Facebook and Democracy: Social Media’s Coarsening Impact on the Public Square

May 31, 2017

Could Twitter diminish your tolerance for opposing ideas (as well as your productivity)? Is Facebook bad for democracy?

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and other social media platforms are set up to show people content that they are already likely to agree with, which is fine when you are checking out puppy dogs and meal ideas. But when the content turns toward politics or life-changing policies, social media algorithms on Facebook and elsewhere leave people seeing only content they “like,” trapping them in a self-reinforcing bubble with little exposure to alternative ideas.

The result? People with different opinions are drifting further and further apart, removed from intellectual challenges and less likely to engage with political opponents. This drop in the need for intellectual rigor is making it more difficult to find solutions to problems that impact everyone.

Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein’s latest book, “#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media,” outlines the role of social networks in representative government, and warns that the division of viewpoints into hardened us vs. them groupings is real, growing, and becoming more difficult to overcome with time.

Speaking to political columnist Michael Barone recently, Sunstein said that the blinders narrowing our minds are harming the American creed.

Echo chambers and information cocoons are a real problem for democracy. It’s very important for people to step outside a kind of hall of mirrors which they can construct with the aid of Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, and encounter both topics that are unfamiliar and maybe not especially interesting to them, and certainly points of view that aren’t congenial and that may be disruptive to what they already think that is central to, let’s say, the American project.”

The average Facebook user gets about 20 percent of his or her news from Facebook, with younger people getting a higher percentage. Likewise, the data show that people on Twitter tend to follow people that agree with their points of view.

Sunstein says this phenomenon is no surprise. Visionaries like Bill Gates saw 20 years ago a new world in which people could get exactly what they want, effectively creating what Sunstein calls “The Daily Me,” a completely personalized online encounter in which everything on one’s computer or tablet reflects views that are preferential to the owner. That’s exactly where society headed.

Is there a danger in not turning the trend around, or not having people demonstrate a curiosity for what others outside their viewpoints think? And is the decision to look at like-minded ideas on the Internet any different than self-selecting pre-sorts of media that came before it, like the cable news channels or news magazines?

Yes and no, Sunstein says. Self-selection has been going on for ages, but its scale has never been so large and so reinforced. As a result, despite its massive reach, social media have basically made it harder to solve problems. When it comes to policies like immigration, infrastructure, education, or economic mobility, the positions have become so rigid, that “doing something about some of these issues would seem preposterous.”

Sunstein notes that human curiosity doesn’t keep everyone down. The counter-effect of social media is that people on each side of the debate pay close attention to what the opposition is saying so that they can monitor and challenge it.

Though Sunstein describes his own book as downbeat and not cheerful, he suggested a few prescriptions that could turn the tide for American society. For one, providers of information, whether they be news outlets or Facebook itself, can get out of the business of reinforcing the barriers.

Two ideas that would be on the list of proposals are, why not give Facebook users an Opposing Viewpoints button where they can just click and then their newsfeed is gonna show them stuff that they don’t agree with. Or why not give Facebook users a Serendipity button where they can just click and if they click, then they’re gonna get stuff that is just coming to them through an algorithm which provides people with a range of stuff. So if you’re someone who is just focused on one set of issues, you’re gonna get the “Wall Street Journal” and “New York Times” also.

And Facebook, to its credit, doesn’t wanna pick winners and losers, so they shouldn’t promote one particular newspaper, but they could have a random draw of things, maybe it could be geographical.

One other approach to get us back into a constructuve debate is to challenge Americans try to take a high road when they disagree in public online forum, and not merely insult their opponents, but nudge people to explain the positive aspects of the positions they support. Good luck with that, but courtesy used to be an American value.

Watch Barone’s interview of Sunstein below.

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Millennials and Democracy: They Do Want It, Don’t They?

October 23, 2016

A recent survey of Millennials and democracy suggests they prefer authoritarianism to freedom and liberty, but a very enlightening look at the concerning phenomenon by a Russian citizen leaves hope that American democracy could actually benefit from the younger generation’s seeming rejection of it.

As America’s youngest adults search for the best future for themselves, the position of government as the go-to answer for life’s everyday problems could lose its dominance.  That may not have been the intention of author Leonid Bershidsky, but it does create the sense of relief from the head-shaking conclusion that Millennials are creeping toward totalitarianism.

First, the scary part: A look at the data that has triggered the widespread talk of Millennial rejection of democracy. Bershidsky reports on the findings in a July paper by Roberto Stefan Foa, a principal investigator of the World Values Survey, and Harvard political scientist Yascha Mouk.

More than two thirds of American Millennials do not consider it essential to live in a country that is governed democratically. About a quarter of them consider a democratic political system a ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’ way to run the country. At the same time, support for authoritarian alternatives is rising. In 1996, only 1 in 16 Americans said it would be good if the military ruled the country. By 2014, it was 1 in 6. Only 19 percent of Millennials say it wouldn’t be legitimate for the military to take over if the government proved incompetent or unable to do its job. A growing share of young people is in favor of a ‘strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliament and elections’ and a government of ‘experts’ rather than politicians.

Yeah, definitely scary, but the conclusions may have been misinterpreted, to everyone’s relief.

