In 2022 nearly half of Americans expected
a civil war in the next few years, one in five now believes political violence
is justified. And it's not just the US but around the world. People increasingly
see themselves as part of opposing teams. There are many different reasons
for this, but one gets blamed a lot: social media. Social media divides us,
makes us more extreme and less empathetic, it riles us up or sucks us into doom scrolling, making us stressed and depressed. It feels like we
need to touch grass and escape to the real world. New research shows that we might have
largely misinterpreted why this is the case. It turns out that the social media
internet may uniquely undermine the way our brains work but not in the way you think. The Myth of the Filter Bubble You've probably heard about online filter bubbles:
Algorithms give you exactly what you want, or what they think you want. You only see information
that shows you opinions that agree with yours, while dissenting opinions or information are
filtered out. Since you only see content close to your world view, more extreme and toxic opinions
suddenly seem less extreme. You are trapped in a radicalising filter bubble and your view of
the world becomes narrower and more extreme. But is that true? Extreme filter bubbles seem to be rather rare Studies that investigated what people actually
look at online or are shown by search engines, found little evidence that you are ideologically
isolated. It is the exact opposite: Online you are constantly confronted with opinions
and world views that are not your own. It turns out the place where you are the most
ideologically isolated is your real life, in the real world, with real people. Your
real world interactions with your friends, family, colleagues and neighbors are
much less diverse than your online bubble. The filter bubble exists
in your real life, not online. Ok wait. Online filter bubbles have been
the prevailing explanation as to why we’ve all started hating each other more over the
last two decades. If that's not the case, shouldn’t the internet open our minds and
make us more empathetic with each other? Unfortunately your brain is stupid. Your Brain is Stupid Human brains didn’t evolve to understand the true
nature of reality, but to navigate and maintain social structures. Our ancestors desperately
needed each other to survive, so our brains had to make sure we cooperated. That's why social
isolation or exclusion feels so horrible, because it was actually life threatening. A tribe that
worked together survived, a divided tribe died. The way communities worked for
thousands of years is that, sure, you may have disliked a neighbour, but because
you lived close to each other, you also rooted for the same sports club or saw them at the
church. You both thought that the people from the other village were idiots. Being physically
close made you familiar and created similarities that bridged the gap of different world views so
you didn’t murder each other. And your world view was probably not that different in the first place
because it was formed by the same local culture. When our brains evolved, this was enough. Whoever
was around, was similar to us. We liked what was similar to us – this kept us aligned enough
to work together despite our differences. As humanity moved on from small tribes to towns
and cities, from chiefdoms to kingdoms to nations, our brains and our communities had to adapt to
more diverse sets of neighbours. We began to meet on the town square or in universities
where we argued and screamed at each other – but in the grand scheme of things
communities were still relatively isolated, we were still pretty similar and
aligned with the people around us. Conflict and disagreement are not
a bad thing per se. Tension over how we should live can create new
and wonderful things. Our values, norms and taboos are always evolving
and whatever we think is normal today, will not be normal in the future. But we also
need social glue to hold our societies together, because our brains don’t care about the meta
level of humanity but about being safe in a tribe. Until about 20 years ago
we did something truly new, that hit our brains like a freight train: the
social media internet, the digital town square. Don’t You Dare Disagree With Me – Social Sorting In a nutshell: Our brains are not able
to process the amount of disagreement we encounter on the social internet. The very
mechanisms that made it possible for our ancestors to work together in the first place
are derailed in ways we were not prepared for. Whether you want it to or not, your brain
sorts people by world views and opinions, into teams. This is not simply tribalism, it goes further. Researchers have
called this process social sorting. On the digital town square you encounter people
that express opinions or share information that clash with your worldview. But unlike your
neighbour, they don't root for your local sports club. You are missing the local social glue your
brain needs to align with them. For your brain, the disagreement between yourself and them
becomes a central part of their identity. And this makes it less likely that
you will seriously consider their position or opinion in the future.
