Social media has wrapped its analog arms around the globe, and it certainly has no plans of letting go anytime soon. Though the embrace may initially have been a welcome one, it is quickly strengthening into a vice grip. Every moment of 2020, our nation walked the digital tightrope of productive discourse and pernicious radicalization.
In its golden age, online platforms were heralded as a possible antidote to a lack of genuine conversation and digital isolation. Inventions such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat allowed people from across the globe to stand virtually nose to nose, and it seemed as though the candy-colored apps paved the way for a novel sort of communication that would remedy the loss of human connection prompted by the rise of big tech. Yet what was originally designed to foster social networks has arguably done more to divide than unite.
2020 neatly evidenced this. The past year was a free fall away from Mark Zuckerberg’s unrealistic dream of ethical digital platforms and noble media intentions. The status quo is a knotted web of cause and consequence in which it is practically impossible to extricate ourselves from the overwhelming degree of content — much of which constitutes as fake or skewed news — that ceaselessly floods both our screens and our conscience. On good days, we may stumble on a genuinely enlightening post that challenges ourselves to rethink a political assumption. On bad days, our feeds may be noise and nothing else.
What has been the role of social media, not only as a contributor to 2020, but as a looking glass from which we can examine the lifetime and legacy of this historic year? Has social media obstructed hindsight 2020, or has it served to clarify the complicated mess of our recent history?
2020 and (Social) Media: Social Change and Misinformation
If social media was once understood as a harmless platform for connection, the present reality is anything but. In an interview with the HPR, Harvard Law School professor and author of “The Wealth of Networks” and “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics” Yochai Benkler explained two major issues to have emerged from 2020, both motivated by “alternative facts.”
“The first is the widespread belief among many Trump supporters that the election was rigged, and stolen, particularly around the mail in ballots,” he said. “The second is that COVID-19 is a hoax, and that it’s essentially perpetrated by scientific elites to undermine and attack Trump.”
To better understand how the media both propagates and challenges these false beliefs, Benkler discussed three leading models that explain the dynamics between social media, mass media, and the greater national conversation.
The first argues that social media directly dominates what people see and read. “That’s the model that says that essentially, you’ve got millions of unsuspecting readers who encounter various manipulations — Russian trolls, Cambridge Analytica, you name it — and acquire false beliefs.”
“Then there’s the social media leads model,” he explained, “where social media is what starts something. Journalists or editors on major media see [a post], and turn it into mass media, and then it generates and generalizes.” Benkler reasoned that this second model has been prevalent in 2020, notably in both far right and liberal social movements. “We’ve seen it with some of the campaigns on the far right, but we’ve also seen it with Black Lives Matter and the Me Too movement.”
Benkler noted that the final model, “the mass media leads model,” is the one that has been “dominant in 2020.” This interpretation explains that mass media — chiefly driven by political and media elites — is where a majority of the nation’s core narrative develops. Consequently, social media becomes a reactionary vessel for national conversation, directly responding to what mass media releases. “Then, social media is at most fanfiction, and often just circulates the core narratives, engages with them, agrees and disagrees.”
Further coloring this fanfiction are “echo chambers,” a now familiar cultural term that highlights the staggering silence between those who agree and disagree. These online niches have emerged as a critical concern that further jeopardizes social media’s chances to live up to its unifying ideal.
It is precisely this digital fanfiction, bolstered by echo chambers, that has clouded the American public’s ability to recognize truth for truth and lie for lie. 2020 has demonstrated the media’s uncanny ability to weave false narratives — at times, even mass media succumbs to its current. Coupled with online users’ inability to sift through channels of fake and genuine news, social media has become the fuel to the fire.
Undergraduate Voices on the Politics of Social Media
National conversation has long bent to the whims of trending Twitter hashtags. Influencers boast a number of Instagram followers greater than the populations of sizable countries, and the screen is both our digital mirror and lover; most Gen-Zers stare at it more often than they do at themselves.
Despite these realities, some young people are demonstrating the virtues of social media as a tool of personal education and political involvement. Two Harvard undergraduates have taken matters into their own hands to challenge the conventional — and at times counterproductive — function of social media in a divisive status quo. Their stories shed light on the experiences of countless other digital natives, providing valuable insight into how members of the younger generation are approaching social media in 2020.
Ebony Smith ’24, a BLM activist since her pre-college career, described her usage of social media — particularly in 2020 — as possessing an attentiveness to the world outside of what she originally knew. Smith experienced this following high-school graduation, when she expanded her social media niche from friends and classmates to the larger world. “I talked less about advocating for change in my school, and more about advocating for change in bigger areas, even countries where I’ve never been before,” she said.
This transition, Smith noted, challenged her understanding of social media’s very function. Whereas Smith used to understand her account to be a vehicle for personal amplification, in 2020 she began to reevaluate her digital platform as a welcome opportunity to consume the diverse politics of others. “Social media became less of this destination where I could go to post an idea that I already had,” she said. “It became more of this avenue, this stepping stone to actually find more information.”
For Ryan Tierney, Harvard Class of ’24, purposeful social media use begins with “recognizing what role social media plays in [your] life.” In a norm of overwhelming media content, it is sometimes difficult to fathom that we possess agency as both media consumers and propagators. “The first step for me is to realize what social media is for,” he said, “and determine what I use social media for.” Tierney, a World Associate Editor for the HPR, stated that he did not use social media as his news source in 2020. “I go on news sites to get my news. And multiple news sites,” the student commented with candor.
