social media and politics essay

Yes, Social Media Really Is Undermining Democracy

Despite what Meta has to say.

W ithin the past 15 years, social media has insinuated itself into American life more deeply than food-delivery apps into our diets and microplastics into our bloodstreams. Look at stories about conflict, and it’s often lurking in the background. Recent articles on the rising dysfunction within progressive organizations point to the role of Twitter, Slack, and other platforms in prompting “endless and sprawling internal microbattles,” as The Intercept ’s Ryan Grim put it, referring to the ACLU. At a far higher level of conflict, the congressional hearings about the January 6 insurrection show us how Donald Trump’s tweets summoned the mob to Washington and aimed it at the vice president. Far-right groups then used a variety of platforms to coordinate and carry out the attack.

Social media has changed life in America in a thousand ways, and nearly two out of three Americans now believe that these changes are for the worse. But academic researchers have not yet reached a consensus that social media is harmful. That’s been a boon to social-media companies such as Meta, which argues, as did tobacco companies, that the science is not “ settled .”

The lack of consensus leaves open the possibility that social media may not be very harmful. Perhaps we’ve fallen prey to yet another moral panic about a new technology and, as with television, we’ll worry about it less after a few decades of conflicting studies. A different possibility is that social media is quite harmful but is changing too quickly for social scientists to capture its effects. The research community is built on a quasi-moral norm of skepticism: We begin by assuming the null hypothesis (in this case, that social media is not harmful), and we require researchers to show strong, statistically significant evidence in order to publish their findings. This takes time—a couple of years, typically, to conduct and publish a study; five or more years before review papers and meta-analyses come out; sometimes decades before scholars reach agreement. Social-media platforms, meanwhile, can change dramatically in just a few years .

So even if social media really did begin to undermine democracy (and institutional trust and teen mental health ) in the early 2010s, we should not expect social science to “settle” the matter until the 2030s. By then, the effects of social media will be radically different, and the harms done in earlier decades may be irreversible.

Let me back up. This spring, The Atlantic published my essay “ Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid ,” in which I argued that the best way to understand the chaos and fragmentation of American society is to see ourselves as citizens of Babel in the days after God rendered them unable to understand one another.

I showed how a few small changes to the architecture of social-media platforms, implemented from 2009 to 2012, increased the virality of posts on those platforms, which then changed the nature of social relationships. People could spread rumors and half-truths more quickly, and they could more readily sort themselves into homogenous tribes. Even more important, in my view, was that social-media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook could now be used more easily by anyone to attack anyone. It was as if the platforms had passed out a billion little dart guns, and although most users didn’t want to shoot anyone, three kinds of people began darting others with abandon: the far right, the far left, and trolls.

Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell: The dark psychology of social networks

All of these groups were suddenly given the power to dominate conversations and intimidate dissenters into silence. A fourth group—Russian agents––also got a boost, though they didn’t need to attack people directly. Their long-running project, which ramped up online in 2013, was to fabricate, exaggerate, or simply promote stories that would increase Americans’ hatred of one another and distrust of their institutions.

The essay proved to be surprisingly uncontroversial—or, at least, hardly anyone attacked me on social media. But a few responses were published, including one from Meta (formerly Facebook), which pointed to studies it said contradicted my argument. There was also an essay in The New Yorker by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, who interviewed me and other scholars who study politics and social media. He argued that social media might well be harmful to democracies, but the research literature is too muddy and contradictory to support firm conclusions.

So was my diagnosis correct, or are concerns about social media overblown? It’s a crucial question for the future of our society. As I argued in my essay, critics make us smarter. I’m grateful, therefore, to Meta and the researchers interviewed by Lewis-Kraus for helping me sharpen and extend my argument in three ways.

Are Democracies Becoming More Polarized and Less Healthy?

My essay laid out a wide array of harms that social media has inflicted on society. Political polarization is just one of them, but it is central to the story of rising democratic dysfunction.

Meta questioned whether social media should be blamed for increased polarization. In response to my essay, Meta’s head of research, Pratiti Raychoudhury, pointed to a study by Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow, and Jesse Shapiro that looked at trends in 12 countries and found, she said, “that in some countries polarization was on the rise before Facebook even existed, and in others it has been decreasing while internet and Facebook use increased.” In a recent interview with the podcaster Lex Fridman , Mark Zuckerberg cited this same study in support of a more audacious claim: “Most of the academic studies that I’ve seen actually show that social-media use is correlated with lower polarization.”

Does that study really let social media off the hook? It plotted political polarization based on survey responses in 12 countries, most with data stretching back to the 1970s, and then drew straight lines that best fit the data points over several decades. It’s true that, while some lines sloped upward (meaning that polarization increased across the period as a whole), others sloped downward. But my argument wasn’t about the past 50 years. It was about a phase change that happened in the early 2010s , after Facebook and Twitter changed their architecture to enable hyper-virality.

I emailed Gentzkow to ask whether he could put a “hinge” in the graphs in the early 2010s, to see if the trends in polarization changed direction or accelerated in the past decade. He replied that there was not enough data after 2010 to make such an analysis reliable. He also noted that Meta’s response essay had failed to cite a 2020 article in which he and three colleagues found that randomly assigning participants to deactivate Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 U.S. midterm elections reduced polarization.

Adrienne LaFrance: ‘History will not judge us kindly’

Meta’s response motivated me to look for additional publications to evaluate what had happened to democracies in the 2010s. I discovered four. One of them found no overall trend in polarization, but like the study by Boxell, Gentzkow, and Shapiro, it had few data points after 2015. The other three had data through 2020, and all three reported substantial increases in polarization and/or declines in the number or quality of democracies around the world.

One of them, a 2022 report from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, found that “liberal democracies peaked in 2012 with 42 countries and are now down to the lowest levels in over 25 years.” It summarized the transformations of global democracy over the past 10 years in stark terms:

Just ten years ago the world looked very different from today. In 2011, there were more countries improving than declining on every aspect of democracy. By 2021 the world has been turned on its head: there are more countries declining than advancing on nearly all democratic aspects captured by V-Dem measures.

The report also notes that “toxic polarization”—signaled by declining “respect for counter-arguments and associated aspects of the deliberative component of democracy”—grew more severe in at least 32 countries.

A paper published one week after my Atlantic essay, by Yunus E. Orhan, found a global spike in democratic “backsliding” since 2008, and linked it to affective polarization, or animosity toward the other side. When affective polarization is high, partisans tolerate antidemocratic behavior by politicians on their own side––such as the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

And finally, the Economist Intelligence Unit reported a global decline in various democratic measures starting after 2015, according to its Democracy Index.

These three studies cannot prove that social media caused the global decline, but—contra Meta and Zuckerberg—they show a global trend toward polarization in the previous decade, the one in which the world embraced social media.

Has Social Media Created Harmful Echo Chambers?

So why did democracies weaken in the 2010s? How might social media have made them more fragmented and less stable? One popular argument contends that social media sorts users into echo chambers––closed communities of like-minded people. Lack of contact with people who hold different viewpoints allows a sort of tribal groupthink to take hold, reducing the quality of everyone’s thinking and the prospects for compromise that are essential in a democratic system.

According to Meta, however, “More and more research discredits the idea that social media algorithms create an echo chamber.” It points to two sources to back up that claim, but many studies show evidence that social media does in fact create echo chambers. Because conflicting studies are common in social-science research, I created a “ collaborative review ” document last year with Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke University who studies social media. It’s a public Google doc in which we organize the abstracts of all the studies we can find about social media’s impact on democracy, and then we invite other experts to add studies, comments, and criticisms. We cover research on seven different questions, including whether social media promotes echo chambers. After spending time in the document, Lewis-Kraus wrote in The New Yorker : “The upshot seemed to me to be that exactly nothing was unambiguously clear.”

He is certainly right that nothing is unambiguous. But as I have learned from curating three such documents , researchers often reach opposing conclusions because they have “operationalized” the question differently. That is, they have chosen different ways to turn an abstract question (about the prevalence of echo chambers, say) into something concrete and measurable. For example, researchers who choose to measure echo chambers by looking at the diversity of people’s news consumption typically find little evidence that they exist at all. Even partisans end up being exposed to news stories and videos from the other side. Both of the sources that Raychoudhury cited in her defense of Meta mention this idea.

Derek Thompson: Social media is attention alcohol

But researchers who measure echo chambers by looking at social relationships and networks usually find evidence of “homophily”—that is, people tend to engage with others who are similar to themselves. One study of politically engaged Twitter users, for example, found that they “are disproportionately exposed to like-minded information and that information reaches like-minded users more quickly.” So should we throw up our hands and say that the findings are irreconcilable? No, we should integrate them, as the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci did in a 2018 essay . Coming across contrary viewpoints on social media, she wrote, is “not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone.” Rather, she said, “it’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium … We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one.” Mere exposure to different sources of news doesn’t automatically break open echo chambers; in fact, it can reinforce them.

These closely bonded groupings can have profound political ramifications, as a couple of my critics in the New Yorker article acknowledged. A major feature of the post-Babel world is that the extremes are now far louder and more influential than before. They may also become more violent. Recent research by Morteza Dehghani and his colleagues at the University of Southern California shows that people are more willing to commit violence when they are immersed in a community they perceive to be morally homogeneous.

This finding seems to be borne out by a statement from the 18-year-old man who recently killed 10 Black Americans at a supermarket in Buffalo. In the Q&A portion of the manifesto attributed to him, he wrote:

Where did you get your current beliefs? Mostly from the internet. There was little to no influence on my personal beliefs by people I met in person.

The killer goes on to claim that he had read information “from all ideologies,” but I find it unlikely that he consumed a balanced informational diet, or, more important, that he hung out online with ideologically diverse users. The fact that he livestreamed his shooting tells us he assumed that his community shared his warped worldview. He could not have found such an extreme yet homogeneous group in his small town 200 miles from Buffalo. But thanks to social media, he found an international fellowship of extreme racists who jointly worshipped past mass murderers and from whom he copied sections of his manifesto.

Is Social Media the Primary Villain in This Story?

In her response to my essay, Raychoudhury did not deny that Meta bore any blame. Rather, her defense was two-pronged, arguing that the research is not yet definitive, and that, in any case, we should be focusing on mainstream media as the primary cause of harm.

Raychoudhury pointed to a study on the role of cable TV and mainstream media as major drivers of partisanship. She is correct to do so: The American culture war has roots going back to the turmoil of the 1960s, which activated evangelicals and other conservatives in the ’70s. Social media (which arrived around 2004 and became truly pernicious, I argue, only after 2009) is indeed a more recent player in this phenomenon.

In my essay, I included a paragraph on this backstory, noting the role of Fox News and the radicalizing Republican Party of the ’90s, but I should have said more. The story of polarization is complex, and political scientists cite a variety of contributing factors , including the growing politicization of the urban-rural divide; rising immigration; the increasing power of big and very partisan donors; the loss of a common enemy when the Soviet Union collapsed; and the loss of the “Greatest Generation,” which had an ethos of service forged in the crisis of the Second World War. And although polarization rose rapidly in the 2010s, the rise began in the ’90s, so I cannot pin the majority of the rise on social media.

But my essay wasn’t primarily about ordinary polarization. I was trying to explain a new dynamic that emerged in the 2010s: the fear of one another , even—and perhaps especially––within groups that share political or cultural affinities. This fear has created a whole new set of social and political problems.

The loss of a common enemy and those other trends with roots in the 20th century can help explain America’s ever nastier cross-party relationships, but they can’t explain why so many college students and professors suddenly began to express more fear, and engage in more self-censorship, around 2015. These mostly left-leaning people weren’t worried about the “other side”; they were afraid of a small number of students who were further to the left, and who enthusiastically hunted for verbal transgressions and used social media to publicly shame offenders.

A few years later, that same fearful dynamic spread to newsrooms , companies , nonprofit organizations , and many other parts of society . The culture war had been running for two or three decades by then, but it changed in the mid-2010s when ordinary people with little to no public profile suddenly became the targets of social-media mobs. Consider the famous 2013 case of Justine Sacco , who tweeted an insensitive joke about her trip to South Africa just before boarding her flight in London and became an international villain by the time she landed in Cape Town. She was fired the next day. Or consider the the far right’s penchant for using social media to publicize the names and photographs of largely unknown local election officials, health officials, and school-board members who refuse to bow to political pressure, and who are then subjected to waves of vitriol, including threats of violence to themselves and their children, simply for doing their jobs. These phenomena, now common to the culture, could not have happened before the advent of hyper-viral social media in 2009.

