Is Social Media Exacerbating Political Polarization in the US?
By Brianna Hartato
Social media platforms have become powerful facilitators of public discourse. Their significance is made clear in Packingham v. North Carolina, in which the US Supreme Court justices identified social media platforms as the most “important places for the exchange of views,” and held that access to them could not be limited. The prevalence of such platforms has led to concerns about their possible role in exacerbating political polarization in the US. Measuring trends in affective polarization — the extent to which citizens feel more negatively towards other political parties — in twelve OECD countries over the past forty years, scholars Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow, and Jesse M. Shapiro found that the US has experienced the most significant increase in polarization in comparison to countries like Switzerland, Canada, and New Zealand. Political polarization has undoubtedly increased in the US, and academics and politicians alike have pointed to social media as a driving force.
Most prominently, Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein argued that social media is detrimental to democracy as its personalized design impedes exposure to opposing views in his book #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Recognizing that political polarization predates social media, social psychologist Jonathan Hiadt nonetheless claims that such platforms have weakened the three most significant forces that hold together successful democracies: social capital, strong institutions, and shared stories. Speaking about social media’s role in the 2016 election, President Barack Obama similarly asserted, “The capacity to disseminate misinformation…to paint the opposition in a widely negative light without any rebuttal…has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it difficult to have common conversation.”
Sunstein’s, Hiadt’s, and Obama’s concerns are not new. Writing in 1939, a time when authoritarian regimes ravaged Europe, prolific American political commentator Walter Lippman emphasized that in a democracy, “Opposition not only is tolerated as constitutional but must be maintained because it is in fact indispensable.” Decades apart, prominent figures have adopted similar lines of reasoning and advanced that exposure to and exchanging diverse viewpoints is critical for democracy. In the Cyber Age, some have embraced a technologically deterministic stance in suggesting that such platforms are to blame for potentially causing and exacerbating political polarization.
Despite so, the position that social media platforms or the internet are responsible for increasing political polarization is unsupported by empirical evidence. Another study by Boxell, Gentzkow, and Shapiro demonstrates that political polarization has increased most among those older than 65. In other words, they found that the age group that uses social media the least has become the most polarized over the years. In addition, media scholar Andrew M. Guess sought to determine whether the internet created “echo chambers” or facilitated selective exposure to politically congenial content. Guess utilized large-N behavioral data on Americans’ media consumption in 2015 and 2016; he then constructed a measure of media diet bias and used machine classification to pinpoint individual articles linked to political news. Measuring the similarity of Republicans’ and Democrats’ media consumption, Guess discovered almost 65% overlap in the two groups’ distributions in 2015 and 50% overlap in 2016; this implies that most Americans across the political spectrum have moderate media diets. Nevertheless, Guess highlights that a small group of partisans is responsible for a disproportionate amount of traffic to ideologically biased websites. Consequently, he posits that if “echo chambers” exist, they affect relatively few people who have tremendous influence. Still, these findings show that neither social media nor the internet are the primary causes of political polarization in the US.
If not social media, then what explains the rise in political polarization? While this question has been explored in James E. Campbell’s Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America and Ezra Kline’s Why We’re Polarized, one plausible explanation is found by looking at when partisans consume media and are most politically attentive. Examining national election surveys across seventy years and changes in the economic news environment catalyzed by the 2008 financial crisis with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, scholars Jin Woo Kim and Eunji Kim demonstrate that partisans alter their media consumption based on whether or not news events are convivial to their political party. Focusing on temporal dynamics, the scholars’ findings highlight that partisans can become more polarized by “subjecting themselves to biased information flows even if their media diets are biased.” In turn, the time when individuals select to consume and expose themselves to certain news or political information may instead drive political polarization.
Ultimately, the studies described highlight that there is a tremendous discrepancy between empirical evidence and widespread beliefs regarding the role of social media in causing or exacerbating political polarization in the US. In this way, the complexity of measuring the effects of social media on political polarization should be recognized and embraced. More broadly, the empirical findings highlight that it is imperative to practice critical thinking and resist adopting a technologically deterministic mindset.
