> And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world?
That's a point I've made myself before, and I think there is some truth to it. Social media can't explain the high and increasing degree of US political polarisation, because other countries (including other English-speaking countries) consume social media about as much and yet have less polarisation, and don't show the same degree of increase in it either. The real explanation must lie in other aspects of US culture, or the US political system
That is because most other countries have multi party systems.
The polarization is still there, but spread thin amongst various factions.
In the US, people are shoehorned into R or D.
Edit : I would also like to point out that the OP is a bit confused between cause and effect. In the US, the effect is deep polarization. However, the cause is the power of mass communication, especially misinformation and blatant lies, that FB enables and does not bother to control. The cause is common to all the countries in the world, the effect varies due to various other factors, one of them being the presence of a multi-party system.
Take the example of India. FB has a large and active user base. However, India being a chaos of various identities, cultures, regions, languages, etc, divisions in society are less pronounced as there are a large number of players (politically, regionally, locally, etc)
Other than that, the effect of FB in Europe is also less visible due to the same reason. Every EU country has mostly multi party systems, leading to spreading thin of the hate and focus.
Because Canadian electoral system is also FPTP just like US and UK. Our election results already reflect this: decades upon decades of essentially only two parties ever being in government and almost no coalition governments.
Most European countries have functional multiparty governments because they have some variation of proportional representation.
The UK doesn’t have a true multi-party system. First-past-the-post elections all but ensure there are only two dominant political parties. It’s really only been a game between Labour and Conservatives for longer than most of us have been alive.
The Lib-Dems were part of Cameron’s coalition government if memory serves. Ironically the former leader of that party (Nick Clegg) now works for … Facebook.
And, you have deep divisions there. If you perceive one single enemy, all your efforts will be focused on that one. If you have three, your efforts are spread out.
This makes the divisions, rhetoric and social environment seem less severe, but the problems are just as big.
Not sure if I fully agree with that argument. With the US being a superpower, the stakes are high and this invites unique foreign influence via social media. That foreign influence could be state coordinated or just come from regular people who have an emotional stake in US politics. I've seen it myself, outside of the US people are more concerned about US politics than their own and engage with it on social media which only adds to the pile of insanity. Also, because of limited bandwidth, only a small handful of topics tend to monopolize, and as such they are usually US topics.
I wasn't aware there was any question that foreign groups (state supported or otherwise) actively coordinate on Facebook to influence US political campaigns.
Most of the research and claims you see about bots manipulating people on social media fall apart when examined. For example they often rely on a badly trained ML model that labelled nearly half of Congress as "bots". This sort of thing is never admitted in the media - if you don't double check for yourself you'd never realize.
Another version of this is extremely sloppy methodology where users are labeled "influencer bots" for merely having certain foreign IP ranges and being active in discussions about certain topics.
Twitter in particular has been banning tens of thousands of accounts based on that flimsy and circular reasoning.
And because the affected people are locked out of the only system, that would realistically allow them to draw attention to the problem, they are all out of luck in bringing attention to their situation and the problem.
That's a good example of the problem. Well, it's not about bots, but the same definitional and logic problems are evident. The story defines "troll farms" as "professionalized groups that work in a coordinated fashion to post provocative content, often propaganda, to social networks". That description is so vague it could describe almost all news outlets and political parties, along with many charities. But, they aren't going to classify CNN, PETA or the White House itself as a "troll farm" although it would be easy to argue otherwise.
Facebook obviously has big problems with internal activists who are trying to convince the company to pursue an ever-spiralling purge against their ideological enemies, and good evidence of that is the unfalsifiable nature of the descriptions of the enemy.
I think the facts on the ground preclude the moral panic angle. Skyrocketing teen depression since 2012, a genocide in Myanmar, ethnic violence in India, a riot/insurrection borne out of fake news on election integrity, woke cancellation mobs empowered by Twitter and the power of wokeness over institutions, large amounts of vax hesitancy. All of these nasty things are circumstantially tied back to social media in one way or another.
I hate how "conspiracy" has been turned into a way to dismiss inconvenient truths.
There is a long and well established history of interference and manipulation of foriegn elections (often by the US). It predates social media and can't be just be blamed on facebook. Pretending this isn't happening is just burying your head the sand.
It isn't a "conspiracy" to think that the most influential elections in the world draws more attention and are more heavily influenced.
The political climate in the UK is pretty savage right now, Brexit pretty much split the country in two. I don’t think this is just a US phenomenon, especially given a lot of what happens in US politics bleeds into the rest of the world (which is why a lot of us follow it so closely).