Matthew Hindman, Nathaniel Lubin, and Trevor Davis: Facebook has a superuser-supremacy problem

This fear of getting shamed, reported, doxxed, fired, or physically attacked is responsible for the self-censorship and silencing of dissent that were the main focus of my essay. When dissent within any group or institution is stifled, the group will become less perceptive, nimble, and effective over time.

Social media may not be the primary cause of polarization, but it is an important cause, and one we can do something about. I believe it is also the primary cause of the epidemic of structural stupidity, as I called it, that has recently afflicted many of America’s key institutions.

What Can We Do to Make Things Better?

My essay presented a series of structural solutions that would allow us to repair some of the damage that social media has caused to our key democratic and epistemic institutions. I proposed three imperatives: (1) harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, (2) reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and (3) better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.

I believe that we should begin implementing these reforms now, even if the science is not yet “settled.” Beyond a reasonable doubt is the appropriate standard of evidence for reviewers guarding admission to a scientific journal, or for jurors establishing guilt in a criminal trial. It is too high a bar for questions about public health or threats to the body politic. A more appropriate standard is the one used in civil trials: the preponderance of evidence. Is social media probably damaging American democracy via at least one of the seven pathways analyzed in our collaborative-review document , or probably not ? I urge readers to examine the document themselves. I also urge the social-science community to find quicker ways to study potential threats such as social media, where platforms and their effects change rapidly. Our motto should be “Move fast and test things.” Collaborative-review documents are one way to speed up the process by which scholars find and respond to one another’s work.

Beyond these structural solutions, I considered adding a short section to the article on what each of us can do as individuals, but it sounded a bit too preachy, so I cut it. I now regret that decision. I should have noted that all of us, as individuals, can be part of the solution by choosing to act with courage, moderation, and compassion. It takes a great deal of resolve to speak publicly or stand your ground when a barrage of snide, disparaging, and otherwise hostile comments is coming at you and nobody rises to your defense (out of fear of getting attacked themselves).

Read: How to fix Twitter—and all of social media

Fortunately, social media does not usually reflect real life, something that more people are beginning to understand. A few years ago, I heard an insight from an older business executive. He noted that before social media, if he received a dozen angry letters or emails from customers, they spurred him to action because he assumed that there must be a thousand other disgruntled customers who didn’t bother to write. But now, if a thousand people like an angry tweet or Facebook post about his company, he assumes that there must be a dozen people who are really upset.

Seeing that social-media outrage is transient and performative should make it easier to withstand, whether you are the president of a university or a parent speaking at a school-board meeting. We can all do more to offer honest dissent and support the dissenters within institutions that have become structurally stupid. We can all get better at listening with an open mind and speaking in order to engage another human being rather than impress an audience. Teaching these skills to our children and our students is crucial, because they are the generation who will have to reinvent deliberative democracy and Tocqueville’s “art of association” for the digital age.

We must act with compassion too. The fear and cruelty of the post-Babel era are a result of its tendency to reward public displays of aggression. Social media has put us all in the middle of a Roman coliseum, and many in the audience want to see conflict and blood. But once we realize that we are the gladiators—tricked into combat so that we might generate “content,” “engagement,” and revenue—we can refuse to fight. We can be more understanding toward our fellow citizens, seeing that we are all being driven mad by companies that use largely the same set of psychological tricks. We can forswear public conflict and use social media to serve our own purposes, which for most people will mean more private communication and fewer public performances.

The post-Babel world will not be rebuilt by today’s technology companies. That work will be left to citizens who understand the forces that brought us to the verge of self-destruction, and who develop the new habits, virtues, technologies, and shared narratives that will allow us to reap the benefits of living and working together in peace.

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Expert Commentary

How does social media use influence political participation and civic engagement? A meta-analysis

2015 paper in Information, Communication & Society reviewing existing research on how social media use influences measures such as voting, protesting and civic engagement.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by John Wihbey, The Journalist's Resource October 18, 2015

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/social-media-influence-politics-participation-engagement-meta-analysis/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

Academic research has consistently found that people who consume more news media have a greater probability of being civically and politically engaged across a variety of measures. In an era when the public’s time and attention is increasingly directed toward platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, scholars are seeking to evaluate the still-emerging relationship between social media use and public engagement. The Obama presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012 and the Arab Spring in 2011 catalyzed interest in networked digital connectivity and political action, but the data remain far from conclusive.

The largest and perhaps best-known inquiry into this issue so far is a 2012 study published in the journal Nature , “A 61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization,” which suggested that messages on users’ Facebook feeds could significantly influence voting patterns. The study data — analyzed in collaboration with Facebook data scientists — suggested that certain messages promoted by friends “increased turnout directly by about 60,000 voters and indirectly through social contagion by another 280,000 voters, for a total of 340,000 additional votes.” Close friends with real-world ties were found to be much more influential than casual online acquaintances. (Following the study, concerns were raised about the potential manipulation of users and “digital gerrymandering.” )

There are now thousands of studies on the effects of social networking sites (SNS) on offline behavior, but isolating common themes is not easy. Researchers often use unique datasets, ask different questions and measure a range of outcomes. However, a 2015 metastudy in the journal Information, Communication & Society , “Social Media Use and Participation: A Meta-analysis of Current Research,” analyzes 36 studies on the relationship between SNS use and everything from civic engagement broadly speaking to tangible actions such as voting and protesting. Some focus on youth populations, others on SNS use in countries outside the United States. Within these 36 studies, there were 170 separate “coefficients” — different factors potentially correlated with SNS use. The author, Shelley Boulianne of Grant MacEwan University (Canada), notes that the studies are all based on self-reported surveys, with the number of respondents ranging from 250 to more than 1,500. Twenty studies were conducted between 2008 and 2011, while eight were from 2012-2013.

The study’s key findings include:

• Among all of the factors examined, 82% showed a positive relationship between SNS use and some form of civic or political engagement or participation. Still, only half of the relationships found were statistically significant. The strongest effects could be seen in studies that randomly sampled youth populations.
• The correlation between social-media use and election-campaign participation “seems weak based on the set of studies analyzed,” while the relationship with civic engagement is generally stronger.
• Further, “Measuring participation as protest activities is more likely to produce a positive effect, but the coefficients are not more likely to be statistically significant compared to other measures of participation.” Also, within the area of protest activities, many different kinds of activities — marches, demonstrations, petitions and boycotts — are combined in research, making conclusions less valid. When studies do isolate and separate out these activities, these studies generally show that “social media plays a positive role in citizens’ participation.”
• Overall, the data cast doubt on whether SNS use “causes” strong effects and is truly “transformative.” Because few studies employ an experimental design, where researchers could compare a treatment group with a control group, it is difficult to claim causality.

“Popular discourse has focused on the use of social media by the Obama campaigns,” Boulianne concludes. “While these campaigns may have revolutionized aspects of election campaigning online, such as gathering donations, the metadata provide little evidence that the social media aspects of the campaigns were successful in changing people’s levels of participation. In other words, the greater use of social media did not affect people’s likelihood of voting or participating in the campaign.”

It is worth noting that many studies in this area take social media use as the starting point or “independent variable,” and therefore cannot rule out that some “deeper” cause — political interest, for example — is the reason people might engage in SNS use in the first place. Further, some researchers see SNS use as a form of participation and engagement in and of itself, helping to shape public narratives and understanding of public affairs.

Related research: Journalist’s Resource has been curating a wide variety of studies in this field. See research reviews on: Effects of the Internet on politics ; global protest and social media ; digital activism and organizing ; and the Internet and the Arab Spring . For cutting-edge insights on how online organizing and mobilization is evolving, see the 2015 study “Populism and Downing Street E-petitions: Connective Action, Hybridity, and the Changing Nature of Organizing,” published in Political Communication .

Keywords: social media, Facebook, Twitter

About The Author

John Wihbey

2024 Theses Doctoral

Politics Meets the Internet: Three Essays on Social Learning

Cremin, John Walter Edward

This dissertation studies three models of sequential social learning, each of which has implications for the impact of the internet and social media on political discourse. I take three features of online political discussion, and consider in what ways they interfere with or assist learning.In Chapter 1, I consider agents who engage in motivated reasoning, which is a belief-formation procedure in which agents trade-off a desire to form accurate beliefs against a desire to hold ideologically congenial beliefs. Taking a model of motivated reasoning in which agents can reject social signals that provide too strong evidence against their preferred state, I analyse under which conditions we can expect asymptotic consensus, where all agents choose the same action, and learning, in which Bayesian agents choose the correct state with probability 1. I find that learning requires much more connected observation networks than is the case with Bayesian agents. Furthermore, I find that increasing the precision of agents’ private signals can actually break consensus, providing an explanation for the advance of factual polarisation despite the greater access to information that the internet provides. In Chapter 2, I evalute the importance of timidity. In the presence of agents who prefer not to be caught in error publicly, and can choose to keep their views to themselves given this, insufficiently confident individuals may choose not to participate in online debate. Studying social learning in this setting, I discover an unravelling mechanism by which non-partisan agents drop out of online political discourse. This leads to an exaggerated online presence for partisans, which can cause even more Bayesian agents to drop out. I consider the possibility of introducing partially anonymous commenting, how this could prevent such unravelling, and what restrictions on such commenting would be desirable. In Chapter 3, my focus moves on to considering rational inattention, and how this interacts with the glut of information the internet has produced. I set out a model that incorporates the costly observation of private and social information, and derive conditions under which we should expect learning to obtain despite these costs. I find that expanding access to cheap information can actually damage learning: giving all agents Blackwell-preferred signals or cheaper observations of all their neighbors can reduce the asymptotic probability with which they match the state. Furthermore, the highly connected networks social media produces can generate a public good problem in investigate journalism, damaging the ‘information ecosystem’ further still.

• Social learning
• Social media--Economic aspects
• Social networks--Economic aspects
• Bayesian statistical decision theory

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How social media impacts political views

Leer en español: Cómo las redes sociales impactan las opiniones políticas

Social media platforms have recently facilitated the organization of protests around racism across the country and even prompted teenagers and K-Pop fans to register for a Trump rally in June with no intention of attending.

But social media use affects young users’ political views and involvement in other ways like exposing users to certain views or determining their understanding of current events.

Different viewpoints or echo chambers?

According to a report from the Pew Research Center , the majority of surveyed teens said they felt social media exposed them to people with different backgrounds and views and helped them show support for causes and issues important to them.

For BYU students, the results of the report mirror their thoughts on how social media platforms influence their political views.

In an informal Instagram poll on The Daily Universe’s account, 89% of the 273 respondents said they believe social media has affected their political views and involvement. When asked for specifics, the majority of commenters said social media has exposed them to different viewpoints and a few said social media can create echo chambers.

BYU student Abby Bjorkman said social media has helped her see views beyond her own community, which is predominantly white. “Especially with the Black Lives Matter movement, I have been able to educate myself on others’ experiences in America besides my own, which is the perspective of a white female.”

While Bjorkman acknowledged it can be easy to fall into an echo chamber and only see posts from those with similar views, she feels she has followed a wide enough variety of people to hear opposing opinions.

“Some users can feel extreme on both sides and can almost be intimidating, but it is up to the user to manipulate how much they want to see,” Bjorkman said.

BYU public relations professor Pamela Brubaker said social media users sometimes only interact with content that reflects their own views, which then leads to the apps suggesting other similar content.

“News and information are pushed to us based upon the content we engage with and the people we engage with online,” Brubaker said. “As a result, if your friends are more politically active on Facebook or Instagram, you are more likely to have higher levels of exposure to political content.”

Social media as a primary news source

Another recent Pew Research Center study shows that people who turn to social media to stay up to date about current events generally pay less attention to and are less knowledgeable about the news and politics. The study found that 48% of young adults age 18-29 fall into this category and primarily get their news from social media.

The study used data from five different surveys conducted from October 2019 to June 2020. During this time major news and political events like the impeachment and the outbreak of the coronavirus occurred. Researchers asked respondents questions to measure their understanding of these events.

The results show that 57% of people who rely on social media for news had low political knowledge and only 17% had high political knowledge. The only group with a larger percentage of low political knowledge was individuals who get their news from local TV stations.

According to the study, those who primarily get news from social media are “more likely than other Americans to have heard about a number of false or unproven claims.”

