About a year ago I began to follow my interest in health and fitness on Instagram. Soon I began to see more and more fitness-related accounts, groups, posts and ads. I kept clicking and following, and eventually my Instagram became all about fit people, fitness and motivational material, and advertisements. Does this sound familiar?
While the algorithms and my brain kept me scrolling on the endless feeds, I was reminded of what digital marketers like to say: “Money is in the list.” That is, the more customized your group, people and page follows, the less time and money is needed to sell you related ideas. Instead, brand ambassadors will do the work for free spreading products, ideas and ideologies with passion.
I’m a psychiatrist who studies anxiety and stress, and I often write about how our politics and culture are mired in fear and tribalism. With the nation on edge, it’s critical to look at how easily our society is being manipulated into tribalism in the age of social media. Even after the exhausting election cycle is over, the division persists, and conspiracy theories continue to emerge, grow and divide on social media.
Those of us old enough to know what life was like before social media may remember how exciting Facebook was at its inception. Imagine, the ability to connect with old friends we had not seen for decades.
With the nation on edge, it’s critical to look at how easily our society is being manipulated into tribalism in the age of social media.
Things did not remain that simple. These platforms have morphed into Frankenstein’s monsters, filled with so-called friends we’ve never met, slanted news stories, celebrity gossip and ads.
The artificial intelligence behind these platforms determines what you see based on your social media and web activity. For example, on Twitter you may follow the politicians you like. Twitter algorithms quickly respond and show you more posts and people related to that political leaning. The more you like, follow and share, the faster you find yourself moving in that political direction. There is, however, this nuance: Those algorithms tracking you are often triggered by your negative emotions, typically impulsivity or anger.
As a result, the algorithms amplify the negative and then spread it by sharing it among groups. This might play a role in the widespread anger among those engaged in politics, regardless of their side of the aisle.
Eventually, the algorithms expose us mostly to the ideology of one “digital tribe” – the same way my Instagram world became only superfit people – the tribes of the extremes of conservatism, liberalism, different religions, climate-change worriers or deniers. Members of each tribe keep consuming and feeding one another the same ideology while policing one another against opening up to “the others.”
We are inherently tribal creatures anyway; but particularly when we’re scared, we regress further into tribalism and tend to trust the information relayed to us by our tribe and not by others. Normally, that’s an evolutionary advantage. Trust leads to group cohesion, and it helps us survive.
But now, that same tribalism often leads to ostracizing those who disagree with you. In one study, 61% of Americans reported having unfriended, unfollowed or blocked someone on social media because of their political views or posts.
And more time spent on social media correlates with higher anxiety, which can create a negative loop.
Human thinking itself has been transformed. It’s now more difficult for us to grasp the “big picture.” A book is a long read these days, too much for some people. Scrolling and swiping culture has reduced our attention span. It has also deactivated our critical-thinking skills.
Before all this, our social exposure was mostly to family, friends, relatives, neighbors, classmates, TV, movies, radio, newspapers, magazines and books. And that was enough. In that, there was diversity and a relatively healthy information diet with a wide variety of nutrients. We always knew people who were not like-minded, but getting along with them was normal life, part of the deal. Now those different voices have become more distant.
Dr. Arash Javanbakht is director of Stress, Trauma and Anxiety Research Clinic and associate professor of psychiatry at Wayne State University. Distributed by The Associated Press.
