how social media broke politics, how we can fix it, and what stands in the way

A number of studies shows how politics and social media often bring out the worst in us, and how being confronted with face to face discussions often bring out the best.

I can think of a few things more unpleasant than talking about politics in this day and age. For example, a surprise colonoscopy. Finding a pet’s vomit with your bare foot on a cold tile floor in the middle of the night. Thermonuclear diarrhea — the consequence of undercooking chicken in spicy chiles, then consuming it with hot sauce, the fusion step to the digesting fission — probably ranks pretty high up there. But overall, talking about politics a pretty miserable experience these days.

Most of us tend to see the majority of political content online, like most of content we see today, period. As has been noted countless times by everyone who spent more than about 30 seconds studying the literature on the subject, social media tends to reward outrage and other attention-seeking behavior, which is especially true for hot takes on current events and politics.

This is absolutely devastating for normal conversations according to a study from last year, as this creates feedback loops of extreme opinions followed by normalization or excuses, followed by an escalation to maintain popularity and draw attention. This is why so many political social media influencers and grifters — or influgrifter for short — always seem to have the most ridiculous and absurd stance on just about anything. They know it will get them the eyeballs they need to stay in business.

As people debate about these hyper-polarizing stances, fans find ways to justify it, or somehow normalize the opinion until the discussion dies down because it seems like an obvious fact that a lot of people secretly held this opinion and that influgrifter just said what all of them were thinking out loud. Amazingly, this holds true even on far-right social media platforms like Gab. Even there one has to say things the user base did Nazi coming to gain a consistent following.

But as the discussion dies down, one of two things will happen. The same influgrifter will now try to top themselves to continue monopolizing conversations, like a toddler throwing a tantrum because they’re bored and no one gives them the attention they crave, or another influgrifter will try to outdo the first one with an even wilder, more out of pocket take. Why? Because that’s the incentive. That’s what puts coke on the mirror in a hyper-competitive environment where everyone has a megaphone.

The big problem, the study’s authors warn, is that a constant compounding of ever more extreme stances and their repetition by fans driven to justify them out of pure partisan loyalty, means more and more people will be exposed to ever escalating extremism and fall to the bandwagon effect, assuming that the snowballing they’re seeing means there must be something to the ideas. If you’ve ever wondered how you’d move the Overton Window seemingly overnight, that’s how.

And the bandwagon effect is so strong that even when people are presented with obvious nonsense — such as that some people have paranormal abilities — then told that millions of people believe it, if not the vast majority, they’ll often back down from a strong stance and side with the masses, even when told that experts disagree with the popular opinion. It’s just a glitch in how our brains work. (Oh, and remember that little tidbit because it comes in handy later.)

runaway bandwagon! all aboard!

This plays perfectly into another problem with extreme partisanship shown by a study which asked liberals and conservatives to rate their tolerance of increasingly offensive acts by a typical Joe and Jane Schmo, politicians from their party, and those from the opposing side. Now, you can probably guess what the researchers found. What was unforgivable for some random asshole and deemed shockingly offensive by figures from the opposition, suddenly became maybe, sort of, excusable from their side.

The researchers’ hypothesis to explain these results goes something like this: due to an intense and escalating dislike between different political camps, our individual idea of what’s right or what’s moral gives way to what’s best for the survival of the group with which we associate. And the more we think we’re under attack, the more we are concerned about the extremism of the other side, the more we find it justifiable to do what’s in the best interests of ours, even if it’s ethically problematic.

Effectively, this is the aforementioned bandwagon effect at work. We know we should adhere to our personal values. We know we should be ethical. We know we shouldn’t demonize and other people who think differently. In the famous words of Mike Tyson, however, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. In reality of today’s vicious, attention-driven political discourse, our plan to stay above the fray and refuse to bend our ethics for the good of the group is gone when we’re virtually punched in the face with absurd levels of rage as soon as we unlock our phones.

This is the world where gatekeepers are on the verge of extinction. As fewer people are even interested in what major publications have to say, and with everyone now having access to a global megaphone, the end result is a deafening cacophony of opinions where people who had to compete — in admittedly rigged contests with slim chances of success — to get their voice heard in traditional media, can now just shout them at the universe. As is every other Very Important Opinion Haver.

Doesn’t it now make perfect sense why Andrew Tate is tweeting that men having sex with women are gay, Kristi Noem is bragging about murdering puppies, and even the most outlandish influgrifters just keep turning into ever more vile cartoon parodies of themselves? Their fans expect — no, need — every new post from them to be more outrageous, more extreme, another way to bond with their in-group in their growing disdain for the out-group as their view of what is permissible and for whom gets ever more lax and warped.