Brubaker said the increased reliance on social media could stimulate more political discussions both online and offline, but it also might limit the political views and information users are exposed to. “To stay politically informed, it’s important to expand our sources. We should rely on more than the news that’s pushed to us. We should also actively seek to be informed.”

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A business journal from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Knowledge at Wharton Podcast

How social media is shaping political campaigns, august 17, 2020 • 11 min listen.

Political newcomers can leverage social media to raise money and gain recognition, which could help them compete against incumbents, according to new research co-authored by Wharton’s Pinar Yildirim.

Wharton’s Pinar Yildirim speaks with Wharton Business Daily on Sirius XM about how social media is changing political competition.

In his short-lived campaign for president, entrepreneur and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg spent more than $1 billion of his own money before dropping out of the race in March 2020. More than 70% of that budget went toward advertising.

The extraordinary spend highlights just how much cash it takes to run for public office in America and why it’s so difficult for political newcomers to gain momentum at the polls without connections to influential donors (or in Bloomberg’s case, his own deep pockets). The problem perpetuates through election cycles, which is why up to 90% of incumbents are reelected in what research calls “the incumbency advantage.”

How Has the Internet Revolutionized Political Campaigns?

But social media has changed the game, allowing incumbents and newcomers alike to speak directly to constituents on everything from policy to what they had for dinner. Barack Obama was the first presidential candidate to use the medium, which was still nascent during his 2008 bid, and Donald Trump took to Twitter almost daily to express himself without the filter of traditional media.

“If you look at the way that politicians communicate today, it’s very different than the way that they used to communicate five, 10 years ago,” Wharton marketing professor Pinar Yildirim said. “They would speak through the official speakers or they would be on TV. They would be in print or official online newspapers. Today, they are communicating through places like Twitter. And I think that begs a question, why are they doing that? Is there any benefit to communicating on channels like Twitter?”

“This is not about the age of your constituency.” — Pinar Yildirim

A study co-authored by Yildirim offers some answers. “ Social Media and Political Contributions: The Impact of New Technology on Political Competition ,” written with Maria Petrova and Ananya Sen, finds that political newcomers can get a substantial boost in support by using social media channels, which cost next to nothing and are easily tapped by anyone with an internet connection. The finding is important because it indicates how social media can help level the playing field in politics, where money and access to formal communication channels pose huge barriers to new entrants.

“Never have politicians been so accessible to the public,” the authors wrote in an opinion piece for The Globe Post . Yildirim recently spoke about the researchers’ findings during a segment of the Wharton Business Daily radio show on Sirius XM . (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.)

Using Social Media for Political Campaign Fundraising

The study, which will be published in Management Science , measured support for a candidate based on donations from individual citizens and whether that support increased after the candidate opened a Twitter or Facebook account. Yildirim said she and her colleagues were surprised to find such a significant effect: Within the first month of using Twitter, politicians were able to raise between 1% and 3% of what they would have raised in a two-year traditional campaign. But that gain flowed almost exclusively to newcomers, not incumbents. And it was amplified when candidates included hyperlinks to more information.

Yildirim made it clear that the advantage has nothing to do with assumptions about age; there is simply more to learn about new candidates.

“This is not about the age of your constituency. This is not because the political newcomers are somewhat more technologically savvy, or their base is younger and that’s where they can communicate and find those individuals on social media,” she said. “We tested all of these, and these are not the drivers.”

Beyond communicating their policy views, new candidates can humanize themselves through their social media accounts, and that helps voters feel more connected to them. For example, former Democratic presidential contender Pete Buttigieg introduced his shelter dogs to his 2 million Twitter followers , while U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren used her Instagram account to chat live with supporters who made small contributions to her presidential campaign.

Those small contributions — often between $5 to $100 — seem unlikely to move the needle in a multimillion-dollar political campaign. But the researchers said they are an important part of the voting process because they represent hope.

“There’s this idea that if there are many of us just donating in small amounts, eventually that will turn into a sea of donations, and that could help this person to get elected down the road,” Yildirim said. “So, donations are very meaningful in a number of ways.”

“You don’t have to have the big money, big bucks, big fundraisers, big supporters to be able to communicate on Twitter with your constituency.” — Pinar Yildirim

In Politics, All Communication Counts

If video killed the radio star, as the 1980 pop song declared, will Facebook kill nationally televised debates or news interviews that are the hallmark of old-school political campaigns? Probably not. As Yildirim pointed out, organic coverage from newspapers or television stations is free and reaches a wide audience. And while costly, paid advertising allows candidates to target a specific message to a specific audience. However, so does social media. It cannot be discounted as a low-cost, powerful tool in political competition.

“You don’t have to have the big money, big bucks, big fundraisers, big supporters to be able to communicate on Twitter with your constituency and tell them about what your ideas are for the future,” Yildirim noted. “You can tell them about who you are, what your values are, and this is typically what we see politicians do. They talk about themselves. They talk about their dog, they talk about their favorite sports team, they talk about their favorite place to go in the neighborhood. Of course, you can always talk about your policies and what you hope to achieve if you were elected into an office. And you can do this way before you officially declare running for an office.”

The scholars believe the intersection of social media and politics is ripe for more research, and their paper makes a notable contribution in the field. The finding suggests that, with enough strategy, social media could erase the incumbency advantage and bring American politics back to its grass roots.

“As political campaigns are becoming increasingly more expensive and the need to reach out to constituencies is becoming more vital, social media will undoubtedly play a more important role in determining electoral outcomes as it gives young politicians a platform,” they said in the op-ed.

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How Harmful Is Social Media?

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

In April, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published an essay in The Atlantic in which he sought to explain, as the piece’s title had it, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Anyone familiar with Haidt’s work in the past half decade could have anticipated his answer: social media. Although Haidt concedes that political polarization and factional enmity long predate the rise of the platforms, and that there are plenty of other factors involved, he believes that the tools of virality—Facebook’s Like and Share buttons, Twitter’s Retweet function—have algorithmically and irrevocably corroded public life. He has determined that a great historical discontinuity can be dated with some precision to the period between 2010 and 2014, when these features became widely available on phones.

“What changed in the 2010s?” Haidt asks, reminding his audience that a former Twitter developer had once compared the Retweet button to the provision of a four-year-old with a loaded weapon. “A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly a billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.” While the right has thrived on conspiracy-mongering and misinformation, the left has turned punitive: “When everyone was issued a dart gun in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in the brain. And, unfortunately, those were the brains that inform, instruct, and entertain most of the country.” Haidt’s prevailing metaphor of thoroughgoing fragmentation is the story of the Tower of Babel: the rise of social media has “unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.”

These are, needless to say, common concerns. Chief among Haidt’s worries is that use of social media has left us particularly vulnerable to confirmation bias, or the propensity to fix upon evidence that shores up our prior beliefs. Haidt acknowledges that the extant literature on social media’s effects is large and complex, and that there is something in it for everyone. On January 6, 2021, he was on the phone with Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke and the author of the recent book “ Breaking the Social Media Prism ,” when Bail urged him to turn on the television. Two weeks later, Haidt wrote to Bail, expressing his frustration at the way Facebook officials consistently cited the same handful of studies in their defense. He suggested that the two of them collaborate on a comprehensive literature review that they could share, as a Google Doc, with other researchers. (Haidt had experimented with such a model before.) Bail was cautious. He told me, “What I said to him was, ‘Well, you know, I’m not sure the research is going to bear out your version of the story,’ and he said, ‘Why don’t we see?’ ”

Bail emphasized that he is not a “platform-basher.” He added, “In my book, my main take is, Yes, the platforms play a role, but we are greatly exaggerating what it’s possible for them to do—how much they could change things no matter who’s at the helm at these companies—and we’re profoundly underestimating the human element, the motivation of users.” He found Haidt’s idea of a Google Doc appealing, in the way that it would produce a kind of living document that existed “somewhere between scholarship and public writing.” Haidt was eager for a forum to test his ideas. “I decided that if I was going to be writing about this—what changed in the universe, around 2014, when things got weird on campus and elsewhere—once again, I’d better be confident I’m right,” he said. “I can’t just go off my feelings and my readings of the biased literature. We all suffer from confirmation bias, and the only cure is other people who don’t share your own.”

Haidt and Bail, along with a research assistant, populated the document over the course of several weeks last year, and in November they invited about two dozen scholars to contribute. Haidt told me, of the difficulties of social-scientific methodology, “When you first approach a question, you don’t even know what it is. ‘Is social media destroying democracy, yes or no?’ That’s not a good question. You can’t answer that question. So what can you ask and answer?” As the document took on a life of its own, tractable rubrics emerged—Does social media make people angrier or more affectively polarized? Does it create political echo chambers? Does it increase the probability of violence? Does it enable foreign governments to increase political dysfunction in the United States and other democracies? Haidt continued, “It’s only after you break it up into lots of answerable questions that you see where the complexity lies.”

Haidt came away with the sense, on balance, that social media was in fact pretty bad. He was disappointed, but not surprised, that Facebook’s response to his article relied on the same three studies they’ve been reciting for years. “This is something you see with breakfast cereals,” he said, noting that a cereal company “might say, ‘Did you know we have twenty-five per cent more riboflavin than the leading brand?’ They’ll point to features where the evidence is in their favor, which distracts you from the over-all fact that your cereal tastes worse and is less healthy.”

After Haidt’s piece was published, the Google Doc—“Social Media and Political Dysfunction: A Collaborative Review”—was made available to the public . Comments piled up, and a new section was added, at the end, to include a miscellany of Twitter threads and Substack essays that appeared in response to Haidt’s interpretation of the evidence. Some colleagues and kibbitzers agreed with Haidt. But others, though they might have shared his basic intuition that something in our experience of social media was amiss, drew upon the same data set to reach less definitive conclusions, or even mildly contradictory ones. Even after the initial flurry of responses to Haidt’s article disappeared into social-media memory, the document, insofar as it captured the state of the social-media debate, remained a lively artifact.

Near the end of the collaborative project’s introduction, the authors warn, “We caution readers not to simply add up the number of studies on each side and declare one side the winner.” The document runs to more than a hundred and fifty pages, and for each question there are affirmative and dissenting studies, as well as some that indicate mixed results. According to one paper, “Political expressions on social media and the online forum were found to (a) reinforce the expressers’ partisan thought process and (b) harden their pre-existing political preferences,” but, according to another, which used data collected during the 2016 election, “Over the course of the campaign, we found media use and attitudes remained relatively stable. Our results also showed that Facebook news use was related to modest over-time spiral of depolarization. Furthermore, we found that people who use Facebook for news were more likely to view both pro- and counter-attitudinal news in each wave. Our results indicated that counter-attitudinal exposure increased over time, which resulted in depolarization.” If results like these seem incompatible, a perplexed reader is given recourse to a study that says, “Our findings indicate that political polarization on social media cannot be conceptualized as a unified phenomenon, as there are significant cross-platform differences.”

Interested in echo chambers? “Our results show that the aggregation of users in homophilic clusters dominate online interactions on Facebook and Twitter,” which seems convincing—except that, as another team has it, “We do not find evidence supporting a strong characterization of ‘echo chambers’ in which the majority of people’s sources of news are mutually exclusive and from opposite poles.” By the end of the file, the vaguely patronizing top-line recommendation against simple summation begins to make more sense. A document that originated as a bulwark against confirmation bias could, as it turned out, just as easily function as a kind of generative device to support anybody’s pet conviction. The only sane response, it seemed, was simply to throw one’s hands in the air.

When I spoke to some of the researchers whose work had been included, I found a combination of broad, visceral unease with the current situation—with the banefulness of harassment and trolling; with the opacity of the platforms; with, well, the widespread presentiment that of course social media is in many ways bad—and a contrastive sense that it might not be catastrophically bad in some of the specific ways that many of us have come to take for granted as true. This was not mere contrarianism, and there was no trace of gleeful mythbusting; the issue was important enough to get right. When I told Bail that the upshot seemed to me to be that exactly nothing was unambiguously clear, he suggested that there was at least some firm ground. He sounded a bit less apocalyptic than Haidt.

