Social media and populist moment not what it seems

Social media is bad for everything and everybody. But at least it reliably generates interesting juxtapositions from which op-ed columns can be made.

The relevant juxtaposition comes from my Twitter feed, which Friday featured a speech by Sacha Baron Cohen, condemning “a handful of internet companies” for driving the rise of authoritarianism, demagoguery and bigotry.

At the same time, Twitter also surfaced a recent study from academics in France, Canada and the United States that examined the relationship between social media echo chambers and support for populism in France, Britain and the United States. The authors found that there was either no relationship or a negative one: Populist voters were somewhat more likely to hang out with people of a similar ethnicity or social class offline, but on the internet they were no more likely than other voters to inhabit an echo chamber. And social media use was a strong predictor of opposition to the campaign of President Donald Trump.

People who rarely use the internet might be more easily deceived by fake headlines when they do wander online. Normal partisans may get kookier under the sustained influence of the memeplex. And Cohen is right that small communities of depraved people use online platforms in vicious ways — and internet giants invoke free expression while shirking their responsibility to deny such viciousness a refuge.

But we should be more doubtful of Cohen’s larger narrative, which is commonplace among progressives — a narrative that invokes the “sewer” of social media to explain everything from climate change skepticism to anti-immigration sentiment and proposes the regulation of online speech.

Instead, the evidence 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.

Tufts political scientist Eitan Hersh notes many

American liberals participate in politics through a kind of uber-online “political hobbyism” in which real-world organizing recedes in favor of constant engagement “from behind screens or with earphones on.”

Spend all your time on Twitter and Facebook, and it seems that they must be essential to the far right’s appeal.

But if the other side is actually less online than you are, this assumption leads to two mistakes. 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.

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 hypereducated ideologues.

Which is not to say that conservatism isn’t pretty warped at the moment or that social media has been good for right-wing decency and common sense. Trump owes his (relative) resilience to the inertia of medium-information voters enjoying a decent economy, not to YouTube radicalism.

And if those voters are the battlefield, then any Democratic strategy will be insufficient unless liberalism realizes that before it regulates social media for other people, it should learn how to resist the internet itself.