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Comment by hourago | Hacker News Reader

> Our current climate of political polarization makes it easy to think itʻs about the content of the speech, or hate speech, or misinformation, or censorship, or etc etc.

Are we sure that it is not the other way around? Didn't social platforms created or increased polarization?

I always see this comments from social platforms that take as fact that society is polarized and they work hard to fix it, when I believe that it is the other way around. Social media has created the opportunity to increase polarization and they are not able to stop it for technical, social or economic reasons.

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> Are we sure that it is not the other way around? Didn't social platforms created or increased polarization?

The process of polarization (in the US) started decades ago:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We%27re_Polarized

In fact it seems that people were always polarized, it's just that the political parties (R & D in the US) didn't really bother sorting themselves on topics until the 1960s: even in the 1970s and early 1980s it was somewhat common to vote for (e.g.) an R president but a D representative (or vice versa). Straight-through one-party voting didn't really become the majority until the late-1980s and 1990s.

There's a chapter or two in the above book describing psychology studies showing that humans form tribes 'spontaneously' for the most arbitrary of reasons. "Us versus them" seems to be baked into the structure of humans.

Scott Alexander's review is worth reading to get a summary of this book: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-why-were-p...

I think political parties only later began astroturfing on social media and split users in camps. Formerly content on reddit in default subreddits often had low quality, but you still got some nice topics here and there. Now it is a propaganda hellhole that is completely in the hands of pretty polarized users.

> "Us versus them" seems to be baked into the structure of humans.

Not quite, but one of the most effective temptations one can offer is giving people a moral excuse to hate others. Best when see as those as responsible for all evil in the world. It feels good to judge, it distracts from your own faults, flaws, insecurities, fears and problems. This is pretty blatant and has become far, far worse than the formerly perhaps populist content on reddit. We especially see this on political topics, but also the pandemic as an example.

> I think political parties only later began astroturfing on social media and split users in camps.

The splitting into camps (in the US) based on particular topics started much earlier than social media:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

> Not quite, but one of the most effective temptations one can offer is giving people a moral excuse to hate others.

The psychology studies referenced in the book show us-versus-them / in/out-group mentality without getting in moral questions or political topics.

It's quite interesting that the USSR collapsed in 1991, which removed the biggest external "us vs them" actor.

But on the other hand there are also countless other factors that are going to affect society at scale: rise internet, rise of pharmaceutical psychotropics, surge in obesity, surge in autism, declines in testosterone, apparent reversal of Flynn effect, and more.

With so many things happening it all feels like a Rorschach test when trying to piece together anything like a meaningful hypothesis.

I think that you should look into the history of talk radio, or maybe just radio in general. Then maybe a history of American journalism, from Robert McCormick's Chicago Tribune back to the the party newspapers set up in the first years of the republic.

Yepp, same message different medium. Having someone in your family who “listens to talk radio” was the “they went down the far right YouTube rabbit hole” of old.

I mean the big names in talk radio are still clucking if you want to listen to them today.

Yeah, there were some good articles about this:

>The Making of a YouTube Radical

>I visited Mr. Cain in West Virginia after seeing his YouTube video denouncing the far right. We spent hours discussing his radicalization. To back up his recollections, he downloaded and sent me his entire YouTube history, a log of more than 12,000 videos and more than 2,500 search queries dating to 2015.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/yo... (2019)

Real society is not that polarized. If you talk to real people they mostly have moderate political opinions. But they don't tweet about politics.

Twitter is not a real place.

But unfortunately real people are influenced and impacted by the fiction.

If far right political bullshit would stay online and out of my state’s general assembly that would be such a positive change.

I used to think this until several instances of various neighbors getting drunk enough to shed the veil of souther hospitality and reveal how racist they are.

Plenty of people have radical thoughts and opinions, but are smart enough to keep it to themselves IRL

Society is a closed system, twitter is not outside of society.

The people on twitter are real people (well, mostly, probably), and have real political opinions.

If you talk to people, by and large they'll profess moderate opinions, because in person discussions still trigger politeness and non-confrontational emotions in most people, so the default 'safe' thing to say is the moderate choice, no matter what their true opinion happens to be.

The internet allows people to take the proverbial mask off.

I would disagree about proverbial masks. Majority of people in the world including US are simply too preoccupied with their everyday routine, problems and work to end up with extreme political views.

What Internet does have is ease of changing masks and joining diverse groups. Trying something unusual without reprecussions appeal to a lot of people who usually simply dont have time to join such groups offline.

The real problem is that unfortunately propoganda has evolved too with all new research about human phychology, behaviors and fallacies. Abusing weaknesses of monkey brain on scale is relatively easy and profitable.

Nah. Even those few accounts on Twitter that are actually run by real people (not bots) are mostly trolling to some extent. It's all a big joke.

I thought that as well, until about Nov 2016...

That was the biggest joke of all!

So far ...

So most of the republicans I run into are extremely frank about the way the country ought to be run. When I was younger it was the same way with democrats.

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