Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy? ISSUES: Focusing on Six Key Risks Though there are a number of different ways to analyze the risks that social media poses for democracy, here we focus on six key issues at the core of the discussion. Issue One: Echo chambers, polarization, and hyper-partisanship The “attention economy” is predicated on understanding and targeting individual users with a variety of customized content. It is well documented that an individual’s search results, newsfeed, and advertising offers are dependent on, and generated by, their digital footprint as manipulated by the ever-evolving algorithms of social media platforms. Of these, advertising is the most important, since it underwrites the business model of the social media giants. The prioritization of user preferences results in a feedback loop where the feeding of news, search results, and social network updates that align with user attitudes and interests exacerbates and reinforces user preferences—and on platforms such as Facebook, this tends to promote selfsegregation into like-minded groups. As articulated by Ethan Zuckerman in an insightful column comparing Facebook’s coverage of Ferguson with the ALS ice-bucket challenge, Facebook’s preference for creative “viral cascades over surfacing novel content” within a social network can lead to significant isolation from the truth: “If few users in your circle of friends are sharing stories about Ferguson—which is a distinct possibility if you are white and most of your friends are white—Facebook’s algorithm may see this as a story unlikely to “go viral” and tamp it down, rather than amplifying it, as it has with the ALS stories.”6 That said, not all social media platforms are designed for such self-segregation, as noted in a Digiday article, “Facebook is for ice buckets, Twitter is for Ferguson.” Few users consume purely partisan media, but social media platform design and the proliferation of partisan media in traditional channels have exacerbated In a study of social network demographics by Daniel Cox and Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute, data revealed that the average white American has one black friend, and that 75% of white Americans have entirely white social networks. 6  © Copyright The Omidyar Group 2017. All rights reserved. partisanship and identity polarization by creating “echo chambers” where views get reinforced and become entrenched—and more extreme—over time. Some part of this is design. But another important part is due to the way people decide whether news and information online can be trusted. A recent American Press Institute (API) study shows that when American readers see news on social media platforms, it’s not the source of the news that matters as much as whom in their network shares the link.7 Attempts to make visible to users the echo chambers in which they operate have been frequent, but we have found little data on whether such information changes minds. Such trends are likely to continue or accelerate. Worldwide, social media users have multiple platform choices, so they can read single articles from different sources based on what is popular in their network. This increased personalization means users are more likely to see (and believe) what their peers share than what news publishers curate, making them less likely to encounter multi-faceted or counter-attitudinal views. In addition, partisan content delivered deliberately and consistently to echo chambers (or “ideological silos”) shifts belief and political behavior, and the results of partisanship on social capital are noteworthy. More partisans today hold extreme (or “shifted”) political views, and there is less willingness to engage across the aisle. People prefer their social networks to be “like-minded” politically, and for the very first time, fewer people in America want to see their children married to someone across the political aisle than to someone from another race. American Press Institute, ‘Who shared it?’ How Americans decide what news to trust on social media, Published March 20, 2017, https://www. americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/survey-research/ trust-social-media/ 7 PAGE 6