DEMOCRACY WATCHCan Reforming Social Media Save American Democracy?
When social media exploded in the mid-2000s, retweeting, sharing and liking posts appeared to give average citizens the power to share their opinions far and wide. The problem, according to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, is that online social networks didn’t really end up giving everyone the voice that many thought it would. “It empowered four groups who take advantage of the viral dynamics of social media. That is the far right, the far left, trolls and Russian intelligence,” he says.
When social media exploded in the mid-2000s, retweeting, sharing and liking posts appeared to give average citizens the power to share their opinions far and wide. The problem, according to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, is that online social networks didn’t really end up giving everyone the voice that many thought it would.
“It empowered four groups who take advantage of the viral dynamics of social media. That is the far right, the far left, trolls and Russian intelligence,” says Haidt, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
“So, these four groups have had a great time since 2009, using the new viral dynamics of Twitter, Facebook and other platforms. At the same time, the middle 80% of the country feels intimidated and attacked and discouraged and disgusted. And so, they speak up less.”
Successful democracies are generally bound together by strong institutions, shared stories, and wide social networks with “high levels of trust,” but social media weakens all three, according to Haidt.
“You go from having a merely polarized democracy, which we had in the early 2010s, to one in which the norms change to be all-out war everywhere, all the time,” he says.
“You can’t have a deliberative democracy when there is no room for deliberation. And you can’t have a liberal democracy when the illiberal left and the illiberal right dominate their respective factions.”
Samuel Abrams, a professor of politics and social sciences at Sarah Lawrence College in New York and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, agrees that social media has been bad for democracy.
“This stuff has been as dangerous as can be. It’s been incredibly bad for the country, and incredibly bad for free speech and dissemination of ideas and real discourse and democratic norms and civility. It’s been a disaster,” says Abrams. “It’s absolutely contributing to our polarization because you’re not getting multiple views. You’re not getting viewpoint diversity. It’s very hard to hear the other side.”
Making Change
If he had to venture a guess, Haidt envisions a future America that looks a lot like a Latin American democracy — that is, “an unstable democracy built with flawed institutions that command little popular respect.”
“I think we’ll have many more constitutional crises, declining trust and increases in political violence and political ineffectiveness,” he says, “unless we make these major changes.”
