Comment by scarface_74
2 days ago
I really hate the narrative that social media has increased polarization knowing that my still living parents grew up in the Jim Crow south where they were literally separated from society because of the color of their skin.
The country has always been hostile to “other”. People just have a larger platform to get their message out.
As someone whose grandparents endured Jim Crow, I largely agree in the sense that social media did not create America’s divides. Many of the divides in American society are very old and are very deep, with no easy fixes.
Unfortunately algorithmic social media is one of the factors adding fuel to the fire, and I believe it’s fair to say that social media has helped increase polarization by recommending content to its viewers purely based on engagement metrics without any regard for the consequences of pushing such content. It is much easier to whip people into a frenzy this way. Additionally, echo chambers make it harder for people to be exposed to other points of view. Combine this with dismal educational outcomes for many Americans (including a lack of critical thinking skills), our two-party system that aggregates diverse political views into just two options, a first-past-the-post election system that forces people to choose “the lesser of two evils,” and growing economic pain, and these factors create conditions that are ripe for strife.
Unfortunately algorithmic social media is one of the factors adding fuel to the fire
Saying social media fans the flames is like saying ignorance is bliss. Mainstream media (cable news, radio, newspapers, etc) only gives us one, largely conservative, viewpoint. If you're lucky, you'll get one carefully controlled opposing viewpoint (out of many!). As you say, our choices are usually evil and not quite as evil.
Anger is not an unreasonable reaction when you realize this. When you realize that other viewpoints exist, the mainstream media and politicians are not acting in anyone's best interest but their own, there really are other options (politically, for news, etc.). Social media is good at bringing these things to light.
There are no easy fixes to the divides you're talking about, but failing to confront them and just giving in to the status quo, or worse, continuing down our current reactionary transcript, is probably the worst way to approach them.
So there wasn’t enough fuel in the fire when marauding Klansmen were hanging Black people?
It was the current President of the US that led a charge that a Black man running for President wasn’t a “real American” and was a secret Muslim trying to bring Shari law to the US and close to half of the US was willing to believe it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WErjPmFulQ0
This was before social media in the northern burbs of Atlanta where I had to a house built in 2016. We didn’t have a problem during the seven years we lived there. But do you think they were “polarized” by social media in the 80s?
That’s just like police brutality didn’t start with the rise of social media. Everyone just has cameras and a platform
Race relations were better in the 2000-2010 period, according to Gallup data:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx
Easy to cherry-pick stuff. You can cherry-pick Jim Crow south; I can cherry-pick Chicago in the 90s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDmAI67nBGU
I think we have to get past black-and-white thinking and see it as a matter of degree. With 340 million people in the USA, realistically, at least a few of them will always be racist. The question is how powerful and influential the racists are. That's a question which social media feeds into.
I don't understand the claim here about "Chicago in the 1990s". Can you say more? I lived here through the 1990s and it was a major city like any other. But maybe that's what you were saying?
You call 60 years of racial segregation that affected an entire race of people in several states “cherry picking”?
It’s a huge difference between “a few people being racist” and laws enforcing segregation and laws against interracial marriage.
The racists have always been in power. You can look at the justice system, the disparity between sentencing for the same crimes across races etc.
The Supreme Court said you can’t use race as a basis for college admissions. But you can use it as a basis for arresting someone.
Fox News is the most popular news network and isn’t part of social media.
>You call 60 years of racial segregation that affected an entire race of people in several states “cherry picking”?
Why are people who call themselves "progressive" so obsessed with events from half a century ago?
>The racists have always been in power.
It amazes me how quickly people forgot that we had 8 years of Obama. That was a lot more recent than racial segregation.
>the disparity between sentencing for the same crimes
The vast majority of this disparity seems to go away when you control for arrest offense, criminal history, etc.: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1985377
>The Supreme Court said you can’t use race as a basis for college admissions. But you can use it as a basis for arresting someone.
Well yeah, if someone fits the description of a criminal suspect, why not?
>Fox News is the most popular news network and isn’t part of social media.
When's the last time Fox News advocated for segregation or laws against interracial marriage?
IMO you've been making some very handwavey arguments which are collapsing important distinctions.
In any case... you can see from Table 13 in this PDF (page 13) that the rate of black-on-white crime is over 3x the rate of white-on-black crime: https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cv23.pdf
This isn't something which happened 60 years ago. This is data from 2023. It's more recent / greater in magnitude than most of the points you've been making. So, would it be fair to conclude that black people in the US are hostile to the "other", akin to the conclusion you made in your original comment?
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> The country has always been hostile to “other”. People just have a larger platform to get their message out.
And a consequence of this is that some people’s perspective of the scale of the nation’s hostilities is limited to the last 5 years or so.
One of the factors that led to the Rwandan genocide was the broadcast of the RLTM radio station
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide#Radio_station...
The radio didn't create the divide, and it wasn't the sole factor in the genocide, but it engrained in the population a sense of urgency in eliminating the Tutsi, along with a stream of what was mostly fake news to show that the other side is already commiting the atrocities against Hutus
When the genocide happened, it was fast and widespread: people would start killing their own neighbors at scale. In 100 days, a million people were killed.
The trouble with social media is that they somehow managed to shield themselves from the legal repercussions of heavily promoting content similar to what RTLM broadcast. For example, see the role of Facebook and its algorithmic feed in the genocide in Myanmar
https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...
It's insane that they can get away with it.
And there wasn’t a history of genocide of other before then? Hitler in Germany and the mass murder in Tulsa in 1921 didn’t need social media.
History has shown people don’t need a reason to hate and commit violence against others.
People don’t need guns to kill, either, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t make for more effective weapons.
I think you're underestimating the role deliberate propaganda has played in mass murder.
Propaganda and ideology were a major part of the Nazi rise to power.
Marx, Engels, and Mussolini were all in the newspaper business. Jean-Paul Marat's newspaper was very influential in promoting the French reign of terror, including some claiming he's directly responsible for the September Massacres. Nationwide propaganda were major priorities day one to Lenin and after him in Soviet Russia.
Similarly with the Cambodian genocide, Great Leap Forward, Holodomor, etc.
Propaganda even played a big role in Julias Caesar's campaign against the Gauls some 2 millenia before social media.
But we made progress away from that and now we've regressed back towards it recently, aided by social media.
Exactly when did we make progress? In 2008 - before social media really took off how much of the population was a yelling that a Black man wasn’t a “real American” and was a “secret Muslim”?
Before then we had the “Willie Horton ads”. Not to mention that Clinton performatively oversaw the electrocution of a mentally challenged Black man to show that he was tough on crime.
https://jacobin.com/2016/11/bill-clinton-rickey-rector-death...
Yes I know that Obama was also a champion of laws like the defense of marriage act. We have always demonized other in this country. It was just hidden before.
That black man you're referring to was elected President twice, despite his haters. Which does not mean that racism was conquered but does indicate progress since the aforementioned Jim Crow era.
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The article mentions this. It tries to argue the significance of that platform.