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Social media platforms face a myriad of criticisms, from contributing to rising anxiety and suicide rates among American teenagers, to profiting from the business of selling personal data and comprising individual privacy. The Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 demonstrated that the zeitgeist of racial justice and equality could be organized through digital activism, which gained widespread support and online engagement .

Social media is an instrument of political change, but these changes are dangerously consequential. Amid the COVID-19 infodemic, the wake of the Donald Trump fueled-Capitol riots in the United States, and the increase in political polarization, the world is abandoning the perception that social media does not significantly impact domestic and world politics.

As many aspects of people's lives were forced into the digital realm during the pandemic, social media platforms were utilized even more for entertainment, communication, and connection. According to a New York Times analysis of Internet usage based on two online data providers, from the first U.S. COVID-19 deaths in January 2020 to March 2020, average daily traffic on Facebook skyrocketed by 27 percent and 15.3 percent on YouTube. In March, Mark Zuckerberg stated in a conference call with reporters that traffic for video calling "exploded" and messaging, particularly on WhatsApp, "doubled in volume," says an additional New York Times report.

Increased engagement and subsequent rise in power of social media companies like have resulted in more sinister consequences: the spread of misinformation and disinformation. In September 2020, the World Health Organization and other United Nation agencies issued a joint statement reiterating a global concern for the COVID-19 infodemic, an "overabundance of information" that has led to widespread dissemination of misinformation and disinformation. Additionally, the statement included a call for member states and stakeholders, which include social media platforms, to combat the infodemic.

Nonetheless, the use of social media platforms has interfered with the integrity of elections, has been used to incite political violence, and has contributed to the spread of misinformation and political polarization around the world.
Political polarization and the spread of misinformation
Recommendation algorithms in social media affect perceptions that contribute to political polarization. "Right now, social media companies like Facebook profit off of segmenting us and feeding us personalized content that both validates and exploits our biases," stated Yaël Eisenstat, former CIA analyst, diplomat, and Facebook employee at a TED conference in August 2020. "Their bottom line depends on provoking a strong emotion to keep us engaged, often incentivizing the most inflammatory and polarizing voices, to the point where finding common ground no longer feels possible."

Social media platforms are breeding grounds for the spread of fake news and misinformation, which also contributes to the political divide. In 2018, three MIT scholars published a based on over a decade of data, that found false news spreads on Twitter six times faster than real news stories. Moreover, false news stories were found to be 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than real news stories.

How people consume their news ultimately affects their perceptions of the world and their political views. According to the Pew Research Center , "one-in-five U.S. adults say they often get news via social media." Consumption of false information not only creates a misinformed electorate but ultimately makes finding common ground and engaging in civil discourse more challenging.

The Markup's Citizen Browser Project found that Facebook users who voted for Joe Biden and users who voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election held different views on the U.S. Capitol riots - because their social media feeds showed stories that catered to their political biases. Not only were the Facebook users shown different news stories, but they were also shown stories from different sources altogether. Biden voters were more frequently served sources like The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN. Meanwhile, Trump voters were more frequently served sources like The Daily Wire, Fox News, and Breitbart.

In parallel, the design of social media recommendation algorithms in part contributed to the political violence in the U.S. Capitol. Dr. James Kimble, a propaganda expert at Seton Hall University, : "Social media enables you to craft an echo chamber" and that there is a "sense of self-selection where all you hear is what you want to hear and you don't hear your opponents."

The result, argues Kimble, is "disastrous for public discourse" because varying perspectives "do not collide with each other and thus grow more and more strong and seem true to those people." He includes that discourse must be free from threats of violence, asserting that "some of these tweets flirted with the idea of domestic terrorism or encouraged people to be violent to show up at the capitol."
Political violence
The U.S. Capitol riots on January 6th, 2021 are considered by some experts to be a result of misinformation campaigns and recommendation algorithms on social media platforms like Twitter, Parler, and Gab. In an interview with The Diplomatic Envoy, John Shannon, a professor at Seton Hall's Stillman School of Business, has one explanation. "One of the great strengths and weaknesses on the planet is you can find people with similar views and ideas and theories [on social media]."

