18 Policy Brief No. 22 Toda Peace Institute/Alliance for Peacebuilding The platforms own algorithms operate to maximize homophily. Hashtags help people find conversations or other people or groups. (Sunstein 2017) Echo chambers can breed polarization, hate, contempt for others, and violent extremism, a set of beliefs that justify violence toward others to support ideological goals. Self-insulation decreases understanding of different points of view, or common values and experiences. (Sunstein 2017, 57) People tend to choose friends and groups that share their interests and opinions. Social media helps people to create self-assembled “tribal” groups with similar interests. This is known as “homophily”, or the human desire to connect and bond with people who are similar to ourselves. People organize on-line to overcome real-life hurdles, including social disapproval for their group. On-line groups grow in strength as like-minded people cooperate to overcome external threats. Tufekci describes this as “a shift from a public, collective politics to a more private, scattered one, with political actors collecting more and more personal data to figure out how to push just the right buttons, person by person and out of sight.” (Tufekci 2018) 34. Expanding Hate Speech and Incivility. There are several hypotheses related to whether people express less respect and more hatred for others on-line than in person. People may simply encounter a greater variety of political opinions on-line than they do in person, and so it may be difficult to compare on-line and in-person communication styles. Some social media platforms allow anonymous posts, or posts with a pseudonym. This option might make it less socially costly to express hate and anger, and there may be fewer mechanisms of accountability and less impact on the reputation of those who do post such messages. (Trump, et al. 2018) 35. Using “Strategic Distraction.” In addition to flooding people with inaccurate information, social media platforms also are a channel for information aimed at distraction. Xuanchuan is a Chinese word to describe the government’s attempt to distract the public on social media away from controversial stories by flooding it with positive, personal-interest stories. China is well known for its media censorship, and its contribution to fake news in China and other countries. But this new technique of strategic distraction is a significant new tactic. By some estimates, the Chinese government employs 2 million people to make up 448 million posts aimed at “strategic distraction” each year. These are called “50 cent” posts because the people in China’s “keyboard army” are reportedly paid half a dollar for each post. (King, Pan and Roberts 2017) Aldous Huxley���s Brave New World described an age when governments control the public not through force, but because individuals in society are drugged, emotionally detached, overstimulated by fluff entertainment, and distracted with empty pleasures. For many observers, social media and its distracting fluff stories are the drug enabling authoritarianism. (Sampson 2017)