BREAKING THE SOCIAL MEDIA PRISM

Social media imprisons us inside echo chambers—or does it?

After conducting a more or less standard sociological survey whose methodology is laid out in an appendix, Bail, who directs the Polarization Lab at Duke, offers a fruitful suggestion: The echo chamber effect, by which social media users surround themselves with those who agree with them politically—social media arguments are almost always about politics—may in fact represent a chicken-and-egg conundrum. “How,” asks the author, “could we be sure that people’s echo chambers shape their political beliefs, and not the other way around?” His findings suggest that both may be at play, to varying degrees. Some users become radicalized over the course of weeks and months of internet arguing while others are firebrands online but apparently moderate in real life. As Bail writes, “the rapidly growing gap between social media and real life is one of the most powerful sources of political polarization in our era.” Interestingly, he notes, people who were experimentally exposed to contending points of view tended to become more hardened in their beliefs. The explanatory power of the echo chamber—a term, Bail notes, that predates the internet by decades—goes only so far; the real source of polarization lies within ourselves. Even more interestingly, he observes, most Americans, left to their own devices, avoid the subject of politics and tend toward a moderate view. What pushes people to extremes is the narcissistic thrill of spouting off and gathering likes as a reward. Meanwhile, the moderate majority, shouted down, stays quiet. “Status seeking on social media creates a vicious cycle of political extremism,” writes Bail, and that extremism correlates closely with a lack of social status offline, which makes online ugliness all the more attractive.

A study that raises as many questions as it answers but provides useful pointers for understanding online (mis)behavior.