Political Extremism in America: Don’t blame Russia, blame Facebook and Twitter | Niall Ferguson

I don’t think the history of the 2016 election will be correctly written until it is clearly stated: "no Facebook, no Trump."

Anybody who expected a wonderful happy global community to form on the Internet in which everybody would share cat videos has been gravely disappointed. In fact, what’s happened is that an already quite polarized political scene has become even more polarized. Why? Well, remember rule number one of the networks: birds of a feather flock together, homophily operates.

So, people have naturally gravitated into two rival clusters, if you want to put it this way: a liberal cluster and a conservative cluster. But what’s fascinating is the way that peculiarities of today’s network platforms exacerbate this problem. For example, we now know that a tweet is 20 percent more likely to be read tweeted for every moral or emotional word that it uses.

If you want to get retweeted, you, therefore, are incentivized to use strong language. We can see that the legislators in the House of Representatives and the Senate who have the most Facebook followers are the most ideologically extreme according to their voting patterns. So, I think Facebook and Twitter have been configured to incentivize the expression and sharing of extreme opinions.

It isn’t just fake news that we have to worry about, but we do have to worry about that; it’s also extreme views. Both are, in fact, incentivized by the structure of the network platforms as they existed. And I think looking back on 2016, the correct analysis of that election is not that the Russian network interfered and that’s why Trump won.

I don’t think the Russian contribution was nearly big enough for that statement to be valid. What is true is that without the existence of Facebook and Twitter, it would’ve been very hard for an outlier candidate like Donald Trump to win. But those network platforms created opportunities for a populist that really had not existed before, and his campaign knew how to use them and continues to know how to use them.

Remember, the algorithms are designed to give you more of what you engaged with before. You may not even notice it, but as you like things, as you share them, you’re signaling to the network platforms your preferences, and it’s set up to give you more of that because the more engaged you are, the more advertising they can sell. That’s how they make their money.

So, I think it’s time to kind of dial back our addiction, not only for political reasons but also because it’s addictive and addictions are bad for you. The more time you spend—and we all spend crazy amounts of time on our smartphones using these platforms—the less time you have to read Tolstoy or my book. And I think books are actually the best way for human beings to get high-level information.

I think it’s better for your peace of mind, and it will be better for our body politic if we all spend much less time on our smartphones using Facebook and Twitter and much more time reading books.