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Social media lock their users in echo chambers. They increase polarization in societies, and their algorithms can force any narratives upon users. These are just a few of the popular accusations against social media, but many of them are rather myths. In fact, we don't know much about the world of social media, says Ruben Enikolopov, NES Academic Supervisor and a researcher of social media. In many ways, their impact depends on where the real world intersects with the virtual one, research shows.
Information сonsumption is often compared with nutrition for a reason. Most humans have already forgotten about famine, and many countries are now busy not with finding ways to feed the population but with fighting obesity and promoting healthy eating. The same is true for information.
Not so long ago, the problem was information hunger. And now there is so much of it that more and more often people want to escape from it and go on an information diet. First, the World Wide Web, and then social media, drastically reduced the cost of information production and consumption: a smartphone in your pocket gives access to an unlimited volume of information, allowing anyone to become its distributor and producer on a scale never seen before. This is a clear sign of progress: it is much better to struggle with a choice (to avoid fakes and pick reliable information) than to starve.
How does public awareness change with this information flow? The simple answer is that it grows. People who were denied access to social media during the research became less informed. However, recent papers (for example, here) suggest that this simple answer is not absolutely correct if we evaluate the impact on political awareness and knowledge.
Nowadays, a variety of choices allows individuals to pick the most suitable information diet from a huge set of «meals», rejecting everything that does not match their tastes. Of course, even before that, one could skip the economics and politics sections of newspapers to read just a report from a football match, or turn on a news broadcast when it was talking about sports. However, while flipping through a newspaper or waiting for a sports block, an individual could also «take a sip» of information about politics and economics. Now social media allow us to customize our «menu» in such a way that we will fully avoid them. Thus, perhaps we can come to a more information-polarized world: the political awareness and knowledge of some people will grow, while it will decrease for others. The first group usually includes people with higher education and of older age, while the second group includes younger and less educated people. Some people learn more about politics, while others learn less, so the general awareness of society does not increase.
But that's only part of the trouble. Even if the information is distributed more evenly, it doesn't solve the other problem: just as the quantity of food does not necessarily transform into quality, so the amount of information does not necessarily form an objective picture. Today, it is increasingly difficult to separate reliable information from unreliable one, and facts from opinions and emotions that accompany information on social media. The more emotional an opinion is, the faster it spreads. And, unfortunately, the lie spreads much faster than the truth. Research shows that fake news often evoke stronger emotions, which encourages people to share them more actively.
The uneven influence of social media on public awareness and people's susceptibility to unreliable, emotionally-tinged information leads us to the question: how do social media influence the polarization of society? This question is extremely relevant, as we are witnessing the consequences in increased support for populists and right-wing radicals in democratic countries. The polarization is based not on political or economic views, but values. And of course, there is a great temptation to blame social media for this: they did not exist before, but now they are here and the polarization has grown. It's hard not to start blaming social media, looking at how they are widely used by politicians. A big example is Donald Trump and his ally, Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter).
And once again, we have a simple and a complex answers. A common point of view is that social media increase polarization: people tend to create an information diet with the content that corresponds to their views and is easier for them to agree with. Users subscribe to unbalanced channels and end up in an information bubble or in echo chambers.
But again, the simple answer may be wrong. First you need to understand whether the polarization in social media is that strong. Indeed, scholars have studied the behavior of Americans on Facebook (Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is recognized as extremist, its activities are banned in Russia – GURU) and confirmed that the level of polarization in social media is higher than offline. But its average rate is largely determined by the distribution tails, particularly in the ultraconservative groups. In the left-wing political spectrum, there are also people in information bubbles, but they are less frequent. Republicans, becoming familiar with opposing views, become significantly more conservative, while the influence on Democrats is statistically insignificant: they become only a little more liberal. It turns out that, on average, polarization is not so great – the vast majority of users receive information from different sources.
The next question is how do social media influence the polarization of society: do they increase or, on the opposite, decrease it? Research has come to mixed results. Social media algorithms can restrict access to news that contradict user's views, and thus increase polarization. This was shown, in particular, by an experiment related to the 2018 US congressional elections. Before voting, participants were denied access to Facebook for four weeks, and the initial results showed that polarization was decreasing. However, a second research conducted two years later during the 2020 presidential and congressional elections did not show a similar effect. Moreover, the transition from Facebook's news filtering algorithm to a simple chronological order did not have a significant impact either.
In some cases, social media even had a positive impact. This was demonstrated by an experiment in Bosnia and Herzegovina in July 2019, which coincided with the anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. The experiment participants were randomly divided into two groups: some temporarily froze their Facebook accounts, while others continued to use it as usual. Contrary to the researchers' expectations, participants who went off Facebook showed less respect for members of other ethnic groups compared to those who were actively using the social media. The effect was particularly noticeable among people living in ethnically homogeneous areas. This indicates that even minimal interaction with someone else's point of view on social media can reduce interethnic tensions.
It turns out that the influence of social media depends on their alternatives. If users did not communicate online, they would probably only keep in touch in an offline environment, which can be even more restricted and radicalized. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, where ethnic groups hardly intersect in real life, social media have become a space where at least minimal dialogue between them is possible. In the long run, this could reduce the level of bias and hostility.
It turns out that determining whether social media have a positive or negative effect depends on the environment. This is also reflected in the political influence of social media. In developed democratic states, the negative impact of social media is stronger. Freedom of speech and opportunities for civic self-organization are already available there. So social media can increase polarization, the spread of extremist ideas and disinformation.
On the contrary, in countries with underdeveloped political institutions, the positive features of social media are more evident. For example, in China, where censorship is widespread and the state uses social media for propaganda, they nevertheless contribute to an increase in the number of protests. The authors of a recently published research analyzed the impact of posts on Weibo, China's most popular microblogging platform, on protests and strikes in the country between 2009 and 2017. Unlike protests in Russia or Arab countries, Chinese protest posts do not contain direct calls for organizing rallies due to censorship. However, even the simple dissemination of information about the protests can encourage people to take action. If residents of one city take to the streets, the probability of protests in other cities increases by 17% within two days.
Such ambiguous conclusions about the impact of social media show that we still have a lot to learn about them in order to limit their negative impact. However, we already know something: the principles of the real world work in the virtual world and can help prevent aggression, as well as with the dissemination of false information in social media.
Above, I mentioned that a lie spreads on social media much faster than the truth. That's the bad news. The good news is that people still recognize false information and stop trusting it. Another bad news is that they're willing to spread it anyway. But the good news is that people can be persuaded not to do this by using the most popular methods of persuasion. This can be done by checking information with professional fact checkers. Crowdsourced verification (for example, by a public survey) turns out to be quite effective too, according to a research by Twitter Birdwatch, which uses crowdsourcing to verify facts.
However, this is not a universal remedy either: no fact checker can catch up with the spreading of fake news. Their ‘half-life’ is just a few hours, while it takes at least 1-2 days to check them. Therefore, it is much easier not to chase a lie, but to stop it. The task is complicated by the fact that at the same time the dissemination of reliable information shouldn't be hampered. Recent research shows that in the short term, the most effective way is to simply remind people that there is a lot of false information being spread on social media and that they need to be critical of what they read. There are also longer-term methods: for example, improving literacy, in this case, digital one. Distinguishing between the truth and untruth is also a skill that can be learned.
