How social media destroys democratic discourse, explained in 6 easy figures

Where we all went wrong

An evidence-based worldview has come under attack from rightwing populist movements all around the world. Fueling the rise of these precarious political parties is a broken information ecosystem that came about by the technological disruption of the information age, especially the social media platform giants of the web 2.0.

It seems that only now people begin to truly realize that silicon valley moved fast and broke things, with no idea of how to put back together the pieces.

Many still dispute what exactly went wrong; misinformation, polarization, extremism, algorithms, influence operations … a long list of symptoms and culprits are offered; but no coherent picture of how they all relate to each other.

So maybe I can share how I think about the bigger picture after spending a great deal immersing myself in the topic; and lay out, as simple as I can, what goes wrong in the information ecosystems we currently inhabit.

Let us look at 6 major drivers that broke our information ecosystems and led to our fall into myth, manipulation and magical thinking.

As always, there is a handy summary infographic, free to use:

1) The attention economy commercialized information, altering how we treat and value information.

The commercialization of attention has turned information from something we traditionally used to “inform ourselves” about the world into a product we create, amplify and exchange for popularity, persuasion, profit or power. The “informational value” (truth, accuracy, relevance, context) of that product is secondary, what counts is its “informational impact”, how well it furthers the strategic goals of the creator/amplifier/consumer.

This shift in how we treat information has created many asymmetries between what information products are successful online; and unfortunately, facts currently always lose out. Facts are less profitable that falsehoods, facts spread worse than fictions that serve the powerful or the popular; and facts are less common in our spaces, drowned out by the abundance of ideologically motivated garbage takes. If all information products exist on a spectrum between very factual and very false, imagine various forces pushing the levers strongly to one side over the other.

2) Social media supercharges processes leading to community and identity formation

In a fascinating book by Prof. Petter Törnberg, a computational sociologist who studies extremist online communities with NLP-based methods, the researcher describes how “discursive spaces” always shape the ideas, communities and identities of the people participating in said environment. We humans use stories to make sense of our world, and doing it together with others endows us with a sense of meaning and belonging to our tribe. Breaking down his full argument can be a bit lengthy (it is a book that I recommend highly), but here is my short-version of how social media funnels us into niche online communities and creates a social information environment.

The trifecta of crowds, algorithms and influencers create viral narratives that shape public discourse

People are probably very familiar now with Renée DiResta’s Invisible Rulers book, which I will happily count among the most important books of the year. In what she aimed to be a sequel to Chomsky’s and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent, the propaganda researcher describes how public discourse is now shaped by a set of new forces in our midst; namely platform algorithms, influencers and (activist) crowds.

I think what is important to understand is that each ingredient needs the other two to thrive. Influencers rise from the crowd because they are perceived as authentic representatives of a niche community, they serve as the conduit (or conductor) of the emotional energy of crowds while “up-selling” their raw emotions into often profound-sounding rationalizations that inspire trust or admiration and spread well. After an initial boost from their niche community, influencers also get new crowds to engage with their content, which signals to algorithms that more people should be exposed to that content. This in turn increases the size of the crowd that can sustain the success of an influencer and the co-created narrative this growing niche community drives into virality.

Viral narratives shape public participation, and with it, social graphs, along the most efficient amplification cascades

On social media, we constantly make the binary decision to buy or reject information products in the form of engagement and sharing. When an influencer engages with a piece of content, his followers see this and might be nudged to make the same decision to engage. If a piece of content has been visibly engaged with by multiple people in our social circle, our decision to engage with it becomes more likely. After all, we want to participate in the conversation with our peers and signal our allegiance. At some point, after seeing almost everybody engaging with a specific information product, our supposedly private choice to engage becomes a near certainty. Our social network compels us to engage, and our decision to do so further influences others after us to engage as well. By being part of a specific social group and engaging with a specific information product the same way, we have become part of an information cascade amplifying the information, a stepping stone on its way into virality.

But information cascades on social media do more than make things go viral; they teach the algorithms what content and associated social relationships influence our decisions to engage. And inversely, the algorithms learn which of our connections and friends are less relevant to create ever higher likelihoods of us participating in such social information cascades. This leads to a radical social sorting over time.

