Is DU Just a Safe Space Where We Hide From MAGA?
The November election is over, but MAGA folks are not resting. They are still showing up school boards and local government meetings to complain about how Democrats are stealing elections. They are still running Trump/Vance kiosks even the election is over. Quite frankly, I am tired of seeing them, but they are relentless in trying to push their view of the world on people. In other words, is anyone still running kiosks trying to distribute Harris/Walz merch? Likewise, is anyone showing up at a local school board to defend the science behind vaccination or to safe guard the right of women to vote?
However, perhaps that is the problem. As the article below notes, social media platforms have contributed to the growth of political polarization and extremism as algorithms send viewers content that reinforces their views. While it is easy to see how this works to radicalize folks on the extremes, does it also serve to insulate and numb moderates and liberals to the growth of the extreme right?
For example, on DU, we heard many folks attacking the media for polls indicating that the November election would be close. We convinced ourselves that no one could possibly vote for someone who is a convicted felon, serial abuser, and who repeatedly lies. After all, in the media and in our social media feeds, we are given steady diet of Trump's transgressions. Thus, we felt relatively safe in our view that Trump would lose.
However, this is not what folks who voted from Trump were seeing. Indeed, on their social media and on right wing news outlets like Fox News, they were repeatedly told of a grand conspiracy to steal the election and how Trump was being unjustly prosecuted. However, rather than just sit in their echo chambers, they went out and spread the MAGA gospel to try to spread the word whether it be showing up at school boards to complain about how critical race theory was being taught to first graders to teach them to hate white people or how vaccines were a secret attempt by Bill Gates to inject nanobots into the populace. It would be well and good if they just hid out in the closet and to follow the latest right wing, sexist or racist conspiracy theory, but MAGA followers were diligent in trying to spread the word.
In contrast, we sat self-assured in our own bubbles. While I am sure that most folks on this board believe that Hitler was evil, and that fascism is bad, has anyone spoke at a school board or city council to condemn fascism? Yet, you will see a lot of MAGA folks ready to trash antifa to anyone who would listen. As for us, we just avoided them and hid on DU, as keyboard warriors, to complain about obnoxious MAGA followers or relatives, and we blamed the media, Democrats, and other scapegoats, for the rise in the extreme right to those who already shared our views.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-tech-platforms-fuel-u-s-political-polarization-and-what-government-can-do-about-it/
Social media contributes to partisan animosity
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has on multiple occasions dismissed suggestions that his company stokes divisiveness. “Some people say that the problem is that social networks are polarizing us, but that’s not at all clear from the evidence or research,” he testified before a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee in March 2021, instead pointing to “a political and media environment that drives Americans apart.” A few days later, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president for global affairs and communication, argued that “what evidence there is simply does not support the idea that social media, or the filter bubbles it supposedly creates, are the unambiguous driver of polarization that many assert.”
Contrary to Facebook’s contentions, however, a range of experts have concluded that the use of social media contributes to partisan animosity in the U.S. In an article published in October 2020 in the journal Science, a group of 15 researchers summarized the scholarly consensus this way: “In recent years, social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have played an influential role in political discourse, intensifying political sectarianism.” In August 2021, a separate quintet of researchers summed up their review of the empirical evidence in an article in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences: “Although social media is unlikely to be the main driver of polarization, they concluded, “we posit that it is often a key facilitator.”
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But that doesn’t exonerate the tech platforms, as Facebook would have us believe. One study published in March 2020 described an experiment in which subjects stopped using Facebook for a month and then were surveyed on their views. Staying off the platform “significantly reduced polarization of views on policy issues,” researchers found, although it didn’t diminish divisiveness based strictly on party identity. “That’s consistent with the view that people are seeing political content on social media that does tend to make them more upset, more angry at the other side [and more likely] to have stronger views on specific issues,” Matthew Gentzkow, a Stanford economist and co-author of the study, told us in an interview.
Facebook and others have pointed to other research to raise questions about the relationship between social media and polarization. A 2017 study found that from 1996 to 2016, polarization rose most sharply among Americans aged 65 and older—the demographic least likely to use social media. A 2020 paper compared rising polarization levels in the U.S. over four decades to those in eight other developed democracies. The other countries experienced smaller increases in divisiveness or saw polarization decrease. These variations by country suggest that, over the long term, factors other than social media have driven polarization in America.
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