...or, did tabloid-style "journalism" bleed from the UK to the US as they both reach new heights in fear-mongering and blaming the out-group to get rage-clicks as news organizations' incomes decline?
>The real explanation must lie in other aspects of US culture, or the US political system
First-past-the-post voting leads to a two party system which leads to more polarization. If you have multiple political parties, polarization can only go so far because there will be centrist groups working against polarization. In the US, there is no force pushing for centrism.
But it's also the sort of thing where you don't have to change the whole system all at once in one go. There are now two states that will use RCV for federal elections as well as many more local municipalities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_Un... ).
With any luck, these reforms can stick and hopefully expand— necessary steps if we're ever to end this political duopoly.
>There is absolutely no way either political party will allow a multi-party system to ever exist.
I've suspected for a while that the real secret to getting PR/MMP (=> multiparty) in the US is getting the Catholics on board. They're sick of the Trumpists and libertarians in the Republican Party but they'll never support the vehemently pro-choice Democrats. They should be obvious fans of a multiparty movement, and they have the political and media heft to move the needle.
Alas, I'm not Christian and my views are quite a bit left of theirs, so I don't think they'll listen to me. And most PR advocates have more in common with me than with the modal Catholic American.
That assumes a model where most of the electorate is politically moderate. A sort of "normal distribution" where the mean is centered around centrism. These days, the US electorate is highly polarized and the parties are responding in kind.
A bunch of models I've seen suggest that from 2016 onwards negative polarisation means that it's turnout of each side's base, not independents, that's deciding elections now.
However the resulting wobbling isn't much different in practice outcome-wise so far because turnout tends to depend on level of outrage which depends on how long the other side's been in power, it's had much more significant of an effect on how elections need to be fought.
(much information about this can be found by googling 'negative partisanship' or 'rachel bitecofer' +/- the word 'model', I'm not including specific links because which outlets/articles/etc. will be preferable to a given reader will likely vary so providing a guide to finding a range to select from seems more useful than my trying to select on others' behalf)
They don't have to be in the center, they just have to make the lesser-evil argument. They just need to express to the swing voters that the other party is even more extreme.
I despise first-past-the-post, but it does not force two party systems. Look at the UK and Canada, who have two parties able to form a government, but multiple viable parties.
If you want a culprit, blame the lack of whipping that both US parties do as a matter of political culture. Since you have historically had all these cuckoo crazy subgroups within both parties, it has meant that other parties simply do not have the bandwidth to exist.
However, in the last four years, the Republicans have started to blindly follow their leader as a matter of pride. I see that as the one positive change the Trump era has brought; yes the man to bring it about has been a disgrace, and has used it for vile purposes, but if both parties stick to following their political platforms and leaders far more, the US can end up in a better place.
First-past-the-post voting is the primary cause in the US. It doesn't automatically result in a two party system everywhere if there are other features of the government that work against it. The biggest reason Canada is different is that they have a parliamentary system that elects their Prime Minister while the US has the Electoral College which elects our President.
> The biggest reason Canada is different is that they have a parliamentary system that elects their Prime Minister
Quebec is another big difference–there is nothing really comparable in the US. Spanish is the closest thing the US has to French, but there is no state in which Spanish outranks English–and even if predominantly Spanish-speaking Puerto Rico successfully gains statehood, Puerto Rico would be only a medium-sized state in terms of population, so it will not be able to have the same impact on US national politics that Quebec has on Canadian.
The US has a lot of cultural diversity, but its cultural diversity is spread out thinly, rather than being regionally concentrated – as a result, that cultural diversity can't be reflected in the political sphere in the same way that it is in Canada or the UK or Belgium or Spain, where the distinctive culture of specific regions of the country causes them to develop their own unique party systems.
The big difference is as philistine implies: the two US parties are dramatically more democratic internally, so there is just far less need for people to create new parties to begin with. By world standards the Democrats and Republicans are barely coherent parties at all. For instance they barely have any manifesto, instead presidents have manifestos, but that's meaningless if the party members don't agree hence why shit is always being "blocked by Congress" in the USA when you rarely see that in other countries. The two US parties are more like vague semi-stable alliances of people who don't really agree on much, that happen to march under a shared flag for the sake of convenience and due to FPTP.
Another difference: an outsider who isn't even a party member or who was actually a member of the opposing party, simply cannot run in open primaries in most countries. Yet both Sanders and Trump did this. Nor can they take over the party against the will of the representatives themselves, which is what Trump did. The closest equivalent in Parliamentary systems was Corbyn, which occurred the moment the rules were loosened to allow more open voting for who leads the party, and that nearly destroyed Labour. They have now changed the rules to re-establish the power of the MPs over Party leadership.