Network studies showed that participation in “Tweet cascades increase the similarity between connected users, as users lose ties to more dissimilar users and add new ties to similar users” and that “Twitter users who follow and share more polarized news coverage tend to lose social ties to users of the opposite ideology.”

Again, here is a very simple figure of how the social topology of our personal network changes; we lose connections to people who do not agree with us, while we elevate some influencers in our midst.

Altered information flow leads to tribally motivated rationalizations, fragmentation of reality perceptions, and bespoke worldviews

Good information rarely reaches people unfiltered by influencers anymore. The socially restructured crowds, in turn, look for influencers and conduits who could channel their feelings, biases and preferences into viral narratives while working to sway, subvert, or discredit the traditional gatekeepers of information flow, such as institutions or media.

Over years, the actions of online culture warriors and tribal gladiators have carved up society into factions with the help of algorithms and asymmetrically engaged crowds. Engagement algorithms made sure to remove the friction for information flow within these socially restructured amplification networks while building barriers to them for outsiders.

Once our social networks have been completely restructured along lowest common denominator lines, such as partisanship or conspiratorial worldview, building bridges and good-faith discussions between opposing camps becomes almost impossible. We inhabit bespoke realities where no consensus on what is real or true exists anymore.

In the all-versus-all war between polarized factions, power and might, not evidence, science or rationality, shapes politics and our understanding of the world.

We need a shared set of facts to function in a democracy; without them, any collaboration on shared issues becomes impossible.

Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without all three, we have no shared reality, and democracy as we know it — and all meaningful human endeavors — are dead. —

Maria Ressa, Nobel Laureate

I believe that today, an entirely new front of informational conflicts has opened between shared reality and our digital world.

In a world fragmented by increasingly bespoke reality perceptions, science, facts, rationality have become an existential threat to most of our cherished co-created beliefs and worldviews; an unwelcome challenge to our recently developed online politics, identity, and community. These frictions can quickly lead to conflict between warring tribes and ideologies; and between two camps completely detached from facts and rationality, no common ground can be found anymore. Might makes right.

“Once you get into this world where truth is a subset of power, it basically means that you can’t have democratic debate anymore,” - Kyiv-born journalist and propaganda researcher Peter Pomerantsev in his Atlantic podcast Autocracy in America

The endresult?

The technological disruption of the information age has changed how society values and treats information; instead of using information to “inform and educate” ourselves about the world we live in, we use information now as a tool for popularity, profit, persuasion or power. And some who are really successful at doing so become new powerholders in our midst, shaping our discourse. We have created an information environment where the most ruthless velocity hackers are rewarded for creating the most compelling motivated rationalizations for the most enaging viral narratives.

Information is coercive. What we see online and what narratives we will buy into is not fully our choice, but a feature of our social and information environment in the first place. So once the addictive pull of viral narratives invites our participation, we can become manipulated by them.

Social media platforms are designed to supercharge emotional energy, introducing us to niche communities where we co-create and shape the viral narratives ever further until they become self-sustaining fan-fiction universes with little attachment to factual reality.

Even worse, once our continuous participation build allegiance to our niche communities and we form our online identities around these fan fiction universes, they shape our worldview and reshape our social connections. From that point forward, any contradictory information is often perceived as a threat to us and our tribe, and anybody holding a different worldview becomes “the other”, an enemy to defeat.

Consensus finding, and democratic discourse, becomes increasingly impossible between worldviews that are based on participatory fan fictions, not scientific reality or rational thinking.

In contrast, the tribal polarization within bespoke worldviews empowers a different type of politics; one of constant existential threat, and desire for dominance and strongmen. Especially fascism is an ideology of “us-versus-them”, a movement based on participatory myth-making about the superiority of one’s ingroup, nation and ideology facing the constant threat of enemies from without and within.

So this is where we are today.

The only antidote is for us to embrace and defend an evidence-based worldview, a seemingly simple thing has become an act of courage and defiance to fascism these days.

So to all of you out there:

Be safe, stay smart, and let’s connect with other defenders of an evidence-based worldview out there to hold the line for democracy.