“A lot of the stories out there are just wrong,” he told me. “The political echo chamber has been massively overstated. Maybe it’s three to five per cent of people who are properly in an echo chamber.” Echo chambers, as hotboxes of confirmation bias, are counterproductive for democracy. But research indicates that most of us are actually exposed to a wider range of views on social media than we are in real life, where our social networks—in the original use of the term—are rarely heterogeneous. (Haidt told me that this was an issue on which the Google Doc changed his mind; he became convinced that echo chambers probably aren’t as widespread a problem as he’d once imagined.) And too much of a focus on our intuitions about social media’s echo-chamber effect could obscure the relevant counterfactual: a conservative might abandon Twitter only to watch more Fox News. “Stepping outside your echo chamber is supposed to make you moderate, but maybe it makes you more extreme,” Bail said. The research is inchoate and ongoing, and it’s difficult to say anything on the topic with absolute certainty. But this was, in part, Bail’s point: we ought to be less sure about the particular impacts of social media.

Bail went on, “The second story is foreign misinformation.” It’s not that misinformation doesn’t exist, or that it hasn’t had indirect effects, especially when it creates perverse incentives for the mainstream media to cover stories circulating online. Haidt also draws convincingly upon the work of Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, to sketch out a potential future in which the work of shitposting has been outsourced to artificial intelligence, further polluting the informational environment. But, at least so far, very few Americans seem to suffer from consistent exposure to fake news—“probably less than two per cent of Twitter users, maybe fewer now, and for those who were it didn’t change their opinions,” Bail said. This was probably because the people likeliest to consume such spectacles were the sort of people primed to believe them in the first place. “In fact,” he said, “echo chambers might have done something to quarantine that misinformation.”

The final story that Bail wanted to discuss was the “proverbial rabbit hole, the path to algorithmic radicalization,” by which YouTube might serve a viewer increasingly extreme videos. There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that this does happen, at least on occasion, and such anecdotes are alarming to hear. But a new working paper led by Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, found that almost all extremist content is either consumed by subscribers to the relevant channels—a sign of actual demand rather than manipulation or preference falsification—or encountered via links from external sites. It’s easy to see why we might prefer if this were not the case: algorithmic radicalization is presumably a simpler problem to solve than the fact that there are people who deliberately seek out vile content. “These are the three stories—echo chambers, foreign influence campaigns, and radicalizing recommendation algorithms—but, when you look at the literature, they’ve all been overstated.” He thought that these findings were crucial for us to assimilate, if only to help us understand that our problems may lie beyond technocratic tinkering. He explained, “Part of my interest in getting this research out there is to demonstrate that everybody is waiting for an Elon Musk to ride in and save us with an algorithm”—or, presumably, the reverse—“and it’s just not going to happen.”

When I spoke with Nyhan, he told me much the same thing: “The most credible research is way out of line with the takes.” He noted, of extremist content and misinformation, that reliable research that “measures exposure to these things finds that the people consuming this content are small minorities who have extreme views already.” The problem with the bulk of the earlier research, Nyhan told me, is that it’s almost all correlational. “Many of these studies will find polarization on social media,” he said. “But that might just be the society we live in reflected on social media!” He hastened to add, “Not that this is untroubling, and none of this is to let these companies, which are exercising a lot of power with very little scrutiny, off the hook. But a lot of the criticisms of them are very poorly founded. . . . The expansion of Internet access coincides with fifteen other trends over time, and separating them is very difficult. The lack of good data is a huge problem insofar as it lets people project their own fears into this area.” He told me, “It’s hard to weigh in on the side of ‘We don’t know, the evidence is weak,’ because those points are always going to be drowned out in our discourse. But these arguments are systematically underprovided in the public domain.”

In his Atlantic article, Haidt leans on a working paper by two social scientists, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, who took on a comprehensive meta-analysis of about five hundred papers and concluded that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy.” Haidt writes, “The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.” Nyhan was less convinced that the meta-analysis supported such categorical verdicts, especially once you bracketed the kinds of correlational findings that might simply mirror social and political dynamics. He told me, “If you look at their summary of studies that allow for causal inferences—it’s very mixed.”

As for the studies Nyhan considered most methodologically sound, he pointed to a 2020 article called “The Welfare Effects of Social Media,” by Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, and Matthew Gentzkow. For four weeks prior to the 2018 midterm elections, the authors randomly divided a group of volunteers into two cohorts—one that continued to use Facebook as usual, and another that was paid to deactivate their accounts for that period. They found that deactivation “(i) reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use.” But Gentzkow reminded me that his conclusions, including that Facebook may slightly increase polarization, had to be heavily qualified: “From other kinds of evidence, I think there’s reason to think social media is not the main driver of increasing polarization over the long haul in the United States.”

In the book “ Why We’re Polarized ,” for example, Ezra Klein invokes the work of such scholars as Lilliana Mason to argue that the roots of polarization might be found in, among other factors, the political realignment and nationalization that began in the sixties, and were then sacralized, on the right, by the rise of talk radio and cable news. These dynamics have served to flatten our political identities, weakening our ability or inclination to find compromise. Insofar as some forms of social media encourage the hardening of connections between our identities and a narrow set of opinions, we might increasingly self-select into mutually incomprehensible and hostile groups; Haidt plausibly suggests that these processes are accelerated by the coalescence of social-media tribes around figures of fearful online charisma. “Social media might be more of an amplifier of other things going on rather than a major driver independently,” Gentzkow argued. “I think it takes some gymnastics to tell a story where it’s all primarily driven by social media, especially when you’re looking at different countries, and across different groups.”

Another study, led by Nejla Asimovic and Joshua Tucker, replicated Gentzkow’s approach in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and they found almost precisely the opposite results: the people who stayed on Facebook were, by the end of the study, more positively disposed to their historic out-groups. The authors’ interpretation was that ethnic groups have so little contact in Bosnia that, for some people, social media is essentially the only place where they can form positive images of one another. “To have a replication and have the signs flip like that, it’s pretty stunning,” Bail told me. “It’s a different conversation in every part of the world.”

Nyhan argued that, at least in wealthy Western countries, we might be too heavily discounting the degree to which platforms have responded to criticism: “Everyone is still operating under the view that algorithms simply maximize engagement in a short-term way” with minimal attention to potential externalities. “That might’ve been true when Zuckerberg had seven people working for him, but there are a lot of considerations that go into these rankings now.” He added, “There’s some evidence that, with reverse-chronological feeds”—streams of unwashed content, which some critics argue are less manipulative than algorithmic curation—“people get exposed to more low-quality content, so it’s another case where a very simple notion of ‘algorithms are bad’ doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It doesn’t mean they’re good, it’s just that we don’t know.”

Bail told me that, over all, he was less confident than Haidt that the available evidence lines up clearly against the platforms. “Maybe there’s a slight majority of studies that say that social media is a net negative, at least in the West, and maybe it’s doing some good in the rest of the world.” But, he noted, “Jon will say that science has this expectation of rigor that can’t keep up with the need in the real world—that even if we don’t have the definitive study that creates the historical counterfactual that Facebook is largely responsible for polarization in the U.S., there’s still a lot pointing in that direction, and I think that’s a fair point.” He paused. “It can’t all be randomized control trials.”

Haidt comes across in conversation as searching and sincere, and, during our exchange, he paused several times to suggest that I include a quote from John Stuart Mill on the importance of good-faith debate to moral progress. In that spirit, I asked him what he thought of the argument, elaborated by some of Haidt’s critics, that the problems he described are fundamentally political, social, and economic, and that to blame social media is to search for lost keys under the streetlamp, where the light is better. He agreed that this was the steelman opponent: there were predecessors for cancel culture in de Tocqueville, and anxiety about new media that went back to the time of the printing press. “This is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, and it’s absolutely up to the prosecution—people like me—to argue that, no, this time it’s different. But it’s a civil case! The evidential standard is not ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ as in a criminal case. It’s just a preponderance of the evidence.”

The way scholars weigh the testimony is subject to their disciplinary orientations. Economists and political scientists tend to believe that you can’t even begin to talk about causal dynamics without a randomized controlled trial, whereas sociologists and psychologists are more comfortable drawing inferences on a correlational basis. Haidt believes that conditions are too dire to take the hardheaded, no-reasonable-doubt view. “The preponderance of the evidence is what we use in public health. If there’s an epidemic—when COVID started, suppose all the scientists had said, ‘No, we gotta be so certain before you do anything’? We have to think about what’s actually happening, what’s likeliest to pay off.” He continued, “We have the largest epidemic ever of teen mental health, and there is no other explanation,” he said. “It is a raging public-health epidemic, and the kids themselves say Instagram did it, and we have some evidence, so is it appropriate to say, ‘Nah, you haven’t proven it’?”

This was his attitude across the board. He argued that social media seemed to aggrandize inflammatory posts and to be correlated with a rise in violence; even if only small groups were exposed to fake news, such beliefs might still proliferate in ways that were hard to measure. “In the post-Babel era, what matters is not the average but the dynamics, the contagion, the exponential amplification,” he said. “Small things can grow very quickly, so arguments that Russian disinformation didn’t matter are like COVID arguments that people coming in from China didn’t have contact with a lot of people.” Given the transformative effects of social media, Haidt insisted, it was important to act now, even in the absence of dispositive evidence. “Academic debates play out over decades and are often never resolved, whereas the social-media environment changes year by year,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting around five or ten years for literature reviews.”

Haidt could be accused of question-begging—of assuming the existence of a crisis that the research might or might not ultimately underwrite. Still, the gap between the two sides in this case might not be quite as wide as Haidt thinks. Skeptics of his strongest claims are not saying that there’s no there there. Just because the average YouTube user is unlikely to be led to Stormfront videos, Nyhan told me, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry that some people are watching Stormfront videos; just because echo chambers and foreign misinformation seem to have had effects only at the margins, Gentzkow said, doesn’t mean they’re entirely irrelevant. “There are many questions here where the thing we as researchers are interested in is how social media affects the average person,” Gentzkow told me. “There’s a different set of questions where all you need is a small number of people to change—questions about ethnic violence in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, people on YouTube mobilized to do mass shootings. Much of the evidence broadly makes me skeptical that the average effects are as big as the public discussion thinks they are, but I also think there are cases where a small number of people with very extreme views are able to find each other and connect and act.” He added, “That’s where many of the things I’d be most concerned about lie.”

The same might be said about any phenomenon where the base rate is very low but the stakes are very high, such as teen suicide. “It’s another case where those rare edge cases in terms of total social harm may be enormous. You don’t need many teen-age kids to decide to kill themselves or have serious mental-health outcomes in order for the social harm to be really big.” He added, “Almost none of this work is able to get at those edge-case effects, and we have to be careful that if we do establish that the average effect of something is zero, or small, that it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried about it—because we might be missing those extremes.” Jaime Settle, a scholar of political behavior at the College of William & Mary and the author of the book “ Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America ,” noted that Haidt is “farther along the spectrum of what most academics who study this stuff are going to say we have strong evidence for.” But she understood his impulse: “We do have serious problems, and I’m glad Jon wrote the piece, and down the road I wouldn’t be surprised if we got a fuller handle on the role of social media in all of this—there are definitely ways in which social media has changed our politics for the worse.”

It’s tempting to sidestep the question of diagnosis entirely, and to evaluate Haidt’s essay not on the basis of predictive accuracy—whether social media will lead to the destruction of American democracy—but as a set of proposals for what we might do better. If he is wrong, how much damage are his prescriptions likely to do? Haidt, to his great credit, does not indulge in any wishful thinking, and if his diagnosis is largely technological his prescriptions are sociopolitical. Two of his three major suggestions seem useful and have nothing to do with social media: he thinks that we should end closed primaries and that children should be given wide latitude for unsupervised play. His recommendations for social-media reform are, for the most part, uncontroversial: he believes that preteens shouldn’t be on Instagram and that platforms should share their data with outside researchers—proposals that are both likely to be beneficial and not very costly.

It remains possible, however, that the true costs of social-media anxieties are harder to tabulate. Gentzkow told me that, for the period between 2016 and 2020, the direct effects of misinformation were difficult to discern. “But it might have had a much larger effect because we got so worried about it—a broader impact on trust,” he said. “Even if not that many people were exposed, the narrative that the world is full of fake news, and you can’t trust anything, and other people are being misled about it—well, that might have had a bigger impact than the content itself.” Nyhan had a similar reaction. “There are genuine questions that are really important, but there’s a kind of opportunity cost that is missed here. There’s so much focus on sweeping claims that aren’t actionable, or unfounded claims we can contradict with data, that are crowding out the harms we can demonstrate, and the things we can test, that could make social media better.” He added, “We’re years into this, and we’re still having an uninformed conversation about social media. It’s totally wild.”

