Tech Talk: The internet and politics

As we rapidly approach the election, it’s hard to escape how weaponized — and polarized — social media has become across the board. Vitriol has gone up, civility has gone down, and everybody seems happy to argue. Other countries have weaponized this tendency and are employing people and AI to try to push their preferred results and viewpoints.

There was a time when the democratization (and I use that term, in the Greek sense, free of any political freight, simply meaning everyone has a voice) of information and access was heralded as an unequivocally good thing. Unfortunately, it’s proven to be a double-edged sword because bad actors can present themselves as having equal legitimacy to certified experts and independent (and ideally neutral) media organizations.

In essence, technology has lead to a hyper-polarization of just about everyone on every single topic imaginable. Taking a step back and looking at it from a lens of how people would have regarded this level of agita maybe 20 years ago, and the contrast is stark. The controversies of yesterday’s politics included marital issues, the colors of people’s suits, and inappropriate exclamations on the campaign trail. Crimes, when they were committed, were generally treated and viewed as such. These events were all filtered through the lens of journalism, and were generally presented to the public with at least the soupcon of fact.

Two very human mechanisms are at work here: the first is confirmation bias – people tend to believe things that fit into their preconceptions or otherwise confirm their worldviews, and don’t tend to question those things — and when confronted with factual evidence to the contrary, they don’t tend to alter their opinion without an overwhelming reason, if ever.

The other is a similar mechanism to road rage: if you’re yelling at someone in a comments section, on social media or getting angry about something online — you can’t see the person or people you’re raging at, which prevents you from empathizing with them as though they were an actual human being — so the checks and balances that keep you from overreacting don’t kick in and the discussion becomes far more unhinged than it otherwise might.

The confirmation bias also causes people to seek out information that “seems” right to them, causing them to flock to news organizations that are slanted in their particular direction because those are “correct.” The inevitable end result of this behavior is a so-called “echo chamber,” where people are never confronted with any facts that challenge their views until it’s too late.

What’s missing here? There’s no real cross-pollination of ideas, no moderation of opinions, no room for exceptions. Social media and digital advertising don’t really allow for emotional context, and only carefully curated sources are actually painting a truly balanced picture. The idea of questioning all of these built-in beliefs that have been hammered in over years becomes uncomfortable at best, or inconceivable at worst.

Critical thinking is very different than “doing your own research.” It’s understanding that any information that’s slanted is unlikely to be wholly accurate. It’s following the information that is presented to you back to the source and considering the facts objectively.

When the world was a smaller place, this wasn’t as much of a problem. The way information is consumed now is, in a word, unnatural, and when making decisions upon which the future of the country depends, unquestioning belief without due consideration is always a bad thing.