DEMOCRACY DISCONNECTED: SOCIAL MEDIA’S CAUSTIC INFLUENCE ON SOUTHEAST ASIA’S FRAGILE REPUBLICS in many countries so few that such an effort has become a Sisyphean task. In an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg in April 2018, several civil society organizations in Myanmar highlighted Facebook’s lack of Burmese-speaking staff members who can interface with local monitors, and noted that delays in removing content deemed to violate the company’s community standards allowed plenty of time for hate speech and rumors to circulate widely.101 The same situation is playing out across the region in countries where Facebook has no offices and no effective way of communicating with the local population.102 Although the company has had success employing artificial intelligence to filter some objectionable material, the technology has proven less capable of censoring hate speech because of the intricacies of context and culture.103 Amid the ongoing debate worldwide about how best to mitigate social media’s polarizing influence, some have argued that a problem born of technology merits a technological solution. Advocates of a technology-mediated intervention suggest that the same algorithms contributing to the increased personalization of the web could be reversed to feed content to individuals that directly contradicts their expressed beliefs.104 While it is plausible that such contrived exposure to opposing viewpoints would help penetrate the information bubbles that have given rise to an era of digital tribalism, recent research suggests it might also prove counterproductive. A study published in 2018 of Twitter users in the United States found that exposing political partisans to contradictory opinions through the use of an automated Twitter bot actually led to a reinforcement of existing views. The authors theorize this outcome may reflect a tendency toward “motivated reasoning,” a psychological process wherein individuals confronted with contradictory information seek to allay their mental discomfort by distorting new information to confirm what they already believe.105 Once again, this study underscores how psychological drivers give rise to social media’s manipulative power. The basic mechanisms of human psychology might seem to portend that even our best efforts to curb technology’s pernicious byproducts will be a largely futile endeavor. On the contrary, perhaps the most effective means of neutralizing the corrosive tendencies of social media lies in acknowledging a simple reality: Although there is little we can do to exert control over our information flows or our physiological capacity to process them, there may be ways to render those individuals least inclined to tolerate an ambiguous world more comfortable living in the gray. 101 Megha Rajagopalan, “NGOs Complain They’re Doing Facebook’s Work for Them,” BuzzFeed, April 6, 2018, https://www.buzzfeed.com/meghara/zuckerberg-open-letter-hate-speech-myanmar?utm_term=.sgoYYN7KOJ#. yn3xxYK8rP. 102 Megha Rajagopalan and Aisha Nazim, “’We Had to Stop Facebook’: When Anti-Muslim Violence Goes Viral,” Buzzfeed, April 7, 2018, https://www.buzzfeed.com/meghara/we-had-to-stop-facebook-when-anti-muslim-violencegoes-viral?utm_term=.qj344MNg8#.btjkkyr4l. 103 Sheera Frenkel, “Facebook’s Latest Transparency Move: Data, Few Details, on What It Removes,” The New York Times, May 15, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/technology/facebook-removal-posts-fake-accounts. html. 104 Geoffrey A. Fowler, “What if Facebook Gave Us an Opposing-Viewpoints Button?” The Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-if-facebook-gave-us-an-opposing-viewpoints-button-1463573101; Sami Main, “BuzzFeed Is Exposing Readers to Opposing Viewpoints with ‘Outside Your Bubble’ Initiative,” Ad Week, February 17, 2017, http://www.adweek.com/digital/buzzfeed-is-exposing-readers-to-opposing-viewpoints-withoutside-your-bubble-initiative/. 105 Christopher Bail et al., “Exposure to Opposing Views can Increase Political Polarization: Evidence from a LargeScale Field Experiment on Social Media,” SocArXiv, (March 2018), https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/4ygux/. 20 | Foreign Policy at Brookings