Scapegoating the Algorithm. America’s epistemic challenges run deeper than social media.

This is very badly wrong, and in a way that’s typical of those with a more empirical bent: it mistakes extremely limited experiments with constrained inputs for an entire sociocultural landscape and media environment and concludes there is no effect. It’s the typical failure mode of this type of surface “well, ackshually” type of analysis and it hits all the clichés as if the author had a checklist to make it through.

The basic thesis is correct, which isn’t saying much. America’s epistemic problems do run deeper than social media. But pretending social media and even the rise of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News had nothing at all to do with the disintegration of political alignment is, frankly, farcical.

I know that the empirical breed hates all anecdotes no matter their applicability, but everyone I know has had a relative or multiple relatives who was a relatively normal well-adjusted conservative or sometimes even a centrist Democrat who got exposed to social media, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh or sometimes all three and who then went on to become some demented ultra-conservative rage-filled caricature of their former self. And that’s because it happened so very often. In this case, anecdotes reveal a lot in ways the pseudo-empirical sophistry above does not.

To elide a great deal I just do not care to write, what matters here is not some few months of posts on social media. Or exposure to Fox News. Or listening to Rush Limbaugh rant¹ about “feminazis.” What is relevant is that there is a recursively self-reinforcing media environment that inveigles and then entraps those at the periphery in small, measured steps. One can see this with how the YouTube algorithm recommends increasingly unhinged right-wing content over time no matter what you view. The same is true of Facebook and other sites and how media ecosystems operate in general, particularly in the United States.

In short, the article is crap because the author does not understand his own sociocultural environment well enough to write about it cogently, nor how propaganda works and its actual function, nor how algorithms actually operate, nor what evidence here is or would be relevant. It is itself a propaganda piece intended to absolve media of blame while at the same time self-inculpating.

It’s worthless other than as a target to lampoon.

1. Yes, I am aware that he is dead.