The USA will see more parties appear and compete if/when the two big parties develop internal cohesion, for example by insisting that the party leader/president is picked by Congress alone, and in which Congress members who defy the party line are kicked out of that party. Otherwise it's kind of meaningless to try and create a new party in the USA when the existing parties don't actually stand for anything to begin with. It makes far more sense to try and take one of them over.
I think you have the causality backwards. The two parties are so large and varied because the US system pushes us towards two parties. The coalition building happens within the party before the election (usually as part of the primary and convention). Other governments have coalition building that happens post election of the parliament as part of electing the Prime Minister. That means a vote for a minority party isn't throwing the vote away like it usually is in the US.
Well, that could be. It feels like two sides of the same coin though. The USA could use a more Parliamentary approach with tighter parties but more of them.
> For instance they barely have any manifesto, instead presidents have manifestos, but that's meaningless if the party members don't agree hence why shit is always being "blocked by Congress" in the USA when you rarely see that in other countries
I don't think that's really unique to the US. That's an inherent problem with presidential systems–the President and Congress are independently elected, and so they can be controlled by different parties, and even being controlled by the same party is no guarantee they will cooperate–and presidential systems are very common in the Americas–most Latin American countries have the same system. I'd be surprised if Latin American countries don't have some of these same problems with "political gridlock" that the US does.
This will sound dramatic, but could it be because the US is the most important market for both advertising and political disinformation?
Regarding advertising, for companies like Facebook, they may have billions of DAU but still derive the majority of their revenue from rich countries like the US. In 2020 the US and Canada were 45% of Facebook's revenue according to this random website I found: https://statstic.com/facebook-revenue-by-geography/ That's way more than the other regions in terms of $/user, so Facebook is a lot more incentivized to over-optimize for engagement based on US users. Depending on how much the algorithmic feed changes from country to country, it's possible that other countries experience less polarization simply because their culture is weighted less in training the feed's engagement optimization algorithms.
Regarding disinformation and political destablization, most countries simply aren't relevant enough on the world stage to be worth investing money in targetting in this area. The US, China, Russia, UK, Germany, France, Japan, India are all probably relevant enough. China and Russia effectively don't use facebook and are the most obvious non-US-aligned bad actors. They would also get way more bang-for-their-buck targeting the US than other countries. Note, I don't think is as widespread of a problem as many people think it is, but I bring it up because it's relevant in the context of political polarisation since there is strong evidence that it has occurred at least in the 2016 election: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/30/facebook-....
Actually, the two combined can be scary. If you can use outrage (great for engagement) to drive engagement in your content which is designed to politically destabilize the US, you can get a huge reach. This is effectively what you see a lot of the time in highly-engaged US content on facebook anyway: politically inclined outrage.
It's the US legacy media that is the main reason for the polarisation - the two party system is a factor, but the regular media is the one pitting "us vs. them" in every single minute of every broadcast.
Social media has downsides, but to lay the blame firmly at the feet of Facebook is to willfully ignore the culpability of CNN, Fox, the NYTimes, Washington Post, and many other legacy media outlets that are making tons of money otherizing the part of the country that is not their readership.
The premise of this argument is false. In Germany, where I live, polarization has increased dramatically, especially since COVID. I don't know about Facebook, but the tone on Twitter is harsh, the hate is palpable. The difference is maybe that unlike in the States it's not a 50:50 split, but maybe 80:20.
NBER's study [0] found (West) Germany had the biggest decline in political polarisation over the 1980-2020 period of all the countries they included in their study (12 OECD countries).
Doesn't entirely contradict your position, given that it was specifically measuring polarisation in terms of attitudes towards political parties, and so may not be good at measuring forms of polarisation that do not map straightforwardly to political parties; and looking at long-term trends over 40 years doesn't tell us much about how people have reacted to something which has only happened in the last 18-24 months.
The study failed to find any statistically significant correlation between political polarisation and proxies of social media use (Internet penetration and online news consumption; the study authors did not have data on social media use itself)
I'd also like to see references on which these countries with declining polarization and high FB/IG-usage would be. It's not a trivial or uncontroversial thing to quantify but hey, MZ brought it up.
It’s interesting that you don’t even agree with the fact that Zuckerberg claims. That polarization is declining or flat outside the US. Your claims that it’s less than in the US, but still increasing outside the US is a lot more aligned with reality.
But the fact is that this isn’t the defense Zuckerberg thinks it is. In fact, it may even suggest the absolute opposite.
Facebook has never been as popular outside the US as it has within it. The best indication of this fact is FB’s $19Bn purchase of WhatsApp which was largely driven by the fact that FB Messenger was basically only popular within the US, with the rest of the world preferring WhatsApp, which was also an indication of how FB’s network was simply not as entrenched outside the US as it was within it.
