Mehdi Hasan just posted a viral tweet arguing that the relentless messaging from Elon Musk, especially his attacks on the media, has a significant impact on public trust and election outcomes.
The claim is that people like Musk and Trump have created a self-reinforcing echo chamber around their followers: people only hear what they want to hear, the assertion goes, and it is therefore difficult for reality-based perspectives to break through.
(Some) people love to blame social media platforms for being “outrage machines” and also creating “filter bubbles”. But sorry, you actually have to pick one. Either there are bubbles (where people live happily never hearing what their ideological opponents believe), or there is ample cross-cutting exposure, which in turn generates anger (but also engagement and more cumulative time spent on the platform).
“As a thought experiment, imagine if during an earlier time Americans had spent their days taking tours of other people’s homes,” suggested Tom Nichols in his latest book. He meant that it would be less than ideal for social harmony if people kept tabs on strangers and their standards of living. And a version of this argument applies to politics: knowing that your friends (and strangers) disagree with your deeply held beliefs can be upsetting.
When Nichols says about hyper-connected Americans that they “get to know too much about each other, and the more they know each other, the more they find themselves in conflict,” I think that sounds right.
And, if increased exposure to differing values and viewpoints contributes to social tensions, then the seemingly invincible echo chamber narrative about social media platforms becomes increasingly difficult to defend.
My second problem is that the timeline simply doesn't add up.
Consider this: by 2021, well before Musk's acquisition of Twitter, Gallup polling showed that only 10-12% of Republicans trusted the mass media. Musk didn't purchase Twitter until late 2022, making it mathematically impossible for his ownership to have caused this historic low in media trust. Unless we're to believe Musk possessed some kind of prescient influence over public opinion before his Twitter purchase, or that he somehow became a messenger who moved the opinions of Democrats, he’s not responsible for the mistrust in the media.
Irrespective of whether you might want to blame the content of his tweets, or possible changes to the algorithm, the necessity of a strange temporal twist for the argument to hold bothered me a little bit. Besides, when a quantity is already near its theoretical floor, it’s tricky to propose a big theory about that quantity’s decline.
Other than that, it was an engaging tweet…
The claim is that people like Musk and Trump have created a self-reinforcing echo chamber around their followers: people only hear what they want to hear, the assertion goes, and it is therefore difficult for reality-based perspectives to break through.
(Some) people love to blame social media platforms for being “outrage machines” and also creating “filter bubbles”. But sorry, you actually have to pick one. Either there are bubbles (where people live happily never hearing what their ideological opponents believe), or there is ample cross-cutting exposure, which in turn generates anger (but also engagement and more cumulative time spent on the platform).
“As a thought experiment, imagine if during an earlier time Americans had spent their days taking tours of other people’s homes,” suggested Tom Nichols in his latest book. He meant that it would be less than ideal for social harmony if people kept tabs on strangers and their standards of living. And a version of this argument applies to politics: knowing that your friends (and strangers) disagree with your deeply held beliefs can be upsetting.
When Nichols says about hyper-connected Americans that they “get to know too much about each other, and the more they know each other, the more they find themselves in conflict,” I think that sounds right.
And, if increased exposure to differing values and viewpoints contributes to social tensions, then the seemingly invincible echo chamber narrative about social media platforms becomes increasingly difficult to defend.
My second problem is that the timeline simply doesn't add up.
Consider this: by 2021, well before Musk's acquisition of Twitter, Gallup polling showed that only 10-12% of Republicans trusted the mass media. Musk didn't purchase Twitter until late 2022, making it mathematically impossible for his ownership to have caused this historic low in media trust. Unless we're to believe Musk possessed some kind of prescient influence over public opinion before his Twitter purchase, or that he somehow became a messenger who moved the opinions of Democrats, he’s not responsible for the mistrust in the media.
Irrespective of whether you might want to blame the content of his tweets, or possible changes to the algorithm, the necessity of a strange temporal twist for the argument to hold bothered me a little bit. Besides, when a quantity is already near its theoretical floor, it’s tricky to propose a big theory about that quantity’s decline.
Other than that, it was an engaging tweet…