Political communities, such as terrorist organizations, who organize and recruit through social media platforms worldwide, are evidence of this. In 2016, an internal Facebook analysis of German political groups "64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools."

While many criticize social media platforms themselves, state actors are also guilty of abusing the platforms to incite violence. In some cases, governments targeted people in their own countries. In 2018, the UN published a that military leaders in Myanmar used Facebook to conduct a systematic propaganda campaign against Rohingya Muslims.

"The role of social media is significant," according to the UN report. "Facebook has been a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate, in a context where, for most users, Facebook is the Internet. Although improved in recent months, the response of Facebook has been slow and ineffective. The extent to which Facebook posts and messages have led to real-world discrimination."

Cynthia M. Wong, a former researcher at Human Rights Watch, explained in the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, that this campaign "helped incite violence against the Rohingya Muslims that included mass killings, burning of entire villages, mass rape, and other serious crimes against humanity that have led to 700,000 Rohingya Muslims having to flee the country."

Evidently, social media can invade many facets of daily living, from forming political opinions and cementing those opinions, to being used as an instrument for conducting genocide. On top of that, investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr presented a startling judgment in her 2019 about Facebook's role in recent elections. Her conclusion addressed "whether or not it is possible to have a free election again."

She stated that "as it stands, I don't think it is."
Election interference
In September 2020, an internal by Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook data scientist for the Facebook Site Integrity team, was leaked to the public. Zhang found evidence that foreign governments, political parties, and other actors in Honduras, Azerbaijan, India, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Ukraine were using fake accounts and/or organizing campaigns on Facebook to influence public opinion and elections. Additionally, Zhang stated that she and her colleagues removed "10.5 million fake reactions and fans from high-profile politicians in Brazil and the U.S. in the 2018 elections."

Further evidence shows that social media is being abused to interfere in elections. According to " Challenging Truth and Trust: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation ," a report by researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute, there is evidence that out of 48 countries examined all around the world, 30 have political parties that are deliberately using computational propaganda on social media platforms during elections or referenda.

Two mainstream examples of this deliberate abuse of social media include Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the United Kingdom's 2016 Brexit referendum. In both cases, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a company supported by the Russian government, organized disinformation campaigns by writing and posting fake content and creating thousands of fake social media accounts to spread propaganda. The IRA created accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media platforms. Fake content curated by the IRA was retweeted over a staggering two million times and reached over 288 million views on Twitter. Leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Russian posts reached 126 million U.S. Facebook accounts, according to a Park Advisors report sponsored by the U.S. State Department from 2019.

In anticipation of the 2020 presidential election, Facebook suspended the recommendation tab for political groups to try and avoid another election fiasco. After November 3rd, Facebook temporarily cut off all political ads in the U.S. in order "to reduce opportunities for confusion or abuse" the company stated. Additionally, from October 29th, 2020, to December 9th, 2020, Instagram temporarily removed the "Recent" tab from hashtag Instagram pages in the United States as a precaution against the spread of misinformation.
"Regulation is the way we protect the commons"
In addition to the precautions taken by Facebook and Instagram, some critics and experts have suggested taxing data mining, fixing the algorithm, and even dissolving social media companies altogether to prevent further consequences from disinformation campaigns. However, regulation is a resounding suggestion among experts.

John Shannon, speaking on the legal aspects of social media regulation to The Diplomatic Envoy, stated, "They are not enough. This problem will require regulation; regulation is the way we protect the commons. We are in the early stages of trying to regulate a largely unregulated industry we call technology."

Dr. Viswa Viswanathan, an Associate Professor of Computing and Decision Sciences at Seton Hall University, concedes to regulation as a possible solution to problems caused by social media, but he does not believe regulation alone is a panacea for all of these issues. A fundamental takeaway is that "people need to know how to think critically or else they will always be targets of exploitation."