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6 Example Essays on Social Media | Advantages, Effects, and Outlines

Got an essay assignment about the effects of social media we got you covered check out our examples and outlines below.

Social media has become one of our society's most prominent ways of communication and information sharing in a very short time. It has changed how we communicate and has given us a platform to express our views and opinions and connect with others. It keeps us informed about the world around us. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn have brought individuals from all over the world together, breaking down geographical borders and fostering a genuinely global community.

However, social media comes with its difficulties. With the rise of misinformation, cyberbullying, and privacy problems, it's critical to utilize these platforms properly and be aware of the risks. Students in the academic world are frequently assigned essays about the impact of social media on numerous elements of our lives, such as relationships, politics, and culture. These essays necessitate a thorough comprehension of the subject matter, critical thinking, and the ability to synthesize and convey information clearly and succinctly.

But where do you begin? It can be challenging to know where to start with so much information available. Jenni.ai comes in handy here. Jenni.ai is an AI application built exclusively for students to help them write essays more quickly and easily. Jenni.ai provides students with inspiration and assistance on how to approach their essays with its enormous database of sample essays on a variety of themes, including social media. Jenni.ai is the solution you've been looking for if you're experiencing writer's block or need assistance getting started.

So, whether you're a student looking to better your essay writing skills or want to remain up to date on the latest social media advancements, Jenni.ai is here to help. Jenni.ai is the ideal tool for helping you write your finest essay ever, thanks to its simple design, an extensive database of example essays, and cutting-edge AI technology. So, why delay? Sign up for a free trial of Jenni.ai today and begin exploring the worlds of social networking and essay writing!

Want to learn how to write an argumentative essay? Check out these inspiring examples!

We will provide various examples of social media essays so you may get a feel for the genre.

6 Examples of Social Media Essays

Here are 6 examples of Social Media Essays:

The Impact of Social Media on Relationships and Communication

Introduction:.

The way we share information and build relationships has evolved as a direct result of the prevalence of social media in our daily lives. The influence of social media on interpersonal connections and conversation is a hot topic. Although social media has many positive effects, such as bringing people together regardless of physical proximity and making communication quicker and more accessible, it also has a dark side that can affect interpersonal connections and dialogue.

Positive Effects:

Connecting People Across Distances

One of social media's most significant benefits is its ability to connect individuals across long distances. People can use social media platforms to interact and stay in touch with friends and family far away. People can now maintain intimate relationships with those they care about, even when physically separated.

Improved Communication Speed and Efficiency

Additionally, the proliferation of social media sites has accelerated and simplified communication. Thanks to instant messaging, users can have short, timely conversations rather than lengthy ones via email. Furthermore, social media facilitates group communication, such as with classmates or employees, by providing a unified forum for such activities.

Negative Effects:

Decreased Face-to-Face Communication

The decline in in-person interaction is one of social media's most pernicious consequences on interpersonal connections and dialogue. People's reliance on digital communication over in-person contact has increased along with the popularity of social media. Face-to-face interaction has suffered as a result, which has adverse effects on interpersonal relationships and the development of social skills.

Decreased Emotional Intimacy

Another adverse effect of social media on relationships and communication is decreased emotional intimacy. Digital communication lacks the nonverbal cues and facial expressions critical in building emotional connections with others. This can make it more difficult for people to develop close and meaningful relationships, leading to increased loneliness and isolation.

Increased Conflict and Miscommunication

Finally, social media can also lead to increased conflict and miscommunication. The anonymity and distance provided by digital communication can lead to misunderstandings and hurtful comments that might not have been made face-to-face. Additionally, social media can provide a platform for cyberbullying , which can have severe consequences for the victim's mental health and well-being.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, the impact of social media on relationships and communication is a complex issue with both positive and negative effects. While social media platforms offer many benefits, such as connecting people across distances and enabling faster and more accessible communication, they also have a dark side that can negatively affect relationships and communication. It is up to individuals to use social media responsibly and to prioritize in-person communication in their relationships and interactions with others.

The Role of Social Media in the Spread of Misinformation and Fake News

Social media has revolutionized the way information is shared and disseminated. However, the ease and speed at which data can be spread on social media also make it a powerful tool for spreading misinformation and fake news. Misinformation and fake news can seriously affect public opinion, influence political decisions, and even cause harm to individuals and communities.

The Pervasiveness of Misinformation and Fake News on Social Media

Misinformation and fake news are prevalent on social media platforms, where they can spread quickly and reach a large audience. This is partly due to the way social media algorithms work, which prioritizes content likely to generate engagement, such as sensational or controversial stories. As a result, false information can spread rapidly and be widely shared before it is fact-checked or debunked.

The Influence of Social Media on Public Opinion

Social media can significantly impact public opinion, as people are likelier to believe the information they see shared by their friends and followers. This can lead to a self-reinforcing cycle, where misinformation and fake news are spread and reinforced, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

The Challenge of Correcting Misinformation and Fake News

Correcting misinformation and fake news on social media can be a challenging task. This is partly due to the speed at which false information can spread and the difficulty of reaching the same audience exposed to the wrong information in the first place. Additionally, some individuals may be resistant to accepting correction, primarily if the incorrect information supports their beliefs or biases.

In conclusion, the function of social media in disseminating misinformation and fake news is complex and urgent. While social media has revolutionized the sharing of information, it has also made it simpler for false information to propagate and be widely believed. Individuals must be accountable for the information they share and consume, and social media firms must take measures to prevent the spread of disinformation and fake news on their platforms.

The Effects of Social Media on Mental Health and Well-Being

Social media has become an integral part of modern life, with billions of people around the world using platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to stay connected with others and access information. However, while social media has many benefits, it can also negatively affect mental health and well-being.

Comparison and Low Self-Esteem

One of the key ways that social media can affect mental health is by promoting feelings of comparison and low self-esteem. People often present a curated version of their lives on social media, highlighting their successes and hiding their struggles. This can lead others to compare themselves unfavorably, leading to feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem.

Cyberbullying and Online Harassment

Another way that social media can negatively impact mental health is through cyberbullying and online harassment. Social media provides a platform for anonymous individuals to harass and abuse others, leading to feelings of anxiety, fear, and depression.

Social Isolation

Despite its name, social media can also contribute to feelings of isolation. At the same time, people may have many online friends but need more meaningful in-person connections and support. This can lead to feelings of loneliness and depression.

Addiction and Overuse

Finally, social media can be addictive, leading to overuse and negatively impacting mental health and well-being. People may spend hours each day scrolling through their feeds, neglecting other important areas of their lives, such as work, family, and self-care.

In sum, social media has positive and negative consequences on one's psychological and emotional well-being. Realizing this, and taking measures like reducing one's social media use, reaching out to loved ones for help, and prioritizing one's well-being, are crucial. In addition, it's vital that social media giants take ownership of their platforms and actively encourage excellent mental health and well-being.

The Use of Social Media in Political Activism and Social Movements

Social media has recently become increasingly crucial in political action and social movements. Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have given people new ways to express themselves, organize protests, and raise awareness about social and political issues.

Raising Awareness and Mobilizing Action

One of the most important uses of social media in political activity and social movements has been to raise awareness about important issues and mobilize action. Hashtags such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, for example, have brought attention to sexual harassment and racial injustice, respectively. Similarly, social media has been used to organize protests and other political actions, allowing people to band together and express themselves on a bigger scale.

Connecting with like-minded individuals

A second method in that social media has been utilized in political activity and social movements is to unite like-minded individuals. Through social media, individuals can join online groups, share knowledge and resources, and work with others to accomplish shared objectives. This has been especially significant for geographically scattered individuals or those without access to traditional means of political organizing.

Challenges and Limitations

As a vehicle for political action and social movements, social media has faced many obstacles and restrictions despite its many advantages. For instance, the propagation of misinformation and fake news on social media can impede attempts to disseminate accurate and reliable information. In addition, social media corporations have been condemned for censorship and insufficient protection of user rights.

In conclusion, social media has emerged as a potent instrument for political activism and social movements, giving voice to previously unheard communities and galvanizing support for change. Social media presents many opportunities for communication and collaboration. Still, users and institutions must be conscious of the risks and limitations of these tools to promote their responsible and productive usage.

The Potential Privacy Concerns Raised by Social Media Use and Data Collection Practices

With billions of users each day on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, social media has ingrained itself into every aspect of our lives. While these platforms offer a straightforward method to communicate with others and exchange information, they also raise significant concerns over data collecting and privacy. This article will examine the possible privacy issues posed by social media use and data-gathering techniques.

Data Collection and Sharing

The gathering and sharing of personal data are significant privacy issues brought up by social media use. Social networking sites gather user data, including details about their relationships, hobbies, and routines. This information is made available to third-party businesses for various uses, such as marketing and advertising. This can lead to serious concerns about who has access to and uses our personal information.

Lack of Control Over Personal Information

The absence of user control over personal information is a significant privacy issue brought up by social media usage. Social media makes it challenging to limit who has access to and how data is utilized once it has been posted. Sensitive information may end up being extensively disseminated and may be used maliciously as a result.

Personalized Marketing

Social media companies utilize the information they gather about users to target them with adverts relevant to their interests and usage patterns. Although this could be useful, it might also cause consumers to worry about their privacy since they might feel that their personal information is being used without their permission. Furthermore, there are issues with the integrity of the data being used to target users and the possibility of prejudice based on individual traits.

Government Surveillance

Using social media might spark worries about government surveillance. There are significant concerns regarding privacy and free expression when governments in some nations utilize social media platforms to follow and monitor residents.

In conclusion, social media use raises significant concerns regarding data collecting and privacy. While these platforms make it easy to interact with people and exchange information, they also gather a lot of personal information, which raises questions about who may access it and how it will be used. Users should be aware of these privacy issues and take precautions to safeguard their personal information, such as exercising caution when choosing what details to disclose on social media and keeping their information sharing with other firms to a minimum.

The Ethical and Privacy Concerns Surrounding Social Media Use And Data Collection

Our use of social media to communicate with loved ones, acquire information, and even conduct business has become a crucial part of our everyday lives. The extensive use of social media does, however, raise some ethical and privacy issues that must be resolved. The influence of social media use and data collecting on user rights, the accountability of social media businesses, and the need for improved regulation are all topics that will be covered in this article.

Effect on Individual Privacy:

Social networking sites gather tons of personal data from their users, including delicate information like search history, location data, and even health data. Each user's detailed profile may be created with this data and sold to advertising or used for other reasons. Concerns regarding the privacy of personal information might arise because social media businesses can use this data to target users with customized adverts.

Additionally, individuals might need to know how much their personal information is being gathered and exploited. Data breaches or the unauthorized sharing of personal information with other parties may result in instances where sensitive information is exposed. Users should be aware of the privacy rules of social media firms and take precautions to secure their data.

Responsibility of Social Media Companies:

Social media firms should ensure that they responsibly and ethically gather and use user information. This entails establishing strong security measures to safeguard sensitive information and ensuring users are informed of what information is being collected and how it is used.

Many social media businesses, nevertheless, have come under fire for not upholding these obligations. For instance, the Cambridge Analytica incident highlighted how Facebook users' personal information was exploited for political objectives without their knowledge. This demonstrates the necessity of social media corporations being held responsible for their deeds and ensuring that they are safeguarding the security and privacy of their users.

Better Regulation Is Needed

There is a need for tighter regulation in this field, given the effect, social media has on individual privacy as well as the obligations of social media firms. The creation of laws and regulations that ensure social media companies are gathering and using user information ethically and responsibly, as well as making sure users are aware of their rights and have the ability to control the information that is being collected about them, are all part of this.

Additionally, legislation should ensure that social media businesses are held responsible for their behavior, for example, by levying fines for data breaches or the unauthorized use of personal data. This will provide social media businesses with a significant incentive to prioritize their users' privacy and security and ensure they are upholding their obligations.

In conclusion, social media has fundamentally changed how we engage and communicate with one another, but this increased convenience also raises several ethical and privacy issues. Essential concerns that need to be addressed include the effect of social media on individual privacy, the accountability of social media businesses, and the requirement for greater regulation to safeguard user rights. We can make everyone's online experience safer and more secure by looking more closely at these issues.

In conclusion, social media is a complex and multifaceted topic that has recently captured the world's attention. With its ever-growing influence on our lives, it's no surprise that it has become a popular subject for students to explore in their writing. Whether you are writing an argumentative essay on the impact of social media on privacy, a persuasive essay on the role of social media in politics, or a descriptive essay on the changes social media has brought to the way we communicate, there are countless angles to approach this subject.

