

I blame social media, I do, for herding Americans onto two ships that are drifting further and further apart. We huddle at our respective railings, watching each other recede into the billowing waves, each group convinced the other sails into oblivion. Our elaborate signal flags, meant to reach across the turbulent, widening gulf, only repeat our own vessel’s chatter back to us as the others, fervently waving their own flags to themselves, vanish over the horizon. I wonder if we’ll ever meet again.