One reason why misinformation campaigns are so successful is their ability to manipulate a target audience. Viswanathan elaborates on this, claiming "the educational system (at all levels) has mostly failed to help people to think critically" because it has come to view itself as an economic tool. One question that remains is if critical thinking, regulation, or other solutions can ultimately prevent social media's disastrous impact on political polarization, political violence, and election integrity.

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How Social Media is Fueling Divisiveness

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Social media platforms face a myriad of criticisms, from contributing to rising anxiety and suicide rates among American teenagers, to profiting from the business of selling personal data and comprising individual privacy. The Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 demonstrated that the zeitgeist of racial justice and equality could be organized through digital activism, which gained widespread support and online engagement .

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As both members of Congress and federal law enforcement agencies investigate the origins and execution of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the role social media played in the mayhem is emerging as a crucial issue.

The House Select Committee probing the mob attack has asked a wide range of social media and telecommunications companies to preserve records related to several hundred people, including members of Congress, who could be relevant to the investigation. Beyond these specific requests, the Committee has signaled a broader interest in how false claims about the 2020 election spread on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, including how algorithms might contribute to the promotion of disinformation and extremism. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors pursuing more than 600 criminal cases are relying on evidence gathered from social media accounts used to organize the attempt by Trump supporters to stop Congress from certifying President Joe Biden's victory.

A report we recently published through the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University's Stern School of Business sheds light on the relationship between tech platforms and the kind of extreme polarization that can lead to the erosion of democratic values and partisan violence. While Facebook, the largest social media platform, has gone out of its way to deny that it contributes to extreme divisiveness, a growing body of social science research, as well as Facebook's own actions and leaked documents, indicate that an important relationship exists.

Our central conclusion, based on a review of more than 50 social science studies and interviews with more than 40 academics, policy experts, activists, and current and former industry people, is that platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter likely are not the root causes of political polarization, but they do exacerbate it. Clarifying this point is important for two reasons. First, Facebook's disavowals, in congressional testimony and other public statements, may have clouded the issue in the minds of lawmakers and the public. Second, as the country simultaneously tries to make sense of what happened on January 6 and turns its attention to elections in 2022, 2024, and beyond, understanding the harmful role popular tech platforms can play in U.S. politics should be an urgent priority.

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."

Partisanship is complicated, but platforms do not fully escape responsibility

Polarization is a complicated phenomenon. Some divisiveness is natural in a democracy. In the U.S., struggles for social and racial justice have led to backlash and partisan animosity. But the extreme polarization we are now witnessing, especially on the political right, has consequences that threaten to undermine democracy itself. These include declining trust in institutions; scorn for facts; legislative dysfunction; erosion of democratic norms; and, in the worst case, real-world violence.

All of this cannot be attributed to the rise of Silicon Valley, of course. Polarization began growing in the U.S. decades before Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube appeared. Other factors-including the realignment of political party membership, the rise of hyper-partisan radio and cable TV outlets, and increased racial animus during Donald Trump's uniquely divisive presidency-have contributed to the problem.

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

But notice that both the age-group and inter-country comparisons spanned decades, including extended stretches of time before the emergence of social media. More recent snapshots of the U.S. are thus more relevant. A paper published in March, based on a study of more than 17,000 Americans, found that Facebook's content-ranking algorithm may limit users' exposure to news outlets offering viewpoints contrary to their own-and thereby increase polarization.

Maximizing online engagement leads to increased polarization

The fundamental design of platform algorithms helps explain why they amplify divisive content. "Social media technology employs popularity-based algorithms that tailor content to maximize user engagement," the co-authors of the Science paper wrote. Maximizing engagement increases polarization, especially within networks of like-minded users. This is "in part because of the contagious power of content that elicits sectarian fear or indignation," the researchers said.

As we wrote in our report, "social media companies do not seek to boost user engagement because they want to intensify polarization. They do so because the amount of time users spend on a platform liking, sharing, and retweeting is also the amount of time they spend looking at the paid advertising that makes the major platforms so lucrative."