As I covered the U.S. presidential campaign, I saw much that appears to contradict Foa and Mouk’s dire warnings. Bernie Sanders’ movement, still alive despite his primary loss, has persuaded many young people that traditional politics can be used to further their goals. These Millennials and younger Generation Z-ers follow a strong leader, and much of the grassroots campaigning they do is outside the political system as we know it — but they don’t seem drawn to authoritarianism or a government of ‘experts.’

For those who think Sanders’ democratic socialist approach to governing is nothing to feel relief about, here’s where Bershidsky’s observations become more encouraging.

Democracy isn’t meritocratic enough for the Facebook generation, which deifies tech capitalists and social media stars. None of their heroes are elected. Democracy throws up people like (Donald) Trump and (Hillary) Clinton, not Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. The proponents of raw democracy these days are anti-technocratic, like Michael Gove, Brexiter extraordinaire, who says Britons have ‘had enough of experts.’

Young people assume there are other ways for a talented leader to get to the top than by rising through political ranks — and the tech billionaires support that intuition by trying to bypass government as they fight disease (Zuckerberg) or prepare to colonize Mars (Musk). A world run by these well-meaning people wouldn’t be democratic, though their support comes from below. …

So, the conclusion is that young people don’t reject democracy per se, they reject the brutal game of politics and an electoral system that foists up candidates more interested in “gotcha” moments than on governing. It’s the very bureaucratic nature accompanying the growth of government that is anathema. Young people want to choose their leaders, but want those leaders to make the economy grow, increase innovation, and reduce the technocratic nature of goverment.

If millennials feel they are represented by smart people who understand their agenda and have the necessary expertise to implement it, they may like politics better than they do now. And so may the older generations: They, too, are not immune from the irritation caused by crude election battles such as this year’s.

That doesn’t suggest Millennials want authoritarian government. It suggests that they want the choice for creative problem-solvers in government. And who can argue with that?

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Freedom House Records Loss of Freedom, Notably in the United States

August 27, 2016

Liberal democracies on the whole are on the decline in the world, which may not alarm Americans in their cushy first-world homes but for the fact that the United States is listed among those who are experiencing a downward trend away from democracy and toward a loss of freedom.

Freedom House, which publishes an annual report on the ability of individuals to live freely in their nations, reported in its 2016 study that for the 10th year in  row, the number of free countries is on the decline. According to Freedom House, 40 percent of nations are free, 24 percent are partly free, and 36 percent are not free.

It reports:

The number of countries showing a decline in freedom for the year—72—was the largest since the 10-year slide began. Just 43 countries made gains.

Over the past 10 years, 105 countries have seen a net decline, and only 61 have experienced a net improvement.

Ratings for the Middle East and North Africa region were the worst in the world in 2015, followed closely by Eurasia.

Over the last decade, the most significant global reversals have been in freedom of expression and the rule of law.

The United States still ranks as a free nation in the Freedom House report, with a score of 90 on a scale of 100, but Freedom House says that the U.S. should be watched because freedom is receding. Specifically, Freedom House reports:

The United States received a downward trend arrow because of the cumulative impact of flaws in the electoral system, a disturbing increase in the role of private money in election campaigns and the legislative process, legislative gridlock, the failure of the Obama administration to fulfill promises of enhanced government openness, and fresh evidence of racial discrimination and other dysfunctions in the criminal justice system.

Freedom House has been conducting the study for 45 years, and while its results have been questioned before, mostly over whether it views freedom from an American-style left-right political lens, which doesn’t take into account cultural barometers, the results should be a concern to Americans, particularly since the decline appears to be acceptable to many on America’s college campuses.

Writer Rebecca Burgess draws from another study which shows that decreasing support for liberal democracies is evident on college campuses, whether university students and faculty want to admit it or not.

(F)ew scholars or commentators are keen to be the next generational crank and say forthrightly that democracy is in decline. This time, however, Foa and Mounk enlist “the language of survey research” to demonstrate that the young of this era no longer support democracy per se as prior generations of young citizens have.

Not only do fewer than 30 percent of US millennials believe it’s essential to live in a country that’s governed democratically, compared to 72 percent of those born before WWII, in 2011, 24 percent of those born in the 1980s and after considered democracy to be a ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’ way of running the country. Among the same cohort of Europeans in 2011, only 13 percent said the similar — itself an increase from the 1990s, when it was 8 percent.

Arguably, these are tenuous because still vague markers. But consider this: the minimal liberal understanding of representative democracy is centered on elections being free and fair. Twenty-six percent of US millennials say that it is ‘unimportant’ for a people in a democracy ‘to choose their leaders in free elections.’

This anchors the more concerning fact that the share of US citizens who believe that having a ‘strong leader’ who doesn’t have to ‘bother with parliaments and elections’ is a better way to proceed has risen to 32 percent from 24 percent in 1995; that 49 percent now approve of ‘having experts, not government, make decisions according to what they think is best for the country’; and that today, one in six of the survey respondents agree that it would be a good or very good thing for the army to rule. (Notably, the proportion in favor of military rule has risen in most mature democracies, including Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.)

To quote “Team America: World Police,” freedom isn’t free. And its loss, disappearing alongside liberal democracies around the world could be much sooner than a generation away if its defenders are not vigilant.

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