Breaking the Social Media Prism

打破社交媒体棱镜

Author | Chris Bail

二、Why Not Break Our Echo Chambers?

IT IS EARLY JANUARY 2019.

Dave Kelly is venting about Medicare for All—a proposal made by Bernie Sanders to provide free health care to all Americans as part of his presidential campaign. In his unmistakable Philadelphian accent, Dave said: “I don’t want the government to solve my problems.… I got myself into them, and I’ll get myself out of them.” As you may remember, Dave was deep inside a conservative echo chamber when I introduced him at the outset of this book.

Nearly everyone he followed on social media leaned to the right, and he seldom encountered political viewpoints that were very different from his own. But for the past month, Dave has been part of a unique experiment designed to see what happens when people are exposed to opposing views on social media. Each day, he sees twenty-four messages from a range of liberal policy makers, pundits, advocacy groups, and media organizations. And for good measure, he’s also seeing a few pictures of cute animals to make the experience a bit more bearable.

In mid-2018, the United States was embroiled in controversy about the separation of immigrant children from their parents—a policy enacted by the Trump administration to deter illegal migration to the United States from Mexico. When we first spoke with Dave, he sympathized with Democrats who criticized the policy.

When we interviewed him five months later—after he had endured a month of liberal messaging—his views had shifted sharply. During that month, a caravan of migrants was making its way from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala toward the United States. Thousands of people, many of them women and children, traveled more than 2,700 miles in the hope of reaching the U.S.-Mexico border.

Conservative and liberal media presented very different stories about the caravan. Fox News highlighted Trump’s description of the migrants as dangerous gang members from crime-ridden countries with “unknown Middle Easterners … mixed in.”1Meanwhile, CNN, MSNBC, and other left-leaning outlets described them as hapless refugees fleeing violence and persecution.

Despite his exposure to the liberal narrative, Dave now subscribes to a popular conspiracy theory. “I don’t think these are honest refugees,” he says. “I think this is a political ploy. Someone put them up to coming here, and paid them to come here.… They’re talking about families coming, but who drags a kid on a 2,000-mile hike?” After participating in the experiment, Dave has developed more conservative views about other political topics as well.

Though he was once mildly concerned about climate change, he now recites another conspiracy theory—this one about the Camp Fire that struck Northern California in late 2018. “I think the governor of California should be arrested,” he says. “He’s directly responsible for those fires. I think he did it on purpose.”

Similarly, Dave—once a lukewarm Trump supporter who had originally supported Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate—now jumps to the president’s defense. Former FBI director Robert Mueller’s investigation into the president did not come up once during our first interview, but Dave now tells us that “it’s 100 percent politically motivated.”

In his opinion, there was “more collusion on the Clinton camp side with Russia than there was on Trump’s side.” Dave was somewhat put off by Trump’s bombastic style when we first interviewed him, but he now defends Trump’s character on even the most salacious issues—such as his alleged affair with the pornographic actress Stormy Daniels. “Maybe it was a crappy thing to do,” Dave says, “but let’s face it, we’re never gonna be able to … elect someone who’s completely clean, because those people don’t want to get into politics.”

Breaking the Echo Chamber

The story of why my colleagues and I asked Dave Kelly and hundreds of other people to step outside their echo chambers begins on November 3, 2016. On that day, the probability that Hillary Clinton would defeat Donald Trump in the presidential election reached 87.4 percent, according to the popular polling website fivethirtyeight.com2That figure was very easy to believe.

The smartest political scientists I knew all agreed that Trump had violated every taboo in the campaign playbook. Also—from what I could tell by scanning my social media feed each night—Trump was not creating the palpable excitement that had propelled Barack Obama to victory eight years earlier. The day after Trump’s improbable victory, the postmortem began quickly. Pollsters pointed to the margin of error. Others blamed James Comey’s inquiry into Clinton’s famed email server.

Still others argued that people’s overconfidence in a Clinton victory had decreased voter turnout.3These explanations all had merit, but my mind kept returning to one simple fact: how had so many of us never seen a shred of evidence that Trump could really win? What were we not seeing that made us so surprised by Clinton’s defeat?

The concept of the echo chamber provided an elegant explanation. If my social media feed had not contained posts from so many left-of-center college professors, I might have realized that Trump actually was generating the same type of emotional energy that Obama had. Or perhaps I would have seen more clearly just how unlikable so many voters found Clinton.