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Politics and Social Media Relations

Introduction, the influence of social media on politics, advantages and disadvantages of social media on politics.

Social media have diverse effects on politics, including their influence on voting, the spread of fake news, the promotion of rebellion toward government and politicians, and the proliferation of negative attitudes such as xenophobia, racism, and political polarization. In contemporary society, it is hard to talk about politics without including the internet, especially social media in the discourse. The exposure of citizens to social media content plays a key role in determining their political perceptions and preferences. Various platforms are used to persuade the electorate by presenting to them party agendas and manifestos. However, in recent times, social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have been used negatively to disseminate propaganda, ruin political discourse, and tarnish the images of politicians and parties, thus depicting social media as having an adverse influence on politics. Over the past twenty years, the media has gained more power with regard to its influence on politics.

In the past decades, social media provided important platforms in politics that were mainly used to educate and disseminate information. However, this trend has shifted in recent years as they are now used to spread fake news, tarnish the names of politicians and parties, and spread propaganda. According to Bolter (2019), social media platforms are now being used to misinform and propagate hate speech aimed at certain ethnic and religious groups. The world should be concerned because social media are ruining political discourse because most contents shared on various platforms is aimed at political indoctrination (Kleinnijenhuis et al., 2019). For instance, certain content on YouTube contains conspiracy theories that delude the public by creating the illusion that a certain cabal wants to take over the world. The concept of “flow” has rendered social media inappropriate for politics because the various platforms threaten coherent political discourse that was characteristic of the print era. On Twitter, users usually engage in partisan politics, thus promoting in-group and out-group affiliations (Kleinnijenhuis et al., 2019). Political polarization has been the outcome of such one-sided engagements.

This trend has affected many people and groups, including politicians, ethnic groups, religious minorities, and Americans in general. A 2018 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center revealed that 68% of Americans relied on social media for information on certain political matters (Bolter, 2019). Online platforms are used by politicians and extremist groups to advance their agendas. An example of the negative effect of flow is the propagation of online conspiracy thinking (Bolter, 2019). A group known as QAnon uses Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to spread conspiracy theories regarding international leaders, including Donald Trump, Angela Merkel, Hillary Clinton, and the Queen of England. Social media promote conspiracism, involving contradictory and incoherent assertions that are primarily political in nature (Bolter, 2019). For example, Donald Trump used Twitter to attack other counties and leaders, including President Obama, Hillary Clinton, China, and Russia. However, his tweets did not form a coherent narrative that could initiate an intelligent political discourse. They were simply personal attacks that did not have any political significance on the public agenda. Social media also contribute to political misperceptions during elections (Garrett, 2019). For instance, their use had a significant misperception about President Obama during the 2012 campaigns, mainly among strong partisans. Usage has increased immensely, with their advantages and disadvantages revealing their increased influence on politics.

Social media have several advantages reading its increasing role in politics. They give people platforms where they can access key political information such as upcoming events, party schedules, and the party’s election agenda ( Increasing role of Social Media in Politics , n.d.). Moreover, people can interact directly with politicians and party representatives, and share their ideas about civic and political issues (Wihbey, 2019). Platforms such as Facebook are widely used by politicians to present their policies to the people and discuss any issue that is of public interest. According to Wihbey (2013), Facebook increased the turnout during the 2012 elections by more than 340,000 voters. Political parties also use it to reach the people and learn about their problems (Kleinnijenhuis et al., 2019). Generally, social media allow people to participate actively in the election process by taking part in open dialogues that are conducted online ( Increasing role of Social Media in Politics , n.d.). Disadvantages of social media are linked to their use to promote political polarization, spread criticisms and misinformation about opposition parties, and create a political gridlock ( Increasing role of Social Media in Politics , n.d.). Moreover, its use in politics is expensive. For instance, Obama used $50 million on online platforms alone during the presidential campaigns. Several measures can be put in place to mitigate the effects of the negative uses of social media in politics.

It is important for social media companies to regulate the usage of their platforms for political discourses. They should consider banning users who use their accounts to promote ethnic or racial hatred, spread propaganda, and cause incitement (Harvey, 2014). For example, this is evident from the banning of President Trump from Twitter and Facebook for inciting his followers. They should also increase monitoring of these platforms in order to ensure that they are used positively. This could involve monitoring the messages and videos shared by users, fact-checking content, and banning individuals who harass and troll others (Harvey, 2014). The most effective measure would be to create more stringent policies that guide political discourses and punish individuals who violate them. Banning Donald Trump was effective because he did not have a platform to share his inciting sentiments with his followers. Denying individuals who misuse social media an opportunity to interact with the people could aid in streamlining the technology in ways that eradicate its negative effects on politics. Monitoring content could fail to work because there are millions of users who share self-generated content on social media every minute (Harvey, 2014). Therefore, eliminating politically divisive messages and videos would be difficult. Moreover, it could cause opposition among the people because users want to be able to enjoy their freedom of speech through and express themselves without any form of limitation.

The use of social media to win the 2012 presidential election, spread propaganda, engage the electorate, and promote partisan political discourses is proof that the media has gained more power with regard to politics. It has been used effectively by President Trump to attack media houses, members of his political party, and the leaders of other countries. Research has shown that social media are widely used to engage the people, present the schedules of political parties, and conduct political discourses. However, it is also being used to criticize opposition parties, spread rumors, and propaganda, and propagate political conspiracy thinking. There is a need to implement measures to regulate the power of social media in politics. Moreover, it is necessary to mitigate the effects of its wrong application by politicians, individuals, and extremist groups who have used it to ruin political discourse.

Bolter, J. D. (2019). Social media are ruining political Discourse. The Atlantic . Web.

Garrett, R. K. (2019). Social media’s contribution to political misperceptions in U.S. presidential elections. PLOS ONE, 14 (3). Web.

Harvey, K. (Ed.). (2014). Encyclopedia of social media and politics . Sage Publications.

Increasing role of social media in politics: Pros and cons . (n.d.). Web.

Kleinnijenhuis, J., Van Hoof, A., & Van Atteveldt, W. (2019). Combined effects of mass media and social media on Political perceptions and preferences. Journal of Communication, 69 (6), 650-673. Web.

Wihbey, J. (2013). Effects of the internet on politics: Research roundup . The Journalist’s Resource. Web.

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An Essay About Social Media: Definition, Outline and Examples

An essay about social media is a piece of writing that explores social media’s impact, influence, and consequences on various aspects of society, such as communication, relationships, politics, mental health, culture, and more.

The essay can take on different forms, such as an argumentative essay , a cause-and-effect essay, a critical analysis, or an exploratory essay.

A good essay about social media aims to provide a well-researched and thought-provoking examination of the topic and to help readers better understand the complex nature of social media and its role in our lives.

The essay may address questions such as:

• How has social media changed communication?
• What are the positive and negative effects of social media on mental health?
• How has social media impacted politics and public opinion?
• What is the future of social media, and how will it continue to shape our lives?

Why do college students write essays about social media

College students may write an essay about social media for several reasons:

• To fulfill an assignment: Many professors assign social media essays as part of a communication, media studies course, or sociology. Writing an essay on social media helps students understand the topic more deeply and grasp its impact on society.
• To demonstrate critical thinking skills: Writing an essay about social media requires students to analyze the topic and form an informed opinion critically. It provides an opportunity for students to demonstrate their critical thinking skills and shows that they can evaluate complex ideas and arguments.
• To develop research skills: Writing an essay about social media requires students to conduct thorough research and gather information from credible sources. This helps students develop important research skills and evaluate the reliability and relevance of different sources.
• To express personal views and opinions: Writing an essay about social media allows students to express their views and opinions on the topic. This can be a great opportunity for students to showcase their creativity and thoughtfulness and share their insights.
• To prepare for future careers: Social media is a rapidly growing field, and many careers in marketing, advertising, public relations, journalism, and other fields require a deep understanding of the role of social media in society. Writing an essay on social media can help students prepare for these careers by better understanding the topic and its impact on the world around them.

How to write an essay about social media

Step 1: Choose a Topic Before you start writing your essay, you must choose a topic you are interested in and clearly understand. This could be a specific aspect of social media, such as its impact on mental health, or a more general overview of the pros and cons of social media.

Step 2: Research To write an effective essay about social media, gather information and data on your topic from various sources, such as books, articles, websites, and interviews. Make sure to take notes and organize your research to make it easier to reference later.

Step 3: Create an Outline An outline is a roadmap for your essay about social media and will help you organize your thoughts and ideas. A standard essay outline includes an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

Step 4: Write the Introduction In the introduction of your essay about social media, provide background information on social media and introduce your thesis statement. A thesis statement is a sentence that states your argument and sets the direction of your essay.

Step 5: Write the Body Paragraphs The body paragraphs are the main part of your essay, where you will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of social media, its impact on society, and other relevant topics. Each body paragraph should have a topic sentence, supporting evidence, and a conclusion.

Step 6: Write the Conclusion The conclusion should summarize your main points and restate your thesis. It should also provide a final thought or call to action, encouraging the reader to think critically about social media and its impact on society.

Step 7: Edit and Revise Once you have completed your first draft, take some time to revise and edit your essay. Check for grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors, and ensure your ideas are well-organized and presented.

Step 8: Proofread Proofread your essay one last time to catch any mistakes you may have missed in the previous steps. This will help to ensure that your essay is well-written and error-free.

Essay about social media: outline example

I. Introduction

Definition of social media A brief history of social media Importance of social media in today’s world II. Advantages of social media

Connectivity and communication Access to information Improved marketing and advertising Increased global exposure and reach Ability to participate in social movements and activism III. Disadvantages of social media

Cyberbullying and online harassment Addiction and decreased productivity Spread of misinformation and fake news Decreased privacy and security Impacts on mental health and self-esteem IV. Social media and its impact on society

Influence on politics and elections Changes in the way we interact and communicate Increase in consumerism and materialism Impact on journalism and news media Effects on personal relationships and communication skills V. Conclusion

Recap of the advantages and disadvantages of social media Final thoughts on the role and impact of social media in society Call to action for the responsible and mindful use of social media

Example 1: Short social media essay

Social media is a term that refers to the various platforms and websites that allow individuals to communicate, share information and content, and connect with others on the internet. With the rise of social media, the way people communicate, interact and consume information has dramatically changed. Overall, Social media has changed the way we communicate, access information, and interact with others, but its impact on society is both positive and negative, highlighting the need for responsible and mindful use. One of the most significant advantages of social media is the ease of connectivity and communication. Social media has brought people from all over the world together, making it possible to form online communities and interact with others who share similar interests (Lin et al., 2021). This has been especially beneficial for individuals who live in isolated areas or have mobility issues, as social media provides a way to stay connected and engaged with others. In addition, social media has provided unprecedented access to information. The internet has become a vast library of knowledge available to anyone with an internet connection. With the help of social media, people can access the latest news, events, and trends from around the world and learn about various topics and issues from diverse perspectives. However, social media also has its negative aspects. One of the most significant drawbacks is the spread of misinformation and fake news. The ease of creating and sharing content online has led to an increase in misleading information, which can have far-reaching consequences, particularly in politics and public opinion (Kuss & Griffiths, 2017). Additionally, social media can be addictive and can negatively impact productivity, as people spend hours browsing and scrolling through their feeds. Social media has also had a significant impact on the way we interact with one another. The anonymity provided by the internet has led to an increase in online harassment and cyberbullying, which can be particularly damaging to young people’s mental health ()Lin et al., 2021; Kuss & Grifffiths, 2017). Moreover, social media has decreased privacy and security, as personal information can be easily shared and spread online. In conclusion, social media has been both a blessing and a curse for society. On the one hand, it has revolutionized how people communicate, providing a platform for global connectivity and access to information. On the other hand, it has also led to an increase in misinformation, cyberbullying, and privacy concerns. As social media continues to evolve, it is important to find a balance between its benefits and drawbacks and to use it responsibly and mindfully. References

• Kuss, D. J., & Griffiths, M. D. (2017). Social networking sites and addiction: Ten lessons learned. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14(3), 311.
• Lin, L. Y., Sidani, J. E., Shensa, A., Radovic, A., Miller, E., Colditz, J. B., Hoffman, B. L., Giles, L. M., & Primack, B. A. (2021). Association between social media use and depression among US young adults. Depression and Anxiety, 33(4), 323–331.

