Social media magnified political polarization in the U.S

Divided democracy in the age of the Internet perhaps is a fact. Platforms such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon are the “Big Five” who are controlling people’s data across the world. Behind them, behind the politicians in relation with the people, what unites us all to look to a prosperous future for human living, this cannot be easy to answer. However, we know now, the product of the zeitgeist to gather us is social media but it lacks a spirit to keep us going together, not apart.

Radical human rights accepted freedom of speech. Moving from the landscape to the virtual space, “how do we live in an age of bewilderment, when the old stories have collapsed, and no new story has yet emerged to replace them?” (Harari, 2018) Such a difficult question and that is why it let us live in the time of post-truth era, where social media and polarization are the two correlations to explain the question above.

Social media used to sort you & ask for vote

Mark Zuckerberg, after being testified in 2018 over the scandal of the Cambridge Analytica Data, claimed that Facebook did not unlawfully interfere in the electing the President. However, according to President-elect Donald Trump’s digital director Brad Parscale, “the social media giants (Facebook and Twitter) were massively influential—not because it was tipping the scales with fake news, but because it helped generate the bulk of the campaign’s $250 million in online fundraising.” (Lapowsky, 2016, para. 1) So, they have become the biggest incubators by generating ads money that went to Facebook or Twitter than to any other platform.

The event is rather a continuation. As using micro-targeting via social media trended in US politics by previous US Presidents 40 years ago. In the 1970s it began with pollster for President Jimmy Carter at “a very simple but not sophisticated” ,the 1996 re-election campaign for President Bill Clinton, and the steady development in Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign (Johnson, 2016, p. 79-81) 

The power of social media is quick and easy to spread. Therefore, the quick thinking to move the political campaign online has been vastly succeeded throughout each of the President candidacy. In another word, it can claim to be a political strategy. 

Divides from political parties to their people

Unfortunately, due vastly to the partisanship in US politics, which is represented by two parties, here the Republic and the Democratic. Followers, supporters, and voters of these two parties will abstruse themselves of how and why they belong to this or that party. However, the election of Donald Trump had remarkably boiled both parties’ political elites.

Typically, apart from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senator Mitt Rommey (R-UT) calls for nation to ‘get behind’ Biden and says he has seen no evidence of voter fraud (Cole & Stracqualursi, 2020) and Mike Murphy, a Republican political consultant who has worked for John McCain, Jeb Bush, Lamar Alexander, Arnold Schwarzenegger and others, said in 2016 that “Republicans in the Congress need to show some guts against a blatant demagogue who is massively unprepared by temperament, knowledge or character to be president of the United States.” (Austin, 2020)

Algorithms do not care polarization

The media itself is opening ways for polarisation. Firstly, it has been the problem of algorithms. They know us better than we know them. They are coming to us to let us forget our organic operating system to find truth. They instead let us rely on Big Data and machine learning to get to know us better and better. They pour the matrix into the Internet and we as users will heavily generate ourselves to know them, not let them know us. This is a social dilemma, by which we should exactly feel we are being manipulated by the tech giants.

Founder of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee (D’Ancona, 2017, p. 48) warned that the contemporary internet websites bid an exchange of free contents to gain people’s personal data. For many of us have not been fully aware, your data is your property like you live in a house you own. Compromising your data is like putting your house in mortgage. Therefore, what you can control is your privacy and what you want to do in the newsfeed.

Adam Mosseri, VP, Product Management, News Feed (Facebook, 2016) said “If you could look through thousands of stories every day and choose the 10 that were most important to you, which would they be? The answer should be your News Feed. It is subjective, personal and unique – and defines the spirit of what we hope to achieve.” 

Humans’ perceptions are varied, from low to high. However, tech companies still need to respect democracy. That is why it must be astray out of legal assessments. This means it locates the data in the US, but millions of users are living worldwide. Is this democratic? If we cannot answer this, that means we are all being polarised by the media regardless who we are.

Given the success of Trump is a cleavage between political parties, nonetheless, the American people were divided and polarised and manipulated to cast their vote. While voting is not compulsory in the US, people casted their vote in 2016 were left behind a truth that Trump does not have a character of a president as aforementioned words of Mike Murphy.

An open sum from past to present 

To sum up, words of John Stuart Mill in 1848, English philosopher, political economist remind that “It is hardly possible to overrate the value, in the present low state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar… Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.” (Sunstein, 2017)

Consequently, hatred came to dominate American politics…

References:

Austin, A. (2020). Republicans opposed to Trump – who and why. Part seven. Daily KOS. Retrieved from: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/7/25/1963685/-Republicans-opposed-to-Trump-who-and-why-Part-seven

Cass R. Sunstein, #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 59-97.

Cole, D., Stracqualursi, V. (2020). Romney calls for the nation to ‘get behind’ Biden and says he has seen no evidence of voter fraud. CNN Politics. Retrieved from: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/08/politics/mitt-romney-biden-election-cnntv/index.html

D’Ancona,M. (2017). Post Truth: The New War on Truth and How To Fight It Back. Ebury Press. P. 48.

Johnson, D. W. (2018). Campaigning in the Twenty-First Century: Activism, Big Data, and Dark Money (New York: Routledge, 2016) pp. 77-92.

Harari, Y. N. (2018). 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Jonathan Cape London. P. 258.

Lapowsky, I. (2016). Here’s How Facebook Actually Won Trump the Presidency. Wired. Retrieved from: https://www.wired.com/2016/11/facebook-won-trump-election-not-just-fake-news/

Mosseri, A. (2016). Building a Better News Feed for You. Facebook. Retrieved from: https://about.fb.com/news/2016/06/building-a-better-news-feed-for-you/

Sunstein, C. R. (2017).  #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Princeton: Princeton University Press. pp. 59-97.