Advances in social media have created insular online groups with homogenous beliefs- creating ready-made groups of ‘pure people’ ripe for exploitation by a populist politician.
To understand the dangers of social networks- we need to understand basic network theory. When allowed to choose groups, we will choose group members like us. This has robust psychology theory behind it, Tajfel and Turner’s 1974 “Social Identity Theory” and it has been replicated since. A 2012 study “Not Like Me = Bad Infants Prefer Those Who Harm Dissimilar Others” in Psychological Science found that even at the tender age of 9 months, humans have a preference towards people like them. This principle has an important implication: We use social media to surround ourselves with people more like us than otherwise. We can now group on interests rather than geography. How does information spread in these homogenous groups?
One of the most important phenomena to understand how social networks change politics is the information cascade. An information cascade occurs when people make decisions one after another rather than all at the same time. Later people watch the actions of earlier people and base their actions on the earlier ones. An example would be someone who searches for a new song by looking at the songs other people have listened to- the most popular song. The cascade can be based on little information and people oftentimes ignore new information. This cascade can easily be based on faulty information, and the credibility of crowds could quickly surpass that provided by traditional experts and authorities.
The structure of the network determines the effectiveness of an information cascade. The more people close to you see you doing something, the more likely you are to do it. Different people and groups have different tendencies to conform, but on a macro-level, people conform to their network.
The structure of social networks not only creates information cascades; it also leads to echo chambers.
Social media allows us to connect more effectively than ever before, but our love for the familiar leads us to connect to what we already know. Information spreads quickly through our insular online groups, but not across them. How are social media sites taking advantage of this property?
According to its mission statement “… Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected…” While the mission may seem noble, at the end of the day, Facebook makes money from ads and makes more money the longer it can get you to stay on the site. Facebook’s engineers manage people’s newsfeed so that voters see things they like and stay longer. For example, if a voter is a likely democrat, it will show posts by their friends that support their political views but repress those that would clash. You can see this in practice through a project by the Wall Street Journal, “blue feed red feed”, which compares Facebook feeds of accounts with different political affiliations.
Why is this a problem? By only showing views that voters are likely to agree with, they are sheltered from new ideas. They end up trapped in an echo chamber listening only to the similar. These echo chambers inflame crises and divisions by only showing one set of opinions and blocking out the rest- killing any chance for compromise. If the world seems to be going mad, part of the reason is algorithms meant to keep us looking at advertisements.