P.S: Click here if you need help with your social media essay 

Example 2: 1000 + words Essay About Social Media

Social media has become an integral part of our daily lives, connecting us to people and information from around the world. With the rise of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, social media has transformed the way we communicate, share information, and consume media (Statista, 2021). This essay, we will explore the advantages and disadvantages of social media, as well as its impact on society. The overaching assertion is that by understanding the complex role that social media plays in our lives, we can begin to use these platforms in a more responsible and mindful way, ensuring that we are maximizing their benefits while minimizing their negative effects. Advantages of social media Connectivity and communication Social media has made access to information easier and more convenient than ever before. News, entertainment, and educational content are readily available through social media platforms, providing users with a wide range of perspectives and viewpoints. Social media has also made it easier for individuals to access information that would have previously been difficult to find or obtain (Gershon, 2019). For example, people can now easily find information about medical conditions, research studies, and government policies, all of which can be used to make informed decisions about their health, education, and politics. Improved marketing and advertising Social media has revolutionized the way companies market their products and services, enabling them to reach a wider audience and target specific demographics. Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have sophisticated advertising algorithms that allow companies to target users based on their interests, location, and behavior (Gershon, 2019). This has made advertising more effective and efficient, resulting in higher engagement and conversion rates. Social media has also enabled small businesses and entrepreneurs to reach customers without the need for expensive marketing campaigns, making it easier to compete with larger corporations. Increased global exposure and reach Social media has given individuals and organizations global exposure, allowing them to reach audiences they would not have been able to reach otherwise. Social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram have been used by celebrities and public figures to build their brands and reach a wider audience (Pew Research Center, 2021). Social media has also been used by activists and social movements to raise awareness about issues and mobilize support across the globe. For example, the #MeToo movement, which started as a hashtag on social media, has become a global movement that has led to significant changes in the way society views sexual harassment and assault. Ability to participate in social movements and activism Social media has given individuals the power to participate in social and political movements, making it easier for people to voice their opinions and take action on issues they care about (Mesch, 2018). Social media has been used to organize protests, raise awareness about issues, and mobilize support for causes. It has also given marginalized groups a platform to share their experiences and perspectives, enabling them to demand change and hold those in power accountable. Disadvantages of social media Cyberbullying and online harassment While social media has many benefits, it also has several disadvantages. One of the most significant drawbacks is cyberbullying and online harassment. Social media platforms have become breeding grounds for bullying and harassment, with individuals using anonymity to attack and intimidate others. This can have severe consequences for the victim, including depression, anxiety, and in extreme cases, suicide (Mesch ,2018). Cyberbullying has become a significant concern, with one study finding that 59% of U.S. teens have experienced some form of online harassment (Pew Reserach , 2021). Addiction and decreased productivity Social media can be highly addictive, with users spending hours scrolling through their feeds and engaging with content. This addiction can have detrimental effects on productivity, with individuals spending less time on work or other important activities. Studies have shown that social media addiction can lead to a decrease in academic performance, work productivity, and overall well-being. Spread of misinformation and fake news Another disadvantage of social media is the spread of misinformation and fake news. With the ease of sharing content on social media, it has become easy for false information to be disseminated to a wide audience quickly. This can have severe consequences, as false information can influence people’s beliefs and behaviors, leading to harmful outcomes. The spread of fake news has been a significant concern, with social media companies facing criticism for not doing enough to combat it. Decreased privacy and security Social media has also led to a decrease in privacy and security, with users’ personal information often being collected and shared without their consent. Social media platforms collect vast amounts of data about their users, including their location, interests, and online behavior. This information can be used for targeted advertising, but it can also be used for nefarious purposes, such as identity theft or cyber attacks. Impacts on mental health and self-esteem Social media has been linked to several negative impacts on mental health and self-esteem. Studies have shown that excessive social media use can lead to feelings of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Social media has also been linked to negative body image and low self-esteem, with individuals comparing themselves to unrealistic and idealized images presented on social media platforms (Pew Research Center, 2021). Social media and its impact on society Influence on politics and elections Social media has had a significant impact on politics and elections, with candidates and parties using social media to reach and engage with voters. Social media has enabled political campaigns to reach a wider audience, mobilize support, and fundraise (Tufekci, 2018). Social media has also been used to spread propaganda and false information, leading to concerns about its impact on the democratic process. Changes in the way we interact and communicate Social media has transformed the way we interact and communicate with others, with many individuals relying on social media platforms as their primary means of communication. Social media has enabled individuals to connect with people across the globe, but it has also led to a decrease in face-to-face interactions. This can have significant consequences, as face-to-face interactions are crucial for building strong relationships and developing social skills. Increase in consumerism and materialism Social media has contributed to an increase in consumerism and materialism, with individuals being exposed to a constant stream of advertisements and product promotions. Social media platforms have become virtual marketplaces, with individuals being bombarded with messages that encourage them to buy more and consume more. Impact on journalism and news media Social media has also had a significant impact on journalism and news media, with many individuals turning to social media platforms for their news and information. While social media has enabled citizen journalism and given a platform to marginalized voices, it has also led to the spread of misinformation and fake news. Social media has also led to a decrease in traditional news media outlets, with many newspapers and TV stations struggling to compete with social media platforms (Tandoc et al., 2018). Effects on personal relationships and communication skills Finally, social media has had significant effects on personal relationships and communication skills. While social media has enabled individuals to connect with people across the globe, it has also led to a decrease in the quality of interpersonal relationships (Pew Research Center, 2021). Many individuals rely on social media for their social interactions, leading to a decrease in face-to-face interactions and the development of social skills. Additionally, social media has enabled individuals to present a curated and idealized version of themselves, leading to a lack of authenticity and trust in personal relationships. Conclusion In conclusion, social media has become an integral part of our lives, with many individuals relying on social media platforms for communication, information, and entertainment. While social media has many advantages, it also has several significant disadvantages, including cyberbullying, addiction, spread of misinformation, decreased privacy, and negative impacts on mental health and self-esteem. Social media has also had a significant impact on society, influencing politics and elections, changing the way we interact and communicate, contributing to consumerism and materialism, and affecting journalism and news media. As we continue to navigate the complex world of social media, it is crucial to be mindful and responsible in our use of these platforms, ensuring that we are using them to their fullest potential while minimizing the negative impacts. By doing so, we can continue to enjoy the benefits of social media while mitigating its negative effects. References  Statista. (2021). Number of social media users worldwide from 2010 to 2026 (in billions). https://www.statista.com/statistics/278414/number-of-worldwide-social-network-users/ Pew Research Center. (2021). Social media fact sheet. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/ Tufekci, Z. (2018). Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. Yale University Press. Mesch, G. S. (2018). Social media and social support. In J. Wright (Ed.), International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences (pp. 28–33). Elsevier. Tandoc, E. C., Jr., Lim, Z. W., & Ling, R. (2018). Defining “fake news.” Digital Journalism, 6(2), 137–153. Gershon, I. (2019). Media ideologies: A comparative study of Russian and US journalism. Cambridge University Press.

Social media essay topic ideas

• Why social media has changed the way we communicate
• A critical analysis of the impact of social media on mental health
• How social media has affected politics and public opinion
• Where social media has made the biggest impact on society
• An examination of the benefits and drawbacks of social media
• The role of social media in the spread of misinformation
• How social media has changed the advertising industry
• The impact of social media on privacy and security
• Why social media can be addictive and what can be done to mitigate its negative effects
• An exploration of the use of social media in education and learning.
• The influence of social media on relationships and personal connections
• How social media has impacted the job market and employment opportunities
• The role of social media in promoting cultural exchange and understanding
• An analysis of the influence of social media on popular culture
• The impact of social media on traditional forms of media, such as television and print
• The potential of social media for social activism and social change
• How social media has changed the way we consume and share information
• The impact of social media on the way we perceive and experience events
• The role of social media in shaping the future of technology and communication
• An examination of the ethical considerations surrounding social media and its use.
• The influence of social media on fashion and beauty trends
• How social media has impacted the way we perceive and experience travel
• An analysis of the impact of social media on professional sports and athletics
• The influence of social media on the music industry and artist promotions
• The role of social media in fostering online communities and relationships
• How social media has changed the way we access and consume news
• An examination of the impact of social media on the way we shop and make purchasing decisions
• The influence of social media on the way we view and engage with art and creativity
• The impact of social media on personal branding and self-promotion
• An exploration of the use of social media in crisis management and emergency response.

Essays about social media additional tips

• Start with a strong thesis statement that clearly states your argument.
• Use reputable sources for your research and reference them properly in your essay.
• Avoid using overly technical language or overly casual language.
• Use specific examples to support your argument and make your essay more relatable.
• Be mindful of the tone of your essay and aim for a balanced, neutral perspective.
• Avoid making broad generalizations and instead focus on specific, well-supported claims.
• Consider both social media’s positive and negative aspects and provide a nuanced perspective.
• Use clear, concise, and well-structured sentences and paragraphs to make your essay easy to read and understand.
• Use a variety of sentence structures and avoid repeating the same sentence structure repeatedly.
• End your essay with a strong conclusion summarizing your main points and providing a final thought or calls to action.

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Americans’ Views of Technology Companies

Most think social media companies have too much influence in politics and censor political viewpoints they object to – both sentiments are growing among democrats, table of contents.

• Social media’s impact on politics and the country
• Political censorship and bias in Big Tech
• Government regulation of technology companies

Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand Americans’ attitudes toward technology companies. For this analysis, we surveyed 10,133 U.S. adults from Feb. 7 to 11, 2024.

Everyone who took part in the survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way, nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for this report , along with responses, and the survey methodology .

Most Americans are wary of social media’s role in politics and its overall impact on the country, and these concerns are ticking up among Democrats, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults. Still, Republicans stand out on several measures, with majorities believing major technology companies are biased toward liberals.

Our survey asked Americans about three key areas: Social media’s impact on politics and the country | Political censorship and bias in Big Tech | Government regulation of technology companies

Since 2020, more Americans – particularly Democrats – believe social media companies wield too much political power. Roughly eight-in-ten Americans (78%) say these companies have too much power and influence in politics today, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of 10,133 U.S. adults conducted Feb. 7-11, 2024. This is up from 72% in 2020.

Another 16% say these sites have the right amount of political influence, while only 4% think they don’t have enough power.

Views by party

Republicans and independents who lean toward the Republican Party (84%) are more likely than Democrats and Democratic leaners (74%) to think these companies have too much political power. And while Republicans’ opinions have changed little since 2020, this view has grown more common among Democrats over the past four years: 74% of Democrats believe social media companies have too much power and influence in politics, up from 63% in 2020.

What impact does social media have on the country?

Americans are far more likely to say social media has a negative rather than positive impact on the country. Roughly two-thirds (64%) think social media has a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the country today.

Only 10% describe social media as having a mostly positive impact on the country. And about a quarter say these sites have neither a positive nor a negative effect.

These overall figures are nearly identical to what the Center found in 2020 . For instance, the share of Americans who see social media’s impact on the country as mostly negative has remained at 64%.

Majorities in both political parties see social media’s impact on the country negatively, though Republicans remain more wary than Democrats (71% vs. 59%). That said, a growing number of Democrats believe these platforms have a mostly bad impact on the country, rising to 59% in our current survey, up from 53% in 2020.

By comparison, the share of Republicans who say social media negatively affects the way things are going in the country has dropped from 78% in 2020 to 71% today.

As social media has become a key way people share news and information, some lawmakers and commentators – especially conservatives – have expressed concerns that these companies are politically biased and limit free speech .

Our survey finds that most Americans think social media sites actively censor political viewpoints they disagree with. Roughly eight-in-ten U.S. adults (83%) say it’s very or somewhat likely that these platforms intentionally censor political viewpoints they find objectionable, up from 77% in 2022. Just 17% in the current survey think this is not likely the case.

Majorities in both parties believe political censorship is likely occurring on social media, but more Republicans hold this view. Fully 93% of Republicans say it’s likely that social media sites intentionally censor political viewpoints that they find objectionable, including 66% who say that this is very likely happening.

By comparison, 74% of Democrats think this is likely occurring, with 25% saying there’s a strong possibility this is occurring.

Republicans’ views have held steady since 2022. But the share of Democrats who think it’s likely that social media sites intentionally censor political viewpoints they object to is rising – 74% say this today, up from 66% two years ago.

Do major technology companies have liberal or conservative biases?

