ArgumentSocial Media and the Populist Moment
Many people, especially of the progressive persuasion, accept the “narrative that invokes the ‘sewer’ of social media to explain everything from climate-change skepticism to anti-immigration sentiment, portrays Russian trolls and YouTube stars as the crucial actors of the populist era,” Ross Douthat writes. Studies show, however, that because educated liberals themselves spend more time on the internet, they assume, mistakenly, that people who support populist positions are equally internet-influenced. Secondly, and more importantly, this view downgrades the obvious real-world forces driving populism’s appeal.
Many people, especially of the progressive persuasion, accept the “narrative that invokes the ‘sewer’ of social media to explain everything from climate-change skepticism to anti-immigration sentiment, portrays Russian trolls and YouTube stars as the crucial actors of the populist era.”
Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times that
Instead, the evidence in [two recent studies] hints at a different scenario — in which because educated liberalism is increasingly so very online itself, ensconced in its own self-reinforcing information bubble, liberals end up analyzing populism exclusively through their digital experience even when that analysis is obviously insufficient.
The assumption that a better social media ecosystem would help dilute illiberal voices leads to two mistakes, he writes:
· First, you end up downgrading the obvious real-world forces driving populism’s appeal, persuading yourself that an algorithmic tweak or better fact-checking will deal with deep trends — economic stagnation, social crisis — that would exist with or without fake news.
· Second, you lose sight of the ways in which your own information bubble is a potential radicalizing force — including for people observing it from outside, for whom it makes political liberalism seem like an airless world filled with hyper-educated ideologues.
