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American President Donald Trump's X Page is seen displayed on a smartphone with a Tiktok logo in the background
Where we get our news - and why it changes everything
In August 1991, a handful of high-ranking Soviet officials launched a military coup to halt what they believed (correctly) was the steady disintegration of the Soviet Union. Their first step was to seize control of the flow of information across the USSR by ordering state television to begin broadcasting a Bolshoi Theatre production of Swan Lake on a continuous loop until further notice. (Click that link for some prehistoric GZERO coverage of that event.)
Even in the decade that followed the Cold War’s end, citizens of both authoritarian states and democracies had far fewer sources of reliable information than today about what was happening in their communities, across their countries and around the world.
Earlier this month, the Reuters Institute published its 14th annual Digital News Report, which Reuters claims is the “most comprehensive study of news consumption worldwide.” Its findings detail just how fundamentally different today’s media landscape has become. Here are some key takeaways that help us understand how and where people get their information and ideas about what’s happening today:
- “News use across online platforms continues to fragment.”
- “Engagement with traditional media sources such as TV, print, and news websites continues to fall, while dependence on social media, video platforms, and online aggregators grows. This is particularly the case in the United States.”
- “The proportion accessing news via social media and video networks in the United States (54%) is sharply up – overtaking both TV news (50%) and news websites/apps (48%) for the first time.”
- “Around a third of our global sample use Facebook (36%) and YouTube (30%) for news each week. Instagram (19%) and WhatsApp (19%) are used by around a fifth, while TikTok (16%) remains ahead of X at 12%.”
- Personalities and influencers are, in some countries, playing a significant role in shaping public debates.
- There’s no reason to expect these trends won’t continue indefinitely.
There’s much more in the Reuters report, but today let’s focus on a few political implications of the points above.
In the years since social media and online influencers began shaping our perception of reality, we’ve seen strong anti-establishment political trends. Think Brexit, the election of charismatic political outsiders (like Donald Trump), and a move away from long-entrenched political establishments in dozens of countries.
Social media algorithms create “filter bubbles” as algorithms feed us steady supplies of what they’ve learned we like at the expense of new information and ideas that make us question what we believe. That trend helps explain the worsening polarization we see in the United States and many European countries.
That problem is compounded by the increasing prevalence in social media feeds of AI bots, which can generate heavy volumes of false information, distorting our sense of reality every day and in real time.
All these trends will make politics, particularly in democracies, much less predictable over time as elections swing outcomes between competing ideologies.
As a source of news and insight, social media has brought billions of people directly into the political lives of their countries in ways unimaginable a generation ago. They’ll continue to play a positive role in helping news consumers and voters learn more and share their views. But the unreliability of so many social media information sources — and the political volatility it increasingly generates — create problems that will only become more complex as technologies change.
And this problem is intensifying at a time when more of the big threats facing governments extend across borders — the eruption of more regional wars, climate change fallout, management of refugee flows, and governance of artificial intelligence. Big ideological swings following elections will make long-term multinational cooperation much more complicated.
Tell us what you think. How should our elected leaders, media sources, and all of us news consumers respond to these challenges? Let us know here.
How the pandemic made us hate each other
On Wednesday, the Pew Research Center released a survey on the impact of the pandemic on political attitudes across 17 advanced economies. The results are startling and alarming.
A median of 60 percent say that COVID has increased political polarization in their countries. Just 34 percent said their nation feels more united. In some cases, perceptions of polarization have jumped by more than 30 percentage points since the pandemic began.
We encourage you to read the report itself, but today we want to focus on the underlying question of WHY the pandemic has widened divisions among voters in so many countries.
Here are a few theories….
Polarization is a product of fear. For some, the virus provoked fear of illness and death. For others, it provoked fear that government would use the virus to control citizens and restrict their most basic freedoms. These competing fears underlie the ferocious debates over, for example, whether and for how long to lock down schools and businesses and the extent to which vaccines should be required for entry into public gatherings.
The pandemic put ordinary people under extraordinary pressure. People fell ill. Lives and livelihoods were lost. Children were pulled from school and confined at home, creating new dilemmas for their parents. Conflicting information and fiery opinions heightened tension. Uncertainty over how long the pandemic would last provoked dread. Taken together, all these factors created pressure-cookers within societies that fueled political resentment.
The pandemic sharpened social tensions by further dividing haves from have-nots. COVID has been toughest on people who can't work from home and those already living closest to the edge economically. Debates over fairness have hardened already hard political feelings.
The pandemic gave governments greater power to restrict movement, to close businesses, to order injections, and to direct historic sums of money as they saw fit. Those powers, which are controversial even in normal times, made governments themselves a focal point in polarized societies under extreme pressure. Supporters of those in power defended their choices no matter what, while opponents found new grounds to criticize those same actions.
In this way, existing divisions of opinion over particular leaders and political parties sharpened conflicting views on COVID. That's true in countries like the United States and Brazil, where governments downplayed risk, and in places like India and the Philippines, where leaders at times took drastic action.
COVID gave us all a reason to fear one another. Will the unmasked person standing next to me infect me? Does the masked person looking at me on the street hate me because I refuse to wear a mask outside?
The "filter bubble" problem got worse. Even before the pandemic, people were turning to cable news channels, websites, and newspapers that aligned with their partisan loyalties, and COVID intensified that trend by pushing people toward sources of information they trusted. Media outlets and social media influencers often saw the pandemic as a "wedge issue" they could use to play on pre-existing biases of their audiences to further their own political and commercial goals.
The pandemic sharpened conflicting attitudes about "experts." For some people, respected scientists became a crucial source of potentially life-saving daily information. But others saw scientists change their minds and messages as research produced new information about the unique threat created by a novel coronavirus. Shifting messages – for example about whether to wear masks, how long it would take to get to herd immunity, etc. – fed cynicism about the reliability of public experts.
OK, Signal readers, tell us what you think. Why has the pandemic sharpened divisions where you live? What do you think can be done to unite people against a common threat? And can the polarization exacerbated by the pandemic ever be undone? Let us know here.