If you have read my blog once or twice, you may know social media, particularly Twitter, is a favored scapegoat of mine. I often worry that, despite my age, I come off as an old man yelling at kids on my front lawn. Hopefully I am yelling some salient points.
A few months ago, I was halfway through my usual rant about social media with a friend who works on Capitol Hill. When I started talking about the influence of Twitter on politics, he stopped me and said it wasn’t as bad as I thought.
His proximity to our nation’s leaders makes me inclined to believe him. It is quite possible the influence of social media is exaggerated, especially by avid social media users who have a bias towards seeing their time as spent on something valuable.
I learned recently that only 1% of Americans see themselves as “politically active” on Twitter. Now I do not know how those people define “politically active.” It could range from Ben Shapiro to your weird friend sharing Pepe memes. According to Twitter,[1] roughly 48 million Americans use Twitter and 40% of them use it daily. That’s still only 6.5% of the total population. So, is it influential?
Influencer Culture
My short and goofy answer is: Well, we call them “influencers” for a reason.
I certainly think it is fair to give social media some credit for shaping the conversation in our country. Not because you see every important post, but because the most important posts seem to make it to you one way or another.
You could be like me, decide to not go on social media and only consume the news once a week if at all, but you will still get news of an interesting headline from your wife who heard it from a friend who saw it on Twitter. I call this the Twitter Telephone.
One of those 6.5% of “social media political activists” (Abby) reads an article, shares it on Twitter, and it is seen by Benedict who may not consider themselves politically active on social media. That person finds it interesting and tells their friend, Catherine who may not even be on Twitter. She tells a friend, et cetera.
The problem lies in the real possibility that someone in that chain got something wrong. It could be something factually incorrect or functionally incorrect, for instance a misleading headline. The article could be misleading, Abby could be misreading it, and Benedict is unaware of all of this. Since Catherine and Benedict are friends, she implicitly trusts him and has no reason to fact check. So now she spreads misinformation down the line.
Now several people believe something false, and none of them know the source.
This alone gives weight to the political influence of Twitter. This weight is not inherent to Twitter, though. If politicians, journalists, and movements placed less emphasis on it, its influence would diminish. Since it is considered a news website, though, people turn to it.
This is nothing new, of course. The spread of misinformation stretches back centuries.
Yellow Journalism
For everyone who remembers their US history class, the late-19th century to early-20th was the so-called “Progressive Era.” This era had a lot of good come out of it, like ethical journalistic practices, food production safety, and labor laws. (It also developed machine weapons, segregation laws, and WWI, but hey you can’t win them all.)
These good things were a reaction to how corrupt industries and the government had become. One industry that needed regulation was the news media, due to something called “Yellow Journalism.”
Yellow Journalism was sensational news designed to be sold cheaply at a high volume, making most of its money from advertisements. Its price and its basic use of language targeted the poorer class who could not afford other newspaper subscriptions.
The problem with these papers was the content. It was often fabricated, misleading, or sensationalized in order to sell more copies and hold the interest of the reader. This led to misinformation on a grand scale and journalistic reform was needed.
According to American Journalism, by Frank Luther Mott[2], there are five characteristics of yellow journalism. These four stood out to me:
- Minor news in large headlines
- Overuse of pictures
- Faked interviews, misleading headlines, pseudoscience, and false experts.
- Dramatic sympathy with the “underdog” against “the system.”
Oh boy.
Blue Journalism
Both Twitter and Yellow Journalism are/were cheap, mass-produced, and funded primarily by ads. By themselves, these similarities do not make Twitter bad, but since they rely on ads, they need your attention. That is why they apply the above four tactics: to hold it.
The human brain has not changed much since then. The four tactics used to capture the attention of people in the late-19th century are still used to capture attention today. Twitter and Facebook make every minor news story feel like its breaking as we read. We use pictures to communicate our point so the reader can skip the critical reading part of news consumption and get straight to agreeing with us.
The third characteristic has changed slightly in that Twitter has made everyone believe they are the expert. In addition to misleading headlines and pseudoscience, we prop ourselves up as authorities on things we have no business talking about.
The fourth characteristic has changed the least. News headlines and pictures have changed, but the “corrupt vs. underdog” narrative is pervasive as ever. You only need the last two election cycles as proof.
Our sitting president ran a Twitter campaign to “Drain the Swamp” of corrupt officials in DC. He rallied support by going up against the “powerful” candidate. It was a noble and difficult battle in their eyes. Now that he is the one in power, the opposition party gets to run on the same narrative.
It is said that Ronald Reagan was the first president made for TV. If that’s the case, Donald Trump is the first president made for Twitter.
This underdog narrative is the go-to for both sides because it just fits the social media mold. Social media rewards binary thinking. To oversimplify it, by tweeting something inflammatory, you gather retweets from supporters and quote tweets from the opposition. If you tweet something nuanced (which is very difficult) or play to the middle, the tweet fails to elicit the emotional reactions that earn you engagement.
Who Is to Blame?
Yellow journalism was fixed through regulations of journalistic practices. It is likely that the technology and dynamics of social media move too quickly for the bureaucracy to determine “ethical” use of Twitter (If Twitter is ethical at all. I am still trying to decide where I stand on that.) S part of the blame rests on journalists not using Twitter well.
Another obvious blame lies on the t-shirt-clad shoulders in Silicon Valley. These are the people who have engineered social media to be addictive and inflammatory. While they are the masters of playing with your brain, they are not to blame for why social media gets so heated about politics in the first place.
In centuries past, people took up arms to fight people that held different religious beliefs than they did. Contrary to popular belief, this was not because they felt strong allegiance to religious doctrines. This was because they felt strong allegiance to the political powers that held those doctrines.[3]
The princes who started those “religious” wars did the same thing we do now: making political power into an idol.
When you remove God as the object of your worship, something else must take it place and for many of us that thing is political power. This is one of the reasons why as Christianity died, political warfare increased.[4]
Ultimately, you and I are to blame. The Catholic Church is responsible for making the world holier, and as members of her body, that responsibility falls to us.
[2] American Journalism, Frank Luthor Mott.
[3] A great resource for analysis of the religious wars surrounding the Reformation is Politicizing the Bible by Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker.
[4] This is an insight of the Ven. Archbishop Fulton Sheen. (Santo subito!) “The interval between the Napoleonic and Franco-Prussian Wars was fifty-five years; the interval between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I was forty-three years; the interval between World Wars I and II, twenty-one years. Fifty-five, forty-three, twenty-one, and a Korean War five years after World War II is hardly progress. Man finally saw that he was not naturally good. Once having boasted that he came from the beast, he now found himself to be acting as a beast.