Causes of Polarization: News Media Dualities and Social Media Conflict
Long before social media came on the scene, the mainstream news media was exacerbating social and political divisions. Decades of framing news into sensational and emotionally inducing black-and-white issues between trumped-up adversaries to garner ratings, subscriptions and now clicks, have conditioned the masses to see the world in rigid either/or terms.
Left versus right in politics is one of the more dualistic framings. In reality, most issues are complex and have numerous perspectives and angles—not just two pitted more or less equally. In combination with social media which amplifies and aggregates outrage, hard news dualities have become especially lethal to our society’s equilibrium. The crows are now coming home to roost.
The nature of communication that takes place on social media encourages and amplifies, rather than resolves, conflict. The posts there, necessarily brief and impulsive pronunciations, are argumentative—and not conversational. Criticism and complaint, lazy and facile forms of thought, are the rule. The lack of physical person-to-person dialogue, which naturally causes us to diplomatically censor ourselves to avoid physical conflict, encourages us to attack others without restraint and thus serious consequence.
Exposure both to our own viewpoints, and those that are contrary, impact us similarly when using social media. On the one hand, algorithmic silos keep us within our tribal belief systems—to which we tend to virtue signal to indicate our allegiances, and to garner status. On the other, when we are encountered with a difference of opinion, we tend to double-down and entrench into our own.
As the most vocal people on social media tend to also be the more opinionated and extreme in their views, it creates the illusion that the world is split into two large camps on all issues—and that those issues themselves are primal. That is in an illusion. Most of us are moderate and usually mildly opinionated. Social media makes opinion-mongers appear more powerful, intimidating and part of camps that are larger than they actually are, drawing their opposites in to attack.
As a result of this, digital and mainstream media are now acting as accelerators of the other variables of polarization described in previous posts, affirming ever deeper cycles of misunderstanding and more extreme rhetoric. This also dovetails with the factor directly related to politics: the rise of ideological extremes.
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Read our next post in the series: Causes of Polarization: The Appeal of Extremes and their Triumph in Politics.