Breaking the Social Media Prism

打破社交媒体棱镜

Author | Chris Bail

一、The Legend of theEcho Chamber

ITIS 4:30 P.M.

Dave Kelly has just finished his workday at an advertising firm in early September, 2018, and pops a CD into the stereo of his aging car. He is preparing to do battle with a formidable enemy: the New Jersey Turnpike at the beginning of a holiday weekend. When Dave finally reaches the exit for his hometown more than one hour later, he stops to perform a weekly ritual. Each Friday night, Dave checks out half a dozen books from his local library, cracks a can of overpriced craft beer, and settles in to read for at least an hour. This week he has chosen a mix of well-thumbed paperback novels, a book about the latest advances in cancer research, and a thick tome on human nature by an evolutionary anthropologist.

Though he might not fit the stereotype of Donald Trump supporters, Dave voted for the former real estate magnate in 2016. Raised in a family of moderate Democrats, Dave veered toward the right in the 1980s because he was so impressed by the leadership of Ronald Reagan. But Dave is not a card-carrying member of the Republican Party. He cast two ballots for Bill Clinton in the 1990s, and takes liberal positions on most civil rights issues.

“I’m perfectly happy with gay marriage,” Dave says. “I don’t understand why you would want to make an issue out of that.” But on economic matters, Dave is more libertarian. When he learned that New York City officials were considering a new law that would require businesses with more than five employees to provide two weeks of paid vacation, Dave warned, “There’s gonna be a lot of companies that fire people to get away from that. There’s gonna be companies that just can’t do it and are gonna go out of business.”

Living outside liberal Philadelphia—and working in a profession dominated by Democrats—Dave normally hides his conservative views. “I have friends I won’t discuss this stuff with,” he says, “because I’m not going to change my mind and they’re not going to change theirs—so what’s the point?” The few times he tried to start such conversations, he explains, things quickly became heated—and the only thing Dave hates more than New Jersey traffic is heated arguments about politics.

Because he feels like an unwelcome minority in his day-to-day life, Dave describes social media as a kind of refuge. He originally joined Facebook and Twitter to escape politics and follow updates about his favorite television shows. But he kept finding himself getting “sucked into political discussions.”

Over the past few years, Dave—who does not use his real name on social media—has spent many late nights arguing with Democrats on Twitter. Remembering one of these conflicts, Dave said, “Don’t judge me … I had a couple of beers.” A local radio station, he explained, had reported a group of White supremacists were planning to march on the campus of a nearby university.

“Turns out they’re not,” he says. “The whole thing is a hoax.” After reading more about the story, Dave learned that one of the groups that raised the alarm was the progressive Southern Poverty Law Center. “They pretty much claim anyone who’s to the right of Karl Marx is a hate group,” he says. When he dismissed the incident on Twitter, another user quickly fired back, calling him a racist. “I called her an idiot,” he says. She didn’t know what she was talking about, he decided, because she was only getting one side of the story.

But so is Dave. Though he prides himself on being informed, Dave gets his news from a conservative talk radio station, the right-leaning website Daily Caller, and Twitter. Of the several hundred accounts that he follows on Twitter, only New York Timescolumnist Bret Stephens could be described as “centrist.”

Dave has consumed a steady diet of conservative views on social media for years. Each day, his feed gets filled with content from Fox News, posts by Trump and other prominent Republicans, and dozens of memes bemoaning liberal hypocrisy. Dave has even retweeted a few messages from Russian trolls masquerading as American conservatives along the way. And that drunken Twitter argument about the White supremacist march at a local university? It turns out that Dave used more colorful language than “idiot” to describe his liberal opponent that night.