The more likely reason, however, is that assuming FB or social media in general increase polarization, it would almost certainly worsen it in the US more than anywhere else because of the US’s fairly unique 2 party structure combined with the primary system, both of which would almost certainly exacerbate any polarization effects caused by an external factor.
According to one researcher (https://www.brown.edu/news/2020-01-21/polarization) polarization is increasing as parties become more closely aligned to ideologies (eg. religion, race). Looking across the aisle, your opponents looks more different then they did a decade ago.
Why? My theory is that data mining and software is identifying and targeting seams of ideology that are most readily influenced, so in effect campaigning efforts are efficiently widening the divide between parties. Social media just happens to be the choice source of this data, as well as the medium to influence.
This is a good observation, but I don't think it absolves social media. There are likely many factors increasing polarization, and social media may amplify those factors and/or turn otherwise harmless factors into harmful ones.
The core idea behind social media is that it amplifies various voices, instead of those few who's job it is to participate in the media. In the US, this has effectively turned our right to freedom of speech into a right of freedom to broadcast.
The total size, wealth, and political influence of the US are much larger than the most culturally comparable nations. The value for those within and without the nation to spend effort using social media to influence discourse and election results is high, and is likely at least a partial factor.
That's worded to tip toe around the truth which is that in other countries FB is increasing polarization, that FB knew about it, and tried to ignore it - from the third^ file:
>In Poland, the changes made political debate on the platform nastier, Polish political parties told the company, according to the documents. The documents don’t specify which parties.
>“One party’s social media management team estimates that they have shifted the proportion of their posts from 50/50 positive/negative to 80% negative, explicitly as a function of the change to the algorithm,” wrote two Facebook researchers in an April 2019 internal report.
>Nina Jankowicz, who studies social media and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, said she has heard complaints from many political parties in that region that the algorithm change made direct communication with their supporters through Facebook pages more difficult. They now have an incentive, she said, to create posts that rack up comments and shares—often by tapping into anger—to get exposure in users’ feeds.
The Facebook researchers, wrote in their report that in Spain, political parties run sophisticated operations to make Facebook posts travel as far and fast as possible.
>“They have learnt that harsh attacks on their opponents net the highest engagement,” they wrote. “They claim that they ‘try not to,’ but ultimately ‘you use what works.’ ”
>In the 15 months following fall 2017 clashes in Spain over Catalan separatism, the percentage of insults and threats on public Facebook pages related to social and political debate in Spain increased by 43%, according to research conducted by Constella Intelligence, a digital risk protection firm.
Facebook researchers wrote in their internal report that they heard similar complaints from parties in Taiwan and India.
Add to that the revelations from yesterday's^^ hearing regarding FB's role in violence in Myanmar and Ethiopia plus repression in PRC and Iran and there is no other interpretation than Mr Zuckerberg is lying.
Is it true that polarization has not increased in other countries? Is there published data on it? Would be interesting to see which countries are experiencing historically high levels of polarization.
Their main results are on the page numbered 20 (page 21 of the PDF) – their data shows political polarisation has grown (over the period 1980-2020) in six OECD countries and declined in six OECD countries. The six countries where it is has grown (in order from greatest to smallest growth) are the US, Switzerland, France, Denmark, Canada, and New Zealand. The six countries where it has declined (in order from greatest to smallest decline) are (West) Germany, Sweden, Norway, Britain, Australia and Japan.
They don't have any direct measures of social media use in their source data; the closest things they have are Internet penetration and consumption of online news, but they found no statistically significant correlation between those and polarisation. The only clearly statistically significant correlation they could find was a positive correlation between polarisation of societal elites and that of the general population (p=0.011). They also found a positive correlation between increasing racial diversity and political polarisation which was of borderline statistical significance (p=0.052).
Thanks, I'd also like to point-out that 40 years is a long time in relation to the more recent FB algo changes that reordered timeline in order to increase engagement.
What gives you the impression that countries besides the US are not becoming more polarized? My experience in Europe and South America make me think it's getting worse everywhere.
Obviously it depends on the actors on social media what level on harm social media can cause. If there weren't political forces, foreign governments and troll media such as Fox and friends then social media could be much less harmful.
It requires considerable expertise and resources to spin up a disinformation campaigns continuously. The US leads here because of the size of its market and determination of its adversaries.
Mark tries to spin the responsibility away in the quoted sentence.
