THE NEW PUBLIC SPACE?
The sharp segmentation of the electorate goes much deeper than just policy disagreements. Americans of different political hues have started to positively hate each other. In 1960, roughly 5 percent of Republicans and Democrats reported they would “[feel] ‘displeased’ if their son or daughter married outside their political party.” By 2010, nearly 50 percent of Republicans and over 30 percent of Democrats “felt somewhat or very unhappy at the prospect of inter-party marriage.” In 1960, 33 percent of Democrats and Republicans thought an average member from their own party was intelligent, compared to 27 percent who had the same view about someone from the other side.
In 2008, those numbers were 62 percent and 14 percent!64What explains this polarization? One of the most important changes since the early 1990s, when partisanship started its sharp increase, is the expansion of the internet and the explosion of social media. As of January 2019, Facebook had 2.27 billion monthly active users globally, while Twitter had 326 million.65 In September 2014, more than 58 percent of the US adult population and 71 percent of the US online population used Facebook.66 (That does not include us, so everything we have to say about these networks is second hand.)
Originally, virtual social networks were billed as the new public place, the new way to connect, and hence something that should have reduced homophily. In principle, they provided an opportunity to connect with distant people with whom we shared some specific interest, say in Bollywood movies, Bach cantatas, or raising babies. These people might not have been like us in other ways, offering us a more eclectic choice of friends than what would result from mere physical proximity. They would have had almost nothing to do with each other, so to the extent we would get to exchange views about things other than the precise topic that brought us together, we would all be exposed to a variety of opinions.
Indeed, on Facebook, 99.91 percent of the two billion people on it belong to the “giant component,” meaning that almost everyone is everyone else’s friend of a friend of a friend.67 There are only about 4.7 “degrees of separation” (the number of “nodes” you have to cross) between any two people in the giant component. This implies that in principle we could easily be exposed to pretty much everyone’s views as they travel through the social network.Nevertheless, virtual social networks have mostly failed to integrate their users on divisive issues. A study of 2.2 million politically engaged users on Twitter (defined as those who followed at least one account associated with a candidate for the US House during the 2012 election period) in the United States finds that while there are roughly ninety million network links among these users, 84 percent of the followers of conservative users are other conservatives, and 69 percent of the followers of liberal users are liberal.68
Facebook and Twitter function as echo chambers. Democrats pass on information produced by Democratic candidates, and Republicans do the same for Republicans. Eighty-six percent of first retweets of tweets by Democratic candidates come from liberal voters. The corresponding number for Republicans is an amazing 98 percent. Taking into account retweets, liberals get 92 percent of their messages from liberal sources, and conservatives get 93 percent of their messages from conservative sources. Strikingly, this is not just true of political tweets; for these politically engaged people, the exposure is just as skewed for nonpolitical tweets. Apparently, even to chat about fly fishing on Twitter, people prefer to connect with a fellow liberal or conservative. The virtual community that social networks have created is at best a fragmented public space.
But is there anything specific about social media that causes this polarization? The political strategies to divide the population and plant fake news were invented long before Facebook.
Newspapers have always been highly partisan, and political mud-slinging was the bread and butter of the print media in colonial America, and continued into the early days of the American Republic (in the musical Hamilton, it is the threat of scurrilous press coverage that forces Hamilton to own up to his affair). The “Republican noise machine” was perfected on cable TV and talk radio in the 1990s, as David Brock powerfully documents in his book bearing that title.69An even more powerful demonstration of just how destructive old media can be comes from the Rwandan genocide. Before and during the genocide, Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) called for the extermination of the Tutsis, whom they called “cockroaches,” justified it as self-defense, and talked about the supposed atrocities committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (or RPF, the Tutsi militia). Villages that RTLM reached experienced significantly more killings than villages it did not due to the mountains blocking radio wave transmissions. Altogether, RTLM propaganda is estimated to be responsible for 10 percent of the violence, or about fifty thousand Tutsi deaths.70
Gentzkow and Shapiro computed an “isolation index” for the year 2009 (which in some ways feels like a lifetime ago, but the internet was already quite vibrant) both for online and offline news. This was defined as the difference in the share of news items with a conservative slant a conservative was exposed to and the share of news items with a conservative slant a liberal was exposed to. What they found seemed to suggest polarization was happening offline just as much as it was online. The average conservative’s exposure to conservative views online was 60.6 percent of their total news consumption, the equivalent of a person who gets all their news from usatoday.com. The average liberal’s exposure to conservative positions was 53.1 percent, at the same level as cnn.com. The isolation index for the internet (the difference between the two) was therefore just 7.5 percentage points, a little bit higher than the isolation index for broadcast news and cable television news, but lower than that for national newspapers.
And it was much lower than the segregation of in-person contact. It was already true in 2009 that conservatives had mostly conservative friends, and the opposite for liberals. The isolation index is low because, in their data, both conservative and liberal users visited mostly “centrist” sites, and those most likely to visit extremist sites (like Breitbart) also visited many others, including those with opposite perspectives.71While it is true that polarization has increased among online users, it has also increased in other spheres of life. Indeed, while polarization has increased in all demographic groups since 1996, it increased the most among those sixty-five or older, who are the least likely to be on the internet, and increased the least among the youngest people (those aged eighteen to thirty-nine).72 Polarization has also increased in traditional news media. A textual analysis of the content of cable news showed that since 2004 the language used by Fox News has become increasingly slanted to the right, while MSNBC has moved to the left.73 The audiences have also diverged. Until 2008, Fox News had a stable share of about 60 percent Republicans among its viewers. This share increased to 70 percent between 2008 and 2012. Over the years, Fox News became increasingly conservative, which attracted more conservative voters, who in turn pushed it to be even more conservative. This has begun to affect voting patterns. We know this because in some counties in the United States Fox News shows up at a less accessible part of the dial, for purely accidental reasons, and therefore people are less likely to tune in to it.74 In those counties people are also less prone to vote for conservatives.
So what is it that changed? In Congress, according to Gentzkow and Shapiro, the turning point seems to have been 1994, the year of Newt Gingrich’s takeover of the Republican Party and his “contract with America.”75 This was also the first year political consultants played a key role in designing and testing messages, which is something that as social scientists interested in the design and testing of innovations, including in messaging, we find rather disturbing.