EDITORIAL: Social Media Distortion

Last week’s Senate hearings on Russia-linked social media accounts inciting political animosity gave us a vivid picture of one way in which the Russian government is making trouble in America. You don’t have to believe that Russian social media “bots” and “trolls” stole the election from Hillary Clinton to understand these shadowy activities as manifestations of a wider Russian policy toward the United States. So we argued last week.

Many of the commentariat’s responses to these revelations, however, seem to involve two questionable assumptions, namely (a) that most Americans are active on Facebook and Twitter and (b) most Americans use these platforms to read and post political content. But a timely study from the University of Pennsylvania suggests that these assumptions are wrong.

The study found that the great majority of the 4,000 Twitter users whose tweets they analyzed didn’t post political content at all. And of the users who did post political content, the great majority posted mostly about non-political subjects. Only a tiny minority used Twitter mainly for political content, and those—not surprisingly—tended to the ideological extremes. Finally, the study’s authors surveyed Americans about their use of Twitter and found that only 12 percent of people surveyed used it at all. “So Twitter posters are already a distinct minority,” the study’s co-author Daniel J. Hopkins recently wrote at FiveThirtyEight.com, “and even among those who do tweet, users who routinely tweet about politics are an even smaller and more atypical minority. Political tweeters are even more polarized than the nation as a whole.”

We’ve often suspected that the vast majority American voters don’t get their politics from Twitter and Facebook. They use social media to get their local news and post baby pictures and rant about traffic problems and link to recipes—not to express and formulate their political views.

America is divided—for sure. Competing and hostile worldviews threaten to tear the fabric of our republic—that’s true. But spending too much time on Twitter and Facebook can make our divisions seem starker and more pervasive than they are.

That brings us to the category of Americans who are almost all on Twitter, Facebook, or both. We’re talking about America’s journalists. It’s a rare news reporter or editor or producer who doesn’t have a Twitter account and doesn’t get a lot of his or her news from these social media platforms. But the world is a big place, full of things and events and people and opinions that aren’t talked about or linked to by the accounts one follows on social media. The nation’s news and opinion journalists who can’t pull themselves from their social media timelines—always there on their smartphones—may come away with some pretty lopsided views of what Americans are really like.

We don’t exempt ourselves from this criticism. And so we were just about to click that “sign out” button . . .

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