Unfortunately for us in general, our minds are very good at seeing ourselves as the good guys in any situation, even when we do monstrous things. Just pair the threats with constant praise for how great we are, and how we understand the severity of the situation, and how we’re all actually fighting for truth, justice, and mom, and baseball, and apple pie, and whatnot, and suddenly, we can justify anything.

Meanwhile, traditional gatekeepers, also eager for clicks and attention because they lost so much of the audience they used to have and desperately need to survive, are making a deal with the Web Devil and platforming the most outrageous of the bunch, or making them national headliners and household names because, hey, that’s what every other person and outlet seems to be doing.

This creates another feedback loop. As more and more outrageous discourse starts to become normalized either by partisan opportunists or by desensitization, it has to get more and more extreme, threatening, and confrontational. That starts to raise the tolerance for bending the rules, ignoring norms, laws, and ethics when the target is a member of the out-group. Rinse, escalate, repeat until society snaps.

The public bandwagon has completely ran away and is careening over terrain full of toxic mud pits, jagged rocks, and hidden caves, and it seems like no one knows how to stop it. Or even wants to.

talk to the face. no, seriously. talk to it.

Given everything we’ve covered, the only thing worse than having to deal with others’ opinions being shouted at you from a screen is having to deal with these loudmouths in person, right? I mean there’s a reason why your Facebook-addicted uncle is such a menace at the holiday dinner table. He won’t stop picking fights with everyone about everything, dismisses rebuttals with “I don’t believe that,” and thinks that if he talks louder, his QAnon meme-derived points will somehow become more valid.

But that’s someone you know. Someone who feels comfortable with you, lashing out at you, and isn’t interested in an actual conversation. What about a stranger? Sure, we keep being told that talking to strangers about sex, religion, and politics is the rudest, absolute worst thing we can do when we’re face to face. It’s uncomfortable, invasive, and requires some serious thought because the debate may not be abstract anymore, you may be talking about an issue that deeply affects you or the other person.

So, scientists decided to see how people would feel if they were given no choice but to talk to strangers about politics because scientists are like that, and your squirming is just data to them. Sweet, sweet data from which they can draw conclusions with a statistical analysis.

Their test subjects were asked to rate how positive they think their interactions would be talking to a person with whom they agree, with whom they disagree, and with how they would feel in a debate exchanging video messages. Amazingly, live interactions, no matter whether the person agreed or not, ended up being more positive according to ratings given by the participants at the end of the conversation. Basically, they were expecting your typical online nastiness and insults, and were pleasantly surprised that their actual experience was very much not that.

In a way, that makes sense. When not put in a hyper-competitive crab bucket of an environment, we’re more than likely to try and get along and have little incentive to be outrageous for the sake of being outrageous and getting attention. Humans, after all, are social creatures, and we’re predisposed to get along when we can. If we didn’t, a society would not be a thing we’re capable of creating. Face to face, with low stakes, and the person we’re addressing right there, we turn the temperature way down.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa! Hold on there. So why is it that we have politicians screaming at each other on TV and national newspapers operate based on petty grievances, like a mean girl’s burn book? And your angry asshole uncle is still yelling at you.”

In the context of the studies we covered, both behaviors make sense. Political media is a high stakes environment in which outrage and pettiness sell, and journalism in this realm is ran like WWE storylines rather than actual reporting, which would be boring if it was actually about facts, data, and policy. This is exactly what people were warning would happen when decrying the fusion of news and entertainment.

And this applies to politicians as well, as noted by Congressman Jeff Jackson in his viral video. Almost every histrionic outburst by a politician is bullshit, and the minute the cameras are out of their face, they drop the act and tend to behave like adults.

So, the bottom line is that if traditional media wants to show that it is indeed the best and most reliable source of information, and that it’s far better than random strangers screaming at us from social media, it needs to finally prove its worth, address the real, serious criticisms it receives, focus on real problems and issues, and give up its lazy, toxic obsession with access journalism.

Seeing arrogant, lying politicians whose only goal is attention having their feet held to the fire by journalists in real time would be both very profitable and very entertaining, as would be confronting them on attention-seeking behavior and refusing to give the tantrums the time of day outside of social media. By not justifying these outbursts, it makes them prime targets for comedians who’ll compare them to Alex Jones’ tirades about the gay friggin’ frogs.

Which brings us back to your angry uncle. He is also doing a performance to get your attention like a bored, angry toddler, and by sticking to the good old we-don’t-talk-about-politics-at-the-dinner-table WASPy etiquette, you’re simply enabling his bad behavior. Push back, define and insist on acceptable parameters of a conversation, and if he refuses, let him whine about rescinded holiday invitations. Unfortunately, a face to face conversation isn’t a panacea, and it will fail in quite a few situations. But we don’t need it to be a perfect solution. Hell, 60% of the time would be plenty.

how the red scare continues to undermine us

Before we call it a post, there is one important thing we need to address, an elephant in the room because if we don’t, there will be a huge asterisk. If social media overran by attention-seeking influgrifters whose awful ways have found their way into politics is the runaway bandwagon, one of its major sources of fuel is a very nasty, deeply embedded, systemic problem with an actual, proper, shadowy villain we can blame.

