Twitter is a hyper-partisan forum where Democrats not only lean left but seek out and attract followers who share their political views, while Republicans — in similar fashion — tilt toward the right, the better to draw like-minded ideologues to support their conservative outlook.
That Twitter affirms existing ideological biases rather than bridging gaps between them is something that should really come as no shock to anyone who has ever interacted with the platform. But if additional proof is needed, here comes a recently published study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America that — in a scholarly thought-experiment designed to put Twitter’s “echo chamber” quality to the test– unsurprisingly demonstrated the strength and intensity of Twitter’s ability to polarize.
But these obvious conclusions aren’t the news here. Twitter is merely another “news outlet for the 21st century.” For good or ill, its “echo chamber” quality is in perfect synchronization with the founding traditions of American journalism, which came into being as rancorous organs of partisan political expression. So it stands to reason that the average tweeter will be no less discriminating in their preferences for politics or information than their forebears were in consuming the news of their day.
In the National Academy of Sciences study, a 10-member team of political scientists and sociologists from several leading universities hired 1,220 frequent Twitter users, who expressed their political alignment as either Democrats or Republicans, to spend a month following an online bot that routinely exposed them to messages and ideas from users with views in opposition to their own. Along the way, the researchers surveyed the test subjects to gauge any changes or moderation in their own views on current events such as immigration, federal government waste, corporate profits, and LGBTQ rights.
The researchers imagined that people who were exposed to differing opinions might moderate, or even change, their political views.
It didn’t happen. Rather, the test subjects’ opinions, especially among self-identified Republicans, appeared to harden — not soften — with routine exposure to political arguments from the other side of the ideological divide. The study notes:
Republican participants expressed substantially more conservative views after following a liberal Twitter bot, whereas Democrats’ attitudes became slightly more liberal after following a conservative Twitter bot—although this effect was not statistically significant. . . .
Although limited in scope, our findings may be of interest to those who are working to reduce political polarization in applied settings. More specifically, our study indicates that attempts to introduce people to a broad range of opposing political views on a social media site such as Twitter might be not only be ineffective but counterproductive—particularly if such interventions are initiated by liberals.
In an interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein, Christopher Bail, one of the study’s authors and director of the Polarization Lab at Duke University, explained the findings came as something of a shocking disappointment. “For a long time, people have been assuming that exposing people to opposing views creates the opportunity for moderation,” Bail said in the Vox interview. “If I could humbly claim to figure out one thing, it’s that that’s not a simple process. If Twitter tweaks its algorithms to put one Republican for every nine Democrats in your Twitter feed, that won’t increase moderation.”
Well, of course not. For the vast majority of news consumers, their consumption follows from their political identity, which in turn informs the information they seek out and how they incorporate that knowledge into their daily lives. While many people may, indeed, seek out views of opposing political persuasions, it is for the most part an effort to “know what the enemy is saying” and to stock ammunition for counter-arguments.
And like it or not, these practices are at least as old as this nation and in thorough lockstep with its free-press traditions. As Eric Burns makes amusingly clear in his 2007 book, “Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism,” the men — such as Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine and James Callender — who fomented rebellion against the British and conspired to create the United States were “a rebellious crowd of propagandist, pamphleteers, and publishers,” who took libelous delight in smearing King George — and each other.
In those 18th century days, before any pretense of objective journalism ever sprouted, political palaver was a raw, bare-knuckled affair disseminated by partisan publications with the sole intent of reaching an audience that shared its public opinions. The intense rancor found in the political rhetoric of his day prompted George Washington to decry his pamphleteering opponents as “infamous scribblers,” giving rise to the title of Burns’ book. He writes:
But in many ways the men and women who settled the New World were the best of people. Surely not the type to print lies in their newspapers when the truth was insufficiently compelling or contradictory to their causes; to smear sex scandals across their pages or raise invective to levels previously unknown outside a cockfighting den. Not the type to confuse hyperbole with fact or scatology with analysis; to be ill informed or misinformed; to correct their mistakes rarely and grudgingly; to inflate a peccadillo into a crime; to condemn a lapse of judgment with a sentence of perdition; to encourage violence against those who disagreed with their views.
Yet they did it all, these best of people, all of it and more, time and again over the course of many decades, an incendiary press somehow becoming the basis of a humane and enduring society.
While the colonists eventually created a nation with a free press as a core principle, the combative and partisan nature of news rarely kept pace with the Framers’ lofty ideal.
For example, journalist Jim Lehrer notes in his 2011 book, “Tension City: Inside the Presidential Debates,” the Lincoln-Douglas debates, frequently rhapsodized by modern-day critics of the current political scene as a high-minded exemplar of political discourse, were nothing of the sort. Those famed confrontations require gauzy, rose-colored spectacles to obscure the horrific partisanship of that media-enabled traveling roadshow.
“They were organized by two newspapermen — Joseph Medill and Charles Ray — who were open supporters of Lincoln,” Lehrer wrote. “After each debate, Medill and Ray made sure the press coverage was full and favorable to Lincoln. In other words, it was a 2008-like media-run exercise, complete with post-debate spinning and pre-debate negotiations.”
Still, some hold out hope that modern-day media can find a way to bridge today’s widening political gap. “Political polarization in the United States has become a central focus of social scientists in recent decades,” the National Academy of Sciences report states. “These partisan divisions not only impede compromise in the design and implementation of social policies but also have far-reaching consequences for the effective function of democracy more broadly.”
Maybe. Or, just perhaps, as Popular Information editor Judd Legum argues, intense partisanship is not only inevitable but to be desired.
“Disagreement and partisanship are essential components of a vibrant democracy,” Legum writes in a recent edition of his newsletter. “This is not to say that America’s political system does not have problems. But the solution is not less partisanship; it’s better partisanship.”
No doubt that’s music to the ears of all who relish a flaming debate on Twitter.