We're not imagining it — Twitter really is bad for democracy.
This is an extract from New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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How is social media reshaping our democracies? This week saw publication of what is surely the most comprehensive review to date of the evidence.
Published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, a new paper saw the analysis of hundreds of high quality studies on the impacts of social media on participation, trust, hate, polarisation, and a range of other dynamics inside democratic societies.
The results? They’re mixed, but overall it doesn’t look good.
On the positive front, the researchers found that social media was weakly associated with exposure to more diverse political news — in contrast to once fashionable thinking about social media filter bubbles.
But social media was also associated with decreased trust in democratic processes, increased hate, polarisation, and a tendency towards populism.
An association, of course, isn’t the same as a causal link. But by using analytical methods known as causal inference techniques, the researchers were able to establish that their data does support the existence of a causal link between social media and the phenomena in question.
In other words, that vague feeling many of us have that a connected world is doing strange and troublesome things to our societies? It looks as though we’re right.
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⚡ NWSH Take:
At the heart of these issues is a powerful truth. Our democracies were designed in the 19th-century; they simply weren’t made to operate alongside ultra-connected, many-to-many media environments. It wasn’t so long ago that we were talking about the impacts of television; then along came Twitter and a whole new wave of disruption.
These days, vague the internet is bad for democracy memes are everywhere; we desperately need evidence, and this report is the most comprehensive attempt yet at providing that.
And look at the landscape into which it arrives. Twitter has fallen into the hands of mercurial (some say unstable) billionaire, and the Saudis are now a major investor. There’s rising concern — including that expressed by the FBI this week — that TikTok is a tool of Chinese surveillance and destabilisation.
We urgently need a deeper understanding of the dynamics in play. And next? We need to act. The next wave of research must be on interventions that ameliorate what is damaging and promote what is positive about social. It's possible to imagine forms of participatory, many-to-many media that are good for democracy. How about we try to build them?
I write often in NWSH on how simulations of complex social dynamics — including entire societies — will allow for new forms of insight across the coming decade.
Who will be first to build a meaningful simulation of social media inside a democracy? That kind of simulation will allow us to test various interventions, and find the ones that work.
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You've just read an extract from this week's New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
Also in this week's instalment:
🌎 Climate scientists say we could overshoot the 1.5C warming target and then deploy technology to claw averages temperatures back underneath it.
🙋♀️ The global population exceeds 8 billion.
...and much more!