Overall, Americans are more likely to think Big Tech companies support the views of liberals over conservatives than the other way around. More than four-in-ten U.S. adults (44%) think major technology companies support the views of liberals over conservatives. Far fewer – 15% – say these companies support conservative views over liberal ones. Still, a notable share (37%) thinks this industry equally values conservative and liberal viewpoints.

Republicans widely believe that major tech companies have a pro-liberal bias. Fully 71% of Republicans say major technology companies support the views of liberals over conservatives. Much smaller shares believe these companies support the views of liberals and conservatives equally (22%) or favor conservative beliefs over liberal ones (6%).

By contrast, the most commonly held view among Democrats is that technology companies support the views of conservatives and liberals equally, with 50% saying this. Roughly a quarter of Democrats either say that these companies favor the views of conservatives over liberals (25%) or liberals over conservatives (22%).

While there’s been little change in views since 2022, there are some differences when comparing today’s views to those in 2018, when we first started asking these questions.

Over the past six years, a rising share of Republicans say major tech companies favor liberal over conservative views (71% today vs. 64% in 2018), while more Democrats today than in the past think these companies support conservative views more than liberal ones (25% today vs. 16% in 2018).

Amid concerns over free speech, social media’s impact on youth and AI’s impending foothold , lawmakers and advocates on both sides of the political aisle have pushed for more government oversight of the tech industry.

But there’s a long-running debate about what role the government should play in regulating Big Tech. We wanted to know where Americans stand, how views have changed over time, and whether opinions vary by party.

Americans favor more rather than less regulation of Big Tech companies. When asked whether the government should regulate major technology companies more, less or at its current level, 51% believe these companies should be regulated more than they are now. Far fewer – 16% – feel they should be regulated less than they are now.

Still, 31% say their current level of regulation should stay the same.

Support for more government regulation of technology companies is identical to what it was in 2018. Support for more regulation has risen and fallen somewhat over the past six years, ranging from 44% in 2022 to 56% in 2021. The share of Americans who think these companies should be regulated more than they are now is identical to what the Center found in 2018, when we first asked the question. At the same time, the share who say there should be less regulation has increased from 9% in 2018 to 16% today.

Democrats are more supportive of increased government oversight of tech companies than are Republicans. Six-in-ten Democrats say the government should regulate major technology companies more than it is now, compared with 45% of Republicans.

The partisan gap between Democrats and Republicans is similar to that in 2022. But these differences have not always been large. For instance, similar shares of Republicans (48%) and Democrats (46%) favored more regulation of technology companies back in 2020.

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Guest Essay

Justin Trudeau Is No Match for a Polarized World

By Stephen Marche

Mr. Marche is the author, most recently, of “The Next Civil War.”

Political careers often end in failure — a cliché that exists because it too often happens to be true. Justin Trudeau, one of the world’s great progressive leaders, may be heading toward that moment. In a recent interview he acknowledged that every day he considers leaving his “crazy job” as Canada’s prime minister. Increasingly, the question is not if he will leave but how soon and how deep his failure will be when he goes.

At stake is something that matters more than one politician’s career: Canada’s contemporary liberal and multicultural society, which just happens to be the legacy of the prime minister’s father and predecessor, Pierre Trudeau. When you fly into Montreal, you land in Trudeau airport, and that’s because of Pierre, not Justin.

The threat to that liberal tradition is not all Justin Trudeau’s fault, of course. The right-wing tide overwhelming global politics has come late but with pent-up vigor to Canada. For several years now, polls have shown Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals at lows from which no Canadian political party has ever recovered in elections. In a recent by-election, in a key suburban district of the Greater Toronto Area, the Conservative Party beat the Liberals by a lopsided 57 percent to 22 percent, a swing of nine percentage points to the Conservatives.

But polls and by-elections can be poor predictors of election viability. A better indicator is the flummoxed figure of Mr. Trudeau himself, who seems increasingly out of touch in the new world of division and extremism.

Part of Mr. Trudeau’s problem is simple exhaustion, both his own and Canadian voters’. He has been in government for almost eight and a half years. During that time, he has been one of the most effective progressive leaders in the world. His government cut Canada’s child poverty in half. He legalized marijuana, ending roughly 100 years of nonsense. He made large strides in reconciliation with Indigenous Canadians. He renegotiated NAFTA with a lunatic American president. He handled Covid better than most. You don’t have to squint too hard to recognize that he is one of the most competent and transformative prime ministers this country has ever produced.

But an era has passed since the start of that halcyon time, when Mr. Trudeau stood in front of his first cabinet and, when asked why it was half female, answered, “Because it’s 2015.” Now a new generation has emerged, for which the liberal technocratic order his government represents has failed to offer a path to a stable, prosperous future and the identity politics he once embodied have withered into vacuous schism. The growing anti-Liberal Party sentiment of young people is the biggest threat to his electability.

His opponents are well aware of Mr. Trudeau’s unpopularity with young voters and have focused Conservative attacks on an issue especially important to that cohort: the housing crisis. The soaring real estate market, in which tiny homes in Toronto and Vancouver now regularly cost more than properties in Paris or New York, has been exacerbated by the Trudeau government bringing in over a million immigrants last year without having built the necessary infrastructure to support the communities receiving them.

For decades, Canada has been the only country in the world where the more patriotic citizens are, the more they support immigration. Liberal mishandling of immigration’s impact may well end this blessed state. The housing crisis is the epitome of Mr. Trudeau’s failure: It feels good — it feels righteous — to support immigration. Isn’t that the whole idea behind multiculturalism? But without the proper hardheadedness, without being frank about difficult realities, righteousness quickly sours.

The first evidence of the prime minister’s weakness in the face of Canada’s growing polarization was the government response to the so-called Freedom Convoy in 2022, in which anti-vaccine demonstrators held Ottawa hostage for a month. His government decided to take a bureaucratic approach to the disruption, dithering while the truckers entrenched themselves in the city, then using the Emergencies Act to seize several of their bank accounts. A January federal decision found that Mr. Trudeau’s invocation of the act was “not justified.”

Other countries took much simpler approaches to their civil unrest in the aftermath of Covid restrictions. The French used tear gas. The moment a convoy set out from Los Angeles headed for Washington, in imitation of the Canadian convoy, the Biden administration called out the National Guard. Other countries know: There is a time for brute force.

The same fear of confrontation — which, to be fair to Mr. Trudeau, afflicts the entirety of Canadian culture and politics — motivated new online harms legislation, which he proposed in February in an attempt to regulate or at least somewhat contain the internet and social media, from revenge pornography and child sexual abuse material to hate speech. It is, unfortunately, an absurd document that seeks to impose virtue by fiat.

The maximum penalty for promoting genocide — a form of speech crime — is life imprisonment, meaning harsh punishments can be meted out for the vaguest and most subjective of definitions. Equally troubling is the measure that if a Canadian citizen “fears on reasonable grounds” that a hate crime will be committed, the individual can apply for an order that another person be subjected to court-mandated conditions on what that person may say.

No less a figure than Margaret Atwood described the proposed law as “Orwellian.” “It’s Lettres de Cachet all over again,” she wrote on X , referring to the king’s ability in prerevolutionary France to imprison without trial. The spirit behind the new law is the very worst of Canada: Be nice, or else. And it will do nothing to contain the disinformation wave that’s swelling.

But more than any other event, it is the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas that has exposed Mr. Trudeau’s inability to fight for liberal values. Since that day, the Canadian Jewish community has been subject to violence not seen since the 1930s. A synagogue has been firebombed , a Jewish school shot at , a Jewish hospital targeted by an antisemitic mob, a Jewish-owned bookstore vandalized , a Jewish neighborhood disrupted , a Jewish grocery store lit on fire . A mob outside a Holocaust Museum in Montreal chanted , “Death to the Jews.” Mr. Trudeau’s response has been pleas for everyone to just get along. “This needs to stop,” he said , referring to the lobbing of a Molotov cocktail at a synagogue. “This is not who we are as Canadians.”

This litany of failures is all the more significant because of Mr. Trudeau’s name. At a moment of crisis for Canadian multiculturalism, he makes a poor contrast with his father. Pierre Trudeau was not just another Canadian politician; he passed the Charter of Rights and Freedoms while establishing Canada’s Constitution as its own and not subject to the British Parliament. He made no-fault divorce and homosexuality legal. He instituted the official policy of multiculturalism, which made it a matter of law that Canadian citizens were encouraged to practice their religions and maintain their identities.

Pierre Trudeau might have been the most important architect of the liberal Canada, but he was also tough as hell. He famously invoked the War Measures Act against separatist terrorists in 1970, suspending civil liberties and bringing in the military. When asked by journalists how far he was willing to go, he said, “Just watch me.” Pierre Trudeau knew that the liberal order demands forceful and practical — and occasionally ugly — defense.

His son now seems to believe that telling people to be nice to one another will do. This weakness not only threatens the multicultural society his father founded; it threatens progressive values around the world. For many, Canada seemed a lone candle alight for the values of pluralism and liberalism as they have been extinguished elsewhere in the world.

Justin Trudeau does not have to call an election until 2025. He won elections against the odds before. But time is not on his side. It’s not Pierre Trudeau’s world anymore. It doesn’t much look like Justin Trudeau’s, either.

Stephen Marche is the author, most recently, of “The Next Civil War.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of an act that Pierre Trudeau invoked in 1970. It is the War Measures Act, not the Emergency War Measures Act.

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An NPR editor who wrote a critical essay on the company has resigned after being suspended

FILE - The headquarters for National Public Radio (NPR) stands on North Capitol Street on April 15, 2013, in Washington. A National Public Radio editor who wrote an essay criticizing his employer for promoting liberal reviews resigned on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, a day after it was revealed that he had been suspended. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)

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NEW YORK (AP) — A National Public Radio editor who wrote an essay criticizing his employer for promoting liberal views resigned on Wednesday, attacking NPR’s new CEO on the way out.

Uri Berliner, a senior editor on NPR’s business desk, posted his resignation letter on X, formerly Twitter, a day after it was revealed that he had been suspended for five days for violating company rules about outside work done without permission.

“I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems” written about in his essay, Berliner said in his resignation letter.

Katherine Maher, a former tech executive appointed in January as NPR’s chief executive, has been criticized by conservative activists for social media messages that disparaged former President Donald Trump. The messages predated her hiring at NPR.

NPR’s public relations chief said the organization does not comment on individual personnel matters.

The suspension and subsequent resignation highlight the delicate balance that many U.S. news organizations and their editorial employees face. On one hand, as journalists striving to produce unbiased news, they’re not supposed to comment on contentious public issues; on the other, many journalists consider it their duty to critique their own organizations’ approaches to journalism when needed.

In his essay , written for the online Free Press site, Berliner said NPR is dominated by liberals and no longer has an open-minded spirit. He traced the change to coverage of Trump’s presidency.

“There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed,” he wrote. “It’s frictionless — one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.”

He said he’d brought up his concerns internally and no changes had been made, making him “a visible wrong-thinker at a place I love.”

In the essay’s wake, NPR top editorial executive, Edith Chapin, said leadership strongly disagreed with Berliner’s assessment of the outlet’s journalism and the way it went about its work.

It’s not clear what Berliner was referring to when he talked about disparagement by Maher. In a lengthy memo to staff members last week, she wrote: “Asking a question about whether we’re living up to our mission should always be fair game: after all, journalism is nothing if not hard questions. Questioning whether our people are serving their mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful and demeaning.”

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo revealed some of Maher’s past tweets after the essay was published. In one tweet, dated January 2018, Maher wrote that “Donald Trump is a racist.” A post just before the 2020 election pictured her in a Biden campaign hat.

In response, an NPR spokeswoman said Maher, years before she joined the radio network, was exercising her right to express herself. She is not involved in editorial decisions at NPR, the network said.

The issue is an example of what can happen when business executives, instead of journalists, are appointed to roles overseeing news organizations: they find themselves scrutinized for signs of bias in ways they hadn’t been before. Recently, NBC Universal News Group Chairman Cesar Conde has been criticized for service on paid corporate boards.

Maher is the former head of the Wikimedia Foundation. NPR’s own story about the 40-year-old executive’s appointment in January noted that she “has never worked directly in journalism or at a news organization.”

In his resignation letter, Berliner said that he did not support any efforts to strip NPR of public funding. “I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism,” he wrote.

David Bauder writes about media for The Associated Press. Follow him at http://twitter.com/dbauder