Facebook is fully aware of how its automated systems promote divisiveness. The company does extensive internal research on the polarization problem and periodically adjusts its algorithms to reduce the flow of content likely to stoke political extremism and hatred. But typically, it dials down the level of incendiary content for only limited periods of time. Making the adjustments permanent would cut into user engagement. Examples include the tumultuous period immediately after the November 2020 election and the days before the April 2021 verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin.

It's time for the government to intervene

In a series of investigative articles published the same week as our NYU report, The Wall Street Journal relied on internal Facebook documents to show that company researchers repeatedly have identified the harmful effects of its platforms, but top management has rejected proposed reforms. In one episode, a major algorithm modification in 2018 backfired and, according to Facebook's own in-house studies, inadvertently heightened anger and divisiveness on the platform. But Zuckerberg reportedly resisted some proposed fixes because he worried that they might hurt user engagement.

Clearly, Facebook and its social media peers need to move beyond denial and come to grips with their role in heightening polarization. One place the industry could start is to make temperature-reducing algorithmic adjustments more permanent, rather than temporary. In doing so, tech platforms will have to continually refine their automated systems and content moderation policies to guard against the removal of legitimate political expression-admittedly a difficult challenge but one they brought upon themselves by building such vast, pervasive networks. Another step the social media companies should take is disclosing how their now-secret algorithms rank, recommend, and remove content. With greater transparency, lawmakers, regulators, academics, and the public would be in a stronger position to assess how the platforms function and demand accountability when warranted. Unfortunately, Facebook lately has moved in the opposite direction, in one case cutting off researchers at New York University who were studying whether the platform has been used to sow distrust in elections. The company accused the NYU team of gathering information improperly-an accusation the researchers denied.

It would be preferable for the social media companies to police themselves, but that's not happening to a sufficient degree. As a result, the government needs to intervene and provide the sustained oversight that until now has been lacking. In our report, we propose that Congress empower the Federal Trade Commission to draft and enforce a social media code of conduct that would go beyond transparency and define the duties of tech companies when addressing hateful, extremist, or threatening content.

For example, the standards could set benchmarks for various categories of harmful content that remain on platforms even after automated and human moderation. If the benchmarks are exceeded, fines could be imposed. Congress could require social media companies to incorporate the new rules into their terms-of-service agreements with users. Then, if the companies fail to observe the standards, the FTC could initiate enforcement action under its existing authority to police "unfair or deceptive" commercial practices. Reps. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) have introduced a bill that points generally in the direction that we recommend.

Widespread social media use has fueled the fire of extreme polarization, which, in turn, has contributed to the erosion of trust in democratic values; elections; and even scientific facts, such as the need for vaccination in the face of a lethal pandemic. Failing to recognize and counter these developments risks repetition of what happened at the Capitol on January 6-or worse.
Barrett is a senior research scholar at New York University's Stern School of Business and deputy director of its Center for Business and Human Rights, where Sims is a research fellow. Hendrix, an associate research scientist and adjunct instructor at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering, is the founder and editor of Tech Policy Press. Facebook and Google are general, unrestricted donors to the Brookings Institution. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions posted in this piece are solely those of the authors and not influenced by any donation.

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How tech platforms fuel U.S. political polarization and what government can do about it

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Widespread use of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media has fueled the fire of extreme polarization, Paul Barrett, Justin Hendrix, and Grant Sims write. In turn, they find this can lead to the erosion of democratic values and partisan violence.

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Jan. 6 Hearing: Trump Drafted Tweet Urging March to Capitol

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Trump and his allies were not only aware that his supporters intended to march to the Capitol, but encouraged it, the Jan. 6 committee said.

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Months after TikTok apologized to Black creators, many say little has changed

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“Whether it’s Latino or Asian or whatever you are, I feel like it’s way harder to go up on TikTok if you are not white,” TikTok creator Noah Webster said.