Before I even clicked on the article, I thought to myself, "I bet Jonathan Haidt wrote this." For those who are unfamiliar, Haidt has a very specific ideology (basically, third-way centrism) that he's been pushing for the last decade and a half under the auspices of doing unbiased social science. If you're curious, here are some critiques of his project:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/ ... ind-review
https://thebaffler.com/latest/solutioni ... -greenwald
https://www.niskanencenter.org/there-is ... -evidence/
Me, I'm probably not likely to take advice from a guy who pals around with world-class herbs like Steven Pinker and Thomas Chatterton Williams, but if that's your thing, go wild, I guess, but caveat emptor.
Now, on its face it seems absurd that the last decade or so has been uniquely polarizing, (like, what about Jim Crow laws or the Vietnam War?) which to his credit he acknowledges somwehat, although he also makes a direct comparison between Trumpism and "callout culture," which, come on, give me a fucking break. Also, using the term "social death" to refer to somebody being called a racist and ratioed on twitter and both-sideing Covid responses from the left and the right are both deeply, deeply stupid.
Okay, but what about his larger point that this is all because of social media and algorithms? Well, the problem with that as Osita Nwanevu has pointed out is that:
I’ve shared figures like this before — on Twitter, ironically — but they’re worth repeating here. Every so often, the Pew Research Center publishes data on where Americans get their news. According to surveys conducted mid-last year, a 52 percent majority of Americans still say they don’t get their news from social media even “sometimes;” that number includes over a quarter of Americans under 30. (On Twitter specifically, Pew finds that 77 percent of Americans don’t use the site.) Pew’s validated voter data suggests about a 55 percent majority of the electorate was over the age of 50 in 2020; their news surveys show that only 38 percent of Americans 50-64 and 31 percent of Americans over 65 report getting any news from social media.
None of that means that Twitter and social media haven’t been influential and that those numbers aren’t steadily rising; I’m certain they’ll continue to. But the central medium of influence in American politics and cultural life is still, far and away, television, which remains a news source for 68 percent of Americans and the preferred source for the older Americans who are the likeliest to engage with politics, the likeliest to vote, and the likeliest to have their votes actually matter.https://ositanwanevu.ghost.io/stupid-is-as-stupid-does/
As for his solutions? Well, they're pretty much bog-standard DLC talking points mixed with letting the reasonable technocrats tweak Facebook and Twitter a bit to promote civil debate. Let a thousand Evan Bayh's bloom! Well, as Anton Chigurh once said, "If the rule you followed brought you to this, what use was the rule?"