I’m talking, of course, about the highly influential group of conspiracy theorists known as the John Birch Society, which you may better know in its current incarnations as a think tank behind Project 2025 — the GOP’s official blueprint for turning the U.S. into a fascist dictatorship — called The Heritage Foundation, and dark money groups like the Teneo Network and the Federalist Society, ran by far-right fixer Leonard Leo.

Their influence over American society since 1958 casts a long, dark shadow on every last plan to fix runaway corporate parasitism and increase living standards. Like in the famous satirical children’s book If You Give A Mouse A Cookie, the Bircherites believe that teaching kids about sharing, caring, or treating others with basic respect even if they’re different, is basically the first step on a short, swift road to being hauled off by evil thugs wearing the armbands of a totalitarian communist one world government.

According to them, everything bad that happens, from political gridlock, to war, to — oh sweet Cthulhu’s left shogoth testicle, I wish I was kidding about this one — broken elevators, is socialism and must be dealt with swiftly lest the Marxist cancer spreads. Over the course of nearly 70 years, they’ve spearheaded a campaign to more or less systematically eliminate any form of empathy or sense of collective responsibility from American culture.

The reason why the now infamous column from Kayla Chadwick in 2017 lamented that she simply didn’t know know how to explain to her fellow Americans that they should care about other people, is because there’s a concerted effort to raise generations of said fellow citizens certain that empathy is bad because it leads to communism, as is any other way of life or thought not approved by Red Scare conspiracy boosters. This is why after 9/11, when George W. Bush could have asked Americans suffering from a prolonged fit of patriotic fervor for anything, he asked us to shop ‘till we drop.

Nuclear families were the only way to have a proper, modern society because only a commie would live in a multi-generational family. We can’t provide healthcare to all of our citizens as a taxpayer-funded program with private extras — like other advanced countries do — because that would be communism. We can’t mandate a living wage for workers because, you guessed it, communism. Teaching kids evolution in science class? Sounds like something a godless, filthy commie would do.

If we really want to turn down the temperature on political conversations, we need to let go of the false notion that we live in a true meritocracy because this is an utterly impossible idea according to basic statistics, realize that the world is not just or fair, and any society worth its salt focuses on community, empathy, and treating them like real people rather than cogs in the Great Machine Of The Almighty Market. And each and every time we try to do that, we’re confronted with the rabid-banshee-struggling-with-food-poisoning screech of Bircherite politicians.

In short, until we finally deal with the multi-generational damage and corrosive effects of the Red Scare and the paradox that right wing politicians clutch ever harder to it as the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s spectacular implosion is now old enough to start worrying about its retirement planning and what overpriced sports car it should get in its upcoming midlife crisis, we won’t be able to actually make any headway.

We can talk face to face all we want. We can ignore attention-seeking tantrums from influgrifters. We can lambast politicians following their lead, eviscerating them on the news as deeply unserious clowns who don’t belong anywhere near real power. While we can — and actually do agree — on solutions to countless major problems, the more politicians refuse to actually implement any of these policies because caring about a nation’s citizens and their opinions is something something Marxist communism ooga booga, we’ll keep getting frustrated, keeping the anger and intensity sky high.

And that’s the bottom line. We need a world where we have strong communities, and multi-generational households, and strong social systems, and third places to spend time to get to know our neighbors, and cities that facilitate walkability and discovery, with a good mix of density, greenery, and businesses we can afford to patronize with living wages we could negotiate, guaranteed healthcare, and education accessible to all. Where we feel like a proper society. Our future relies on having empathy for each other so we can live up to the Greek proverb that society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they’ll never sit.

These are all things the Red Scare has taken from Americans before separating them into warring camps and isolated family units in which they’re now struggling, besieged from all sides by sociopaths infuriated there is a possibility that Americans may find a new way to reject dog-eat-dog parasitic capitalism, mostly get along with each other, and that people on whom they look down and desperately want to rule over, will also treated with dignity and respect. And this is what we’re ultimately up against.

See: Pandey, S., Cao, Y., Dong, Y. et al. (2023) Generation and influence of eccentric ideas on social networks. Sci Rep 13, 20433, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-47823-0

Kyle Hull, Clarisse Warren, Kevin Smith (2024) Politics makes bastards of us all: Why moral judgment is politically situational. PoliPsych, DOI: 10.1111/pops.12954

Wald, K. A., Kardas, M., & Epley, N. (2024). Misplaced Divides? Discussing Political Disagreement With Strangers Can Be Unexpectedly Positive. Psychological Science, DOI: 10.1177/09567976241230005