For many Americans, however, social media is a rising news outlet despite its echo-chamber dangers. Tierney noted how social media functions as a double-edged sword: while it can amplify oppressed voices, it dually multiplies racist rhetoric and hate speech. “It’s going to skew how our country’’ collective conscious looks back at 2020,” he predicted. “There are two planes of existence right now in the United States that run contrary to one another. Social media isolates you from other groups. It can connect people, but it can also stick them in with a bunch of like-minded individuals and push out the other perspectives.”
To put it simply, the probability that social media — or at least the social media of 2020 — will foster communication in a divided nation is bleak. Tierney’s efforts to construct an intentional routine around social media consumption may be a critical step towards accomplishing Zuckerberg’s digital ideal, but the undergraduate easily finds himself in the minority of online users.
As Benkler mentioned, social media functions more as an amplifier of already divisive news than a connective tissue that remedies a fraught national dialogue. If, in its inception, social media served as a connector, it now foreshadows a dark age of national division.
America’s Social Media Binary
National reconciliation — and reimagination — of social media’s capabilities demands an acknowledgement of the present reality that digital platforms can either connect diverse opinions or push like-minded thinkers into homogeneous niches. In other words, social media serves as both a necessary tool of amplification and a disseminator of falsehood.
Brain Friedberg, senior researcher at the Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project, rooted this binary in recent history in an interview with the HPR. “You look at the way BLM was so successful at raising awareness using social media, relying on the influence and celebrity space to make messages go much further than ever before and set some sort of new social standards for how we talk about anti-blackness in the U.S.”
“Juxtapose that,” Friedberg continued, “with the QAnon movement. It also used hashtags and online outreach to build an anti-democratic, sort of preparatory base for the distribution of political disinformation leading up to 2020.”
The senior researcher called attention to social media’s increased efficacy when leveraged outside of the institutional realm. “Social media is good for social movements, and potentially bad for our social institutions,” he argued. “When you see social movements exist within the social realm rather than the institutional realm, you can get great progress.”
When asked how social media could be used as a motivator of social change in 2020 and beyond — not merely wielded as an instigator of polarizing national thought — Friedberg cited regulation as “the only way forward.”
“There needs to be better regulation,” he said. “One of the things that we’ve been seeing about how platform companies regulate themselves is that it’s uneven and it’s opaque. The platforms themselves are growing harder to study.”
“Platforms need accountability in a social context that we do not currently have the legal language for,” Friedberg continued. “Without external pressure, platform companies will continue to rely on civil society, critical journalism, and academic partnerships to essentially be content moderators for them.”
Perhaps most notably, the researcher pushed against a binaristic understanding of America’s future social media ecosystem. While regulation efforts may raise public outcry over the disregard of free speech, Friedberg argued that the issue is not so black and white. Completely non-regulated digital platforms and authoritarian policies against free speech, he argued, are not the nation’s only options.
“The binary between market-based mass communication or authoritarian style is a false dichotomy that needs to be troubled,” he said. The answer does not lie on either end of the regulatory spectrum, the researcher argued: It lies somewhere in-between.
This anti-binaristic interpretation of social media does not only have implications for the future. It largely affects our understanding of 2020, in hindsight. As mentioned by Benkler, social media regularly amplifies already divisive news. This year has affirmed the necessity of developing nuanced, intentional frameworks of accountability within the social media sphere so as not to obstruct the heartbeat of truth that should dictate any democracy’s reconciliation with its own history. Smith and Tierney’s personalized approaches to social media that prioritize objectivity and self-education highlight ways in which people can responsibly engage with social media “as is.” Moving forward, however, it is only with changes to and regulation of platforms that social media can continue to play a formative role in social change.
Imagining 2020 Sans Social Media
Social media, throughout the recent stretch of American history, has opened both cultural and political Pandora’s boxes that complicate our nation’s ability to speak with itself. As evidenced by professors, experts, and students alike, while digital users may like to believe hashtags and likes are valiant efforts to be informed and active participants in our democracy, the reality is not so simple. In fact, it can be argued that 2020 has fallen prey to the sinister side of these online platforms.
That being said, a status quo sans social media would not merit the same opportunities to reach beyond our immediate communities and foster conversations with strangers, like-minded change-makers, and perhaps most notably, those who harbor radically differing views. Sans social media, the isolated high-school advocate would not be able to network with allies scattered across the breadth of the United States, and sans social media, there would be little opportunity for discourse — even if it means dissent — across digital users from across party lines.
America chose this road years ago. Our cultural imagination and political engagement — whether we like it or not — shares a home with the pixels, with the Instagram feeds, with the trending Twitter hashtags. If 2020 has taught us anything, it is that social media refuses to be characterized as virtuous or sinful, liberal or conservative, black or white. It is all of the above and more.
And so as 2021 unfolds, we are tasked with the strange and momentous responsibility of shaping social media’s legacy, post-2020. Whether the federal government will put their foot down on regulation, and whether technological giants will fulfill their promises of fact-checking will largely influence the coming years.
It is just as critical to acknowledge, however, the redemptive agency that rests in the hands of the individual digital citizen. Reenvisioning — and consequently reforming — our nation’s history with social media calls for much more than merely falling back on what we know.
Old habits we are comfortable subscribing to no longer stand. Authentic digital change-making requires more discipline and intention than self-congratulatory political correctness. It demands more than temporarily blacking out our profile pictures to signal support for the Black Lives Matter movement.
Revolutionary social media usage calls for users to wrestle with the discomfort of dissent, and encourages digital citizens to outrun echo chamber activism and cross — if only for a moment — the yawning line of American partisanship.
In hindsight, social media was both the definer and complicator of 2020. Its digital footprint has not only left a mark on the way we look back, but has imprinted itself in how Americans conceptualize their nation’s future. Despite the gravity of the stakes, let it be a small comfort that in the hands of any digital citizen lies the power to challenge and reshape the national conversation, one decision at a time.
