Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America

"Frenemies is just such a great contribution. It was one of the first books to really study social media and polarization in a very careful, empirical manner. This book is for readers who really want to go deep into the research design, really understand how social scientists can, for example, conduct experiments that simulate Facebook or understand how social networks shape political polarization. Jaime Settle is a really talented scholar. The rigor of the experiments and design are just wonderful in this book. I think one of the nice conclusions was to demonstrate this phenomenon of false polarization. This is the tendency for all of us to exaggerate the extremity of the other side and underestimate the extremity of our own side. It has been known since the 1990s that people do this, at least in the US. And, actually, there’s some evidence of it internationally now as well. But hers was really the first book, I think, to make such a strong connection to social media, particularly. The book was written during the surging period of Facebook’s popularity, so there weren’t many other dominant paradigms. Twitter was still relatively small. And, of course, TikTok and Instagram weren’t really around. So I think it’s fair to say it’s primarily about Facebook. Yes. I think a lot of the problem is that the people shaping the debate are not social scientists. They’re not people who have done studies of this issue. So, we have a lot of former tech employees. In the book I call them ‘apocryphal tech leaders’, people who played a central role in creating platforms, and now regret their actions. To some degree, it’s like the tobacco merchants wanting to run the oncology clinic—this idea that the people who created the problem are now uniquely qualified to fix the problem. You have people that have an engineering background, they’re extremely bright, they’ve built new technology that that no one had seen before, it’s just phenomenal. But that doesn’t mean that they have a keen understanding of human nature. Somewhat uncritically, they tend to adopt untested and highly speculative ideas about human behavior that have really been outmoded by the social science. So we see a lot of that from tech leaders on the one hand. “The internet allows us to be completely different people” On the other hand, a lot of politicians, who are also very often self-interested, want to make an easy scapegoat out of social media. For example, its role in the election of President Trump and the conservative bias in social media in the US, or, for those on the right, there’s a lot of concern about social media companies clamping down on conservatives. We have these highly seductive stories: ‘it’s just foreign misinformation campaigns,’ or ‘these companies are profiting by radicalizing us with these algorithms that they don’t fully understand,’ or ‘echo chambers are dividing us and if only the companies would break us out of our echo chambers, we’d be more moderate.’ And yet, when we start to actually do these surveys—and in the last three, four, five years, we social scientists have really started to do them—we’re seeing that for most of these common narratives are there, there just isn’t much evidence. We need a new explanation."