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• Is social media fuelling political polarisation?
• Some have gone so far as to say that in online discussions, “anyone can become a troll”, i.e., turn into an offensive and cynical debater.

• Some have gone so far as to say that in online discussions, “anyone can become a troll”, i.e., turn into an offensive and cynical debater.

    

  Recent scholarship in quantitative social sciences and scientific psychology, however, provides important nuance to this pessimistic discourse.
• several studies suggest that if individuals regularly clash over political issues online, this is partly due to psychological and socioeconomic factors independent of digital platforms.
• it is in economically unequal and less democratic countries (e.g., Turkey, Brazil) that individuals are most often victims of online hostility on social media (e.g., insults, threats, harassment, etc.). A phenomenon which seems to derive from frustrations generated by more repressive social environments and political regimes.
• Our study also shows that the individuals who indulge most in online hostility are also those who are higher in status-driven risk taking. This personality trait corresponds to an orientation towards dominance, i.e., a propensity to seek to submit others to one’s will, for instance through intimidation. According to our cross-cultural data, individuals with this type of dominant personality are more numerous in unequal and non-democratic countries. Similarly, independent analyses show that dominance is a key element in the psychology of political conflict, as it also predicts more sharing of “fake news” mocking or insulting political opponents, and more attraction to offline political conflict, in particular.
• individuals high in status-driven risk taking, who most admit to behaving in a hostile manner online, are also those most likely to interact in an aggressive or toxic manner in face-to-face discussions (the correlation between online and hostility is quite strong: β = 0.77).
• In summary, online political hostility appears to be largely the product of the interplay between particular personalities and social contexts repressing individual aspirations. It is the frustrations associated with social inequality that have made these people more aggressive, activating tendencies to see the world in terms of “us” vs “them”. On a policy level, if we are to bring about a more harmonious Internet (and civil society), we will likely have to tackle wealth inequality and make our political institutions more democratic.
• Although our study puts online political hostility into perspective, it does not deny social media platforms any causal role in fuelling political polarisation and hostility.
• If exchanges on social networks often lack civility, it’s also because of the possibility they offer of exchanging with anonymous and depersonalised strangers. This experience, unique to the Internet age, reduces our sense of personal responsibility and empathy towards interlocutors whom we no longer see as individuals but as the interchangeable members of political “tribes”.
• social networks operate less as a mirror than as a distorting prism for the diversity of opinions in society.

• Indeed, outraged and potentially insulting political posts are generally written by people who are more committed to express themselves and more radical than the average person, whether it’s to signal their commitments, express anger, or mobilise others to join political causes. Even when they represent a relatively small proportion of the written output on the networks, moralistic and hostile posts tend to be promoted by algorithms programmed to push forward content capable of attracting attention and triggering responses, of which divisive political messages are an important part.

    

  On the other hand, the majority of users, who are more moderate and less dogmatic, are more reluctant to get involved in political discussions that rarely reward good faith in argumentation and often escalate into outbursts of hatred.

    

  These selection and perception biases combine to produce the misleading impression that radical and hostile beliefs are more widespread and more morally tolerated than they actually are.
• Unfortunately, the way in which most people express their political convictions – both on social media and at the coffee machine – is rather lacking in nuance and tactfulness. It tends to reduce opposing positions to demonised caricatures, and is less concerned with persuading the other side than with signaling devotion to particular groups or causes, galvanising people who already agree with you, and maintaining connections with like-minded friends
• repeated exposure to unconvincing claims or headlines produced by our political enemies (a fortiori posts attacking one’s ingroup) can paradoxically reinforce partisans from each side in their pre-existing positions and identities, rather than bringing them closer to each other in terms of worldviews and sentiments.
• Let us always remember that narratives pointing to threats on society enjoy a considerable competitive advantage on the market of ideas and conversations, due to their attractiveness to our minds. One should thus approach the question of the relationship between social media, and political hostility and polarisation, by avoiding the symmetrical pitfalls of naive optimism and collective panic

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• Undemocratic and unequal countries experience more political hostility on social media – Evidence from 30 Countries

• Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions

• How to deal with visual misinformation circulating in the Israel-Hamas war and other conflicts
• users of social media have significant power to influence the content they receive and thus bear some responsibility when they consume and share false information.
• Scholars and policymakers distinguish misinformation from disinformation based on the intentions behind their creation and circulation. Misinformation consists of false information that is not created or circulated with the intent to deceive. Disinformation consists of false information, including visual information, that is intended to deceive and do harm.
• As social media becomes saturated with falsified images of mass violence in the Israel-Hamas war, the Ukraine war and other regions of the globe, individuals should ask what ethical responsibility they bear for their consumption of misinformation and disinformation.

