Link: The Case Against Social Media is Stronger Than You Think

A long read, but important for understanding the depth of the negative consequences of the proliferation of social media use in recent years.

That negative content spreads especially far online makes sense given some well-established properties of human psychology. Humans exhibit a broad-based psychological negativity bias as well a range of more specific attentional biases toward negative stimuli. This is because, like other organisms, we have evolved to be uniquely attuned to signals suggestive of danger. As a result, when given the opportunity to cycle through a variegated soup of thousands of digital signals daily, we tend to fixate on and amplify the most distressing ones.

This dynamic creates very strong incentives to prey on our negative emotions. Successful ‘attentional entrepreneurs’ online not only enjoy attention’s more immediate benefits like status or influence, but are often paid by platforms in proportion to the ad revenue they generate. In that case, if certain kinds of content reliably accrue the most attention, there are very strong incentives online to produce that content en masse.

That is exactly what has happened in recent years with sensationalized and excessively negative political content. The last decade and a half has seen the rise of a new class of political influencers who, empowered by social media’s unique incentive environment, have come to exert near-symphonic control over the fear, anger, and tribalism of large sectors of the American public. The phrase “political influencer” calls to mind names like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, but I mean it to refer to any content creator, pundit, journalist, or even politician with an active online presence oriented around the production of political content—so perhaps hundreds of thousands of users with followings of varying sizes. Critically, this group is not a random selection from social media’s overall user base, but skews wealthier and more educated, meaning its greater online influence is likely matched by greater offline influence as well.

Despite accounting for only a small slice of the online population, this new influencer class is coming to dominate the market for political communication. In the process, it is transforming America’s perception of itself, which, since America is a social entity constituted in part by its self-perceptions, just amounts to saying it is transforming America.