How Social Media Affects our Opinions and Extremism.
For most of human history people have only been with others who share their beliefs and ideals, lack of travel and communication designated that everyone live in communities where everyone shared the same religion, race and moral beliefs. This eventually changed, and in the modern day people are much more connected. However, it seems that online people remain divided and unwilling to converse with people who don’t agree with them or who may try and change their views. In this article I want to explore if social media and the spiral of silence can help lead to extreme viewpoints.
The best website to explore this idea is Reddit, due to it featuring individualized communities where people can converse and share opinions. Reddit is divided into many different subreddits where people can make posts and comments about certain topics. The site’s owners largely allow subreddits to self-govern, meaning that what is and isn’t allowed is entirely up to the admins of that subreddit (exceptions being extreme cases where the site has decided to remove entire subreddits due to extreme hate speech and/or doxxing).
The biggest problem is correlation vs causation. Are people affected by what the community thinks, or do they simply prefer to spend time with people who already agree with them? There is also the issue of the spiral of silence, due to Reddit’s voting system, people may fear expressing contrarian beliefs and risk lowering their point or “karma” score.
To try and understand the first issue, I looked at examples of communities with extreme beliefs in the real world, such as the KKK. What I found is that when people are given the opportunity to converse with somebody that doesn’t already agree with them they are more willing to change their beliefs. One example of this is Daryl Davis, an African American blues musician who convinced over 200 KKK members to leave the organization: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes. While this far from proves anything, it does seem to lend credence to the idea that our communities have heavy influence over our viewpoints.
The second issue is the effect of the spiral of silence. According to a report taken from Pew Research Center. People are less willing to discuss controversial matters online than they are in the real world. “People reported being less willing to discuss the Snowden-NSA story in social media than they were in person — and social media did not provide an alternative outlet for those reluctant to discuss the issues in person.” (http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/26/social-media-and-the-spiral-of-silence/) This would lend credence to the idea that the spiral of silence affects what people are willing to post to their chosen subreddit.
People being unwilling to post beliefs that risk going against the grain of the community could mean that more extreme viewpoints become popular. This means that those viewpoints will define what people see when they first view the community and whether or not they choose to stay. There is also the fact that subreddits oftentimes ban people for posting opinions that don’t agree with the viewpoints of the admins and mods.
To conclude while it remains inconclusive, and likely will for the near future. It appears that social media helps to protect extreme viewpoints and make them seem more popular due to people only spending time with people that agree with them and avoiding saying anything that could get them downvoted or banned. While in the real world, people have to work to avoid people that disagree with them, in the online world its simply a matter of clicking away from any dissenting opinion.