If you hear bad things about them, your brain is much more likely
to believe it uncritically. On the flipside, there are people who
share your world view and are maybe even more similar to you than many people
in your real life. Which makes your brain like them a lot and kind of hyper align with
them. People who think like you are probably good people because you are a good person and
whatever social group you belong to is good! So your brain is more likely to believe their
opinions. If you hear bad things about them, your brain is much more likely
to dismiss it uncritically. The engagement driven social internet makes it
worse because it wants to keep you online as long as possible. And the most engaging emotion
is, unfortunately: Anger. The more angry you get, the more likely you are to share and engage,
and this leads to social media amplifying the most extreme and controversial opinions. It
optimises not only to show us disagreement, but the worst disagreement possible. And because
your stupid brain is sorting people into teams, whatever the worst opinions are, it assigns the
same opinions to everybody on the other team. What is striking and new about online polarisation
is that all the aspects of our lives that make us individuals, our lifestyle choices, the
comedians or shows we watch, our religion, sense of fashion and so on are condensed,
making it seem that they are parts of opposing and mutually exclusive identities.
This simplifies and distorts disagreements about how we should run society so much that
it often seems as if the people on the other team are actively, willfully making the
world worse. That they are almost evil, beyond convincing with rationality, facts or civil
discussion. While you are of course on the correct team, it may be hard to process that you may
seem like that to people on the other team. On a societal level this is dissolving the
social glue that is the foundation of our democracies. If we think our neighbours
are evil, how can we live together? This is especially bad in the US, where the
two party system makes it extra easy to think of people in terms of teams – negative opinion
about the other party has reached record highs. Ok. Is there something we can learn
from this? Is there something we can do? Something more positive – Opinion Part In the end, It is important to be
aware of what social media does to your brain. It's easier to change
yourself than to change the world, so you can self examine why you believe the
things you believe and whether you dismiss or believe information based on who the
person is who is stating that information. The internet comes with a lot of
ups and downs and just like we had to adapt from living in small tribes
to living in cities, we need to adapt to the information age where we have access to
billions of people. Evolution is too slow, so we need to find models that work with
what our brains are able to tolerate. One model that seemed to work well was the pre
social media internet old people might remember: Bulletin boards, forums, blogs. The
main difference to today was twofold: For one there were no algorithms fighting to
keep you online at anycost – at some point you were done with the internet for the
day, as mind blowing as this may sound. But more importantly: The old internet
was very fractured, split into thousands of different communities, like small villages
gathering around shared beliefs and interests. These villages were separated from each
other by digital rivers or mountains. These communities worked because they mirrored
real life much more than social media: Each village had its own culture and set of rules.
Maybe one community was into rough humour and soft moderation, another had strict rules and banned
easily. If you didn’t play by the village rules, you would be banned – or you could just go and
move to another village that suited you better. So instead of all of us gathering in one
place, overwhelming our brains at a town square that in the end just leads to us
going insane, one solution to achieve less social sorting may be extremely simple:
go back to smaller online communities. Because what our stupid brains don’t realize
is that we are actually all on the same team: Humanity, on a wet rock speeding through space
in a universe that doesn’t think about us. We are all in this together – but until our
brains adjust to being able to deal with that, we might be better off being a tiny bit separated. One of the worst things about the media we
consume is that most news organizations tend to cater to one team, making you
feel you are on the correct side. Ground News, the sponsor of this video, is
trying to make these biases more transparent by giving you tools that help you think
critically about the information you consume – a mission we wholeheartedly
support. Ground News gathers related articles from around the world in one
place so you can compare how different outlets and sides cover them. They provide
context about the source of the information, if they have a political bias, how reliable
their reporting is and who owns them. This makes the news less stressful and makes you
understand the world much better. If you want to check them out go to ground got news slash
nutshell. If you sign up through this link, you’ll get 30% off their unlimited access
plan. A subscription supports Kurzgesagt and Ground News, so they can continue
to build more media literacy tools. Our favorite tool has a personal background:
in 2018 kurzgesagt founder Philipp, who wrote this video, was going through chemotherapy
and was intensely bored – so he ended up reading all the big German newspapers,
even the ones he hated, front to back, every single day. Aside from the obvious biases,
what was the most shocking were the stories each side did not talk about. Both sides ignored
things that are inconvenient to their world views. The Ground News Blind spot feed highlights this
exact thing - showing you news stories that are heavily covered by one side of the political
spectrum and ignored by the other. So check them out at ground.news/nutshell
to make sure you’re seeing the full picture.