The fact that people such as Peter Turchin predicted a peak in US political polarization starting in around 2020 (a prediction made in a published paper in an academic journal in 2010) shows that surely FB is not the immediate cause. But that's kind of like how gasoline doesn't start fires. It doesn't, but it accelerates them, and makes the consequences worse.
Given the late 1800s and early 1900s US were also very polarized, part of me wonders if the post-Cold-War world is returning to some sort of polarized state. It can feel like there are a lot of different perspectives on the way things should be, and thus there's less certainty where to go.
That said, I'm not a historian so take my shower thoughts with a teaspoon of salt.
One possible explanation is that Facebook in US is subject to more adversarial actors than other countries.
A propagandist-for-hire choosing to astroturf, conduct false flag campaigns, form vote brigades, etc. is more likely to target the US political market because -- globally speaking -- there's more political power at stake.
Whether FB can claim that as an excuse is another question.
How would you categorize FB/whatsapp-driven genocide in Myanmar[0], polarization(+) or polarization-lite?
The semantic acrobatics in statements like this drive the discussion into pedantic details that successfully lose sight that on net, this is a cancerous product, with a pathology unique to each culture it touches.
like, there's been leaked FB PM discussions on this very topic and phrasing it like a product challenge versus the moral calamity that it is.
Or it could be the enemies of democracy can leverage social media for division and the enemies of authoritarianism can’t. And some countries don’t have as big of targets on their backs as the US.
Because the rest of the world is behind the curve, the US is merely leading the charge as its established political landscape perfectly plays into the filter bubble polarization FB feeds on.
Something that's quite observable in places like Germany: Election campaigns in Germany used to be quite boring, there used to be no such thing as "political attack ads", parties kept their campaigning to topics they stand for, instead of trying to attack other parties or candidates on their particular positions.
At least that's how it used to be for the longest time, but during the last decade the whole tone around German elections became noticeably more hostile, something that directly correlates with the rise in popularity of the AfD.
Said AfD has hired American Harris Media for their campaign strategy, the same company that won Trump his presidency [0]. They not only introduced the wonders of micro-targeting, which already contributed to the Obama presidencies, but also added their American flavor of running political campaigns with these extremely hostile overtones.
The latest highlight of that escalation, during the recent election, has been far-right parties literally calling to "hang the Greens" [1]
Or to give another, often overlooked, example; The US wasn't the only country that saw their capitol stormed in recent times, an attempt was also made in Germany, but there police actually stood their ground [2]
And while most of the big established parties condemned what happened there, the rising far-right ones did nothing like that, they were right there riling people up.
You don't need to go anywhere else to find polarization. Right here on HN, conservative points are downvoted, flagged and shunned despite of having excellent credibility, just a different perspective of core values. This was not the case, note the number of downvoted comments in this highly debated topic in 2016, they were very few: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12926678
It's one of those things that says a lot about the people on HN and their tolerance to wide range of opinions. And yes, we all agree that rude, disrespectful and violence has no place on HN. But, disagreeing on Tax policies? Property laws? Patents? Let people talk about it.
I really don't see it different than anti-liberal hostility on conservative forums. It's the same. Exactly the same.
Let's change this and exercise some restraint. Most people on either fence have good faith.
You need at least a 3rd viable political party to fix this. A two party system is polarized on issues. Democrats believe conservatives are homophobic, racist womanizers and conservatives believe liberals are communist, devil-worshipping pedos. It doesn't matter if either of them have facts the other party is so opposed they won't listen.
The point is that moderate comments that are slightly challenging mass ideology are downvoted on HN. That clearly and factually didn’t used to be the case as I’ve shown in 2016.
They are downvoted for the reason I just stated. Why would you upvote someone you believe is opposed to your entire existence based on what political party they associated with?
This just doesn’t resonate with my experience on HN. Ad-hominems are aggressively downvoted, and bad-faith arguments usually are too, even in political threads. There’s clearly something being valued higher than party affiliation by HN’ers else that wouldn’t be the case.
That isn't the issue. The issue is that good-faith arguments are downvoted as well. If you are Republican, there are certain ideas that will instantly get downvoted simply because of your political affiliation. You could say, the most abundant element in the atmosphere is Nitrogen as a Republican and you'd get a bunch of downvotes and people arguing just cause they think all Republicans are anti-vax idiots.
Same with Democrats depending on where you are and what you're commenting on. People are polarized to the point that they no longer care what you have to say. If they think you're with the other political party it is instant downvote.
That's a point I've made myself before, and I think there is some truth to it. Social media can't explain the high and increasing degree of US political polarisation, because other countries (including other English-speaking countries) consume social media about as much and yet have less polarisation, and don't show the same degree of increase in it either. The real explanation must lie in other aspects of US culture, or the US political system