• Some might deny that users of digital media bear any such responsibility, since they are merely the passive recipients of content created by others.  Philosopher Gideon Rosen claims that when people are passive toward some occurrence, they generally don’t bear ethical responsibility for it. Anyone scrolling the internet will passively encounter hundreds of images and related texts, and it is tempting to assume they bear no responsibility for the images of war and mass violence that they see but only for how they respond to them.

    

  However, users of digital media are not merely passive recipients of falsified images and stories. Instead, they have power to influence the kinds of images that show up on their screens. This means, in turn, that users bear some ethical responsibility for their consumption of visual misinformation and disinformation.
• Through both online and offline behaviors, users help determine what these algorithms deliver
• helpful to distinguish between influence and control
• Hiding, reporting or simply disengaging with violent content, by contrast, tends to lead to fewer such messages coming in. It may also reduce the odds that such content will reach others.
• Because users have these means of influencing the images they receive, it is reasonable to assign them some responsibility for algorithmically generated misinformation and disinformation.
• Altering patterns of engagement with digital content can decrease users’ exposure to misinformation in wartime. But how can users verify the images they do receive before directing others to them?
• stop, investigate, find, trace.
• stop, investigate the source of a message, find better coverage, and trace quotes and claims back to their original contexts
• reverse image search tool
• by understanding users’ power to influence content, it may be possible to mitigate these risks and promote a more truthful future.

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• In the past few years, my colleagues and I at UMass Boston’s Applied Ethics Center have been studying the ethics of emerging technologies. I believe that political activism on social media is a counterproductive and sometimes even dangerous form of engagement.
• social media will either mirror your own views or upset you, or both.
• most often generates no new knowledge while it inflames already raw emotions. When it comes to a conflict as historically convoluted and as emotionally charged as the Israel-Hamas war, those are terrible outcomes.
• Russia, Iran and China have been running disinformation efforts meant to undercut Israel and bolster the image of Hamas.
• Russia, Iran and China are using the war in Gaza to fight their proxy war with the U.S. As a result, the average social media user will be exposed to a great deal of content meant to promote the interests of those countries. Stated differently, you might go to social media for information about the conflict, but what you often end up with is propaganda.
• Social media is also notoriously bad at mediating complexity.
• the very nature of social media platforms, with their space limitations and their calibration toward likes, shares and virality, is antithetical to conveying such complexity
• Rather than helping people think about historical and moral ambiguity, social media usually promotes a cartoonish version of reality.
• Rather than depth, so crucial for any insight about this terrible war, one gets the rule of anecdotes

• the very existence of social media serves as an impetus to create and share inflammatory content. This is one of the lessons that the Islamic State group taught the world with its made-for-YouTube brand of terrorism. That lesson was not lost on Hamas: On Oct. 7, some members of its Nukhba force – the commandos who led the assault – livestreamed their barbaric, murderous rampage in southern Israel with GoPro cameras.

    

  The acts themselves were designed for social media consumption. The point was to shock and scare viewers. In the case of social media, the medium really is the message, to use Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase. That means that the prospects of posting to Telegram or X influence the kind of content that will be created in the first place.

• Don’t get your news from social media, and don’t focus your activism on social media.

    

  These platforms are designed to make money for the companies that developed them and not to inform you or promote meaningful activism. Knowledge comes from consuming a variety of credible, vetted news sources. Meaningful political engagement happens between real people in the real world and is based on real information.
• Social media can be used to point people to credible news sources and to organize real political activities. But most of the time it is not. Junk food harms your body; junk information and junk engagement harm the body politic. The most momentous political events of our lifetime deserve a greater degree of intellectual and political commitment than that.

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