The Mob, 1935, by Carl Hoeckner
1. Introduction
The philosopher Dan Williams recently published two pieces on social media— “Scapegoating the Algorithm” at Asterisk Magazine, and “The Case Against Social Media is Weaker Than You Think” at his Substack. As their titles attest to, both argue that the case against social media, on epistemic and political grounds, has been considerably overstated.
I recently published a lengthy essay arguing the opposite: that the case against social media has, if anything, been understated. And so, especially given I’m new to Substack, Williams’s recent work gives me a welcome opportunity to pick a fight for engagement-farming purposes. Sadly for my subscriber count, I agree with Williams on quite a bit, and so this is going to be less combative polemicizing and more demonstrating that a range of serious worries about social media are capable of charting a course between the equivocal lines of evidence he underlines.
I am going to focus on the putative political impacts of social media—in particular its impact on political polarization—rather than the specifically epistemic ones. These are often conflated, but I think it is helpful to cleave them apart. It is possible to believe, as I in fact do, that social media has had a dangerous, incendiary effect on American politics, while also believing that related concerns about misinformation and conspiracy theorizing are somewhat (though not entirely) overblown. I may decide to write a short follow-up on the latter, but will put it to the side for now.
With respect to social media’s supposed contributions to political polarization, and in particular ‘affective polarization,’ Williams highlights four main lines of evidence that contradict the prevailing narrative. First, polarization has been rising for decades and began doing so well in advance of social media. Second, polarization has increased the most in recent years among those who use social media and the internet the least, those over 65. Third, trends in polarization have diverged in countries that all have widespread social media use. And fourth, several high-quality experimental studies have found a negligible effect of social media use on individuals’ levels of polarization.
If I can import a cliché from academic philosophy, it is sometimes said that all argumentative objections fall into one of two categories: “oh yeah?” or “so what?” I opt for a mix of both here. I begin with the “oh yeah?”: Williams’s evidence is much less convincing than it initially seems, and beyond ruling out an implausibly large spike in polarization, tells us little about how social media might be influencing its trajectory.
I then turn to my main focus, the “so what?”: even if Williams is right that social media has not significantly contributed to affective polarization in the U.S., this is consistent with it having plenty of other negative effects on American politics. To make this argument concrete, I highlight different lines of evidence to Williams in order to demonstrate first, that social media has indeed had a deeply concerning impact on our politics, and second, that one need not rely on the metric of affective polarization in particular to make this case. I refer to the alternative view I develop as an elite radicalization theory of online politics.
While I am an avid reader and admirer of Williams’s work, I think he is engaged in what has unfortunately become a fashionable form of academic contrarianism: arguing that despite what very much seem to be foundational, risk-laden changes in our social order, all we observe is in fact business-as-usual, and to the extent it seems otherwise, that is because of some mix of psychological bias and media overhype.
A similar contrarianism plagued early predictions of the threat posed by Donald Trump. Those critics have either relented or fallen quiet now. It is time for those who continue to minimize the downside risks of the digital media revolution to finally do the same.
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