One of the the biggest concern when it comes to the damage of social media and political polarization in the United States is the fear of echo chambers or people operating in media bubbles. When people only hear opinions they already agree with or see stories that match their worldview, they can become more entrenched in their beliefs, whether or not their beliefs reflect the real world. They can also become easier to manipulate and more extreme.
Interestingly, research largely shows that the vast majority of people do not live in perfectly sealed echo chambers. It has been found that only about 4 percent of people work in online echo chambers, and most people on Twitter, for example, do not follow political accounts. Essentially, most people don’t follow politics, and many who do get at least a little bit of information from different sides of the political spectrum. That said, echo chambers and media bubbles are a problem because they can radicalize people, negatively affect the people who live there, and distort the wider political landscape.
“The subgroup of the population that consumes hyperpartisan media and inhabits echo chambers on social platforms is deeply impacted,” said Magdalena Wojcieszak, a professor of communications at the University of California, Davis. “They are more politically interested, more participative, more partisan and more polarized. All these things make them more likely to participate in politics.”
Because these people are so politically involved, according to Wojcieszak, they have a disproportionate influence on American politics. They are often the loudest voices in the room. She says people who are politically active like to have their opinions validated so they can follow accounts that match their opinions and get into echo chambers. Social media makes it easier to find people who align with them politically, and algorithms often give them the content they’ll like. All of this can eventually lead people to go down rabbit holes and become more politically extreme.
“It makes you more extreme or more polarized. It strengthens your attitude. It also reinforces your sense of belonging to this group, and it reinforces your negativity and hostility towards other groups,” says Wojcieszak. “You think you are the legitimate one, the good one, the virtuous one. The others are bad.”
People may come to believe that they are the only ones with the facts and that the other side is illegitimate. (You may have seen this in someone who recently paid tens of billions of dollars for a social media company.) Wojcieszak says the process of radicalizing people can begin when they have just a few political views in common with those who are more extreme than they are . Having a few points of view that align with these extreme actors online can be the trap that pulls them down the rabbit hole.
“To enter into that process of this individual psychological and algorithmic confirmation, you have to have a certain amount of sensitivity to some sort of narrative from the left or the right,” says Wojcieszak. “If there are social or political issues that you have certain views on, that can start the process.”
