Social media can be used to fight polarisation

Can you use social media to reduce polarisation rather than exaggerate it ? Yes, if you take identity out of the picture.

Their study was motivated by NASA’s 2013 release of new data detailing historical trends in monthly levels of Arctic sea ice. “NASA found, to its dismay, that a lot of people were misinterpreting the graph to say that there would actually be more Arctic sea ice in the future rather than less,” Guilbeault explains. “Conservatives in particular were susceptible to this misinterpretation.”

The researchers wondered how social media networks might alter this outcome, so they randomly assigned participants to one of three experimental groups: a political-identity setup, which revealed the political affiliation of each person’s social media contacts; a political-symbols setup, in which people interacted anonymously through social networks but with party symbols of the donkey and the elephant displayed at the bottom of their screens; and a non-political setup, in which people interacted anonymously. Twenty Republicans and 20 Democrats made up each social network.

Once randomised, every individual then viewed the NASA graph and forecasted Arctic sea-ice levels for the year 2025. They first answered independently, and then viewed peers’ answers before revising their guesses twice more. The study outcomes surprised the researchers in several respects. 

In the non-political setup, for example, polarisation disappeared entirely, with more than 85 percent of all participants agreeing on a future decrease in Arctic sea ice.  “But,” Centola adds, “the biggest surprise—and perhaps our biggest lesson—came from how fragile it all was. The improvements vanished completely with the mere suggestion of political party. All we did was put a picture of an elephant and a donkey at the bottom of a screen, and all the social learning effects disappeared. Participants’ inaccurate beliefs and high levels of polarisation remained.”

I don't think there's anything surprising about the fragility exactly. It's a very nice and very interesting confirmation that identity is the root cause of polarisation, not the issues themselves : the barriers between people are at least in some cases purely artificial (but we should be wary of generalising this to more direct moral issues rather than the purely factual one examined here). Once you get emotion out of the way and allow the data to drive debate, people are capable of behaving rationally and intelligently. Put it back in and this goes to hell. The problem is that people are not naturally drawn to emotionless discussion - that's why the clickbait advertising model works.

I disagree that an image of political symbols constitutes a "mere suggestion of political party" - that seems to me to be a very direct statement. I'd like to see what happens with a much more subtle hint, e.g. someone casually mentioning party policy. Still, I'd expect that in that case the debate would be derailed and the whole thing would collapse. In which case it becomes damn hard to keep identity politics out of the social media arena in the real world.

https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/climate-change-political-polarization-disappears-social-networks