When Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) instructed the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection to determine what role social media played in fostering the attack on the Capitol, she implicitly embraced a widely held assumption: that the major tech platforms have fueled the acute level of political polarization in the U.S.
Facebook begs to differ. Since Jan. 6, the largest social media site has sought to discredit what it calls “an albatross public narrative” that is contributing to partisan hatred. In March, Nick Clegg, the company’s vice president for global affairs, took on that narrative in an article on Medium, while in congressional testimony, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg blamed the media and political elites for causing division, saying “technology can help bring people together.”
In a new report from the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, we challenge Facebook’s disavowals and show that while the use of social media may not create partisan divisiveness, it does exacerbate it. An understanding of this connection is vital to preventing a repeat of Jan. 6 and regulating online platforms responsibly. This will only become more urgent as the country turns its attention to elections in 2022 and beyond.
For starters, we can all agree that social media doesn’t bear sole responsibility for partisan animosity. Polarization began growing in the U.S. decades before Facebook, Twitter and YouTube appeared. Other factors...
Read Full Story: https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/572002-how-social-media-fuels-us-political-polarization-what-to-do-about-it
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