The Internet is Worse Than Ever – Now What?

As of 2022, nearly half of Americans expected a civil war in the coming years, and one in five now believe political violence is justified. And it's not just about the United States but about the entire world. People increasingly see themselves as part of opposing teams. There are many different reasons for this, but one is widely blamed: social media. Social networks divide us, make us more extreme and less empathetic, irritate us or immerse us in a fatal world, stressing and depressing us. It seems we need to touch the grass and escape to the real world. New research shows that we may have largely misunderstood why this is the case.

It turns out that Internet social media can uniquely undermine the way our brains work, but not the way we think. The Myth of the Filter Bubble You've probably heard of filter bubbles online: algorithms give you exactly

what

you want or

what

they think you want. You only see information that shows opinions that agree with yours, while dissenting opinions or information are filtered out. Since you only see content close to your worldview, the most extreme and toxic opinions suddenly seem less extreme. You are trapped in a radicalizing filter bubble and your worldview becomes narrower and more extreme.

But is that true? Extreme filter bubbles seem to be quite rare. Studies that investigated what people actually see online, or what search engines display, found little evidence that it is ideologically isolated. It's exactly the opposite: online you are constantly confronted with opinions and worldviews that are not your own. It turns out that the place where you are most ideologically isolated is your real life, in the real world, with real people. Your real-world interactions with your friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors are much less diverse than your online bubble. The filter bubble exists in your real life, not online.

OK wait. Online filter bubbles have been the predominant explanation for why we've all started to hate each other more over the past two decades. If that's not the case, shouldn't the Internet open our minds and make us more empathetic toward each other? Unfortunately your brain is stupid. Your brain is stupid Human brains did not evolve to understand the true nature of reality, but to navigate and maintain social structures. Our ancestors desperately needed each other to survive, so our brains had to make sure we cooperated. That is why isolation or social exclusion is so horrible, because it was actually life-threatening.

A tribe that worked together survived, a divided tribe died. The way communities worked for thousands of years is that, sure, you might not like a neighbor, but because you lived close to each other, you also supported the same sports club or saw them at church. You both thought the people in the other town were idiots. Being physically close made them familiar and created similarities that bridged the gap between different worldviews so they wouldn't kill each other. And their worldview probably wasn't that different in the first place because it was shaped by the same local culture. When our brains evolved, this was enough.

Who

ever

was around, they were similar to us. We liked what was similar to us; This kept us aligned enough to work together despite our differences. As humanity grew from small tribes to towns and cities, from chiefdoms to kingdoms and nations, our brains and communities had to adapt to more diverse sets of neighbors. We started meeting in the town square or at universities, where we argued and yelled at each other, but in the grand scheme of things, the communities were still relatively isolated, we were still quite similar and aligned with the people around us. Conflict and disagreement are not a bad thing per se.

The tension over how we should live can create new and wonderful things. Our values, norms and taboos are always evolving and

ever

ything we think is normal today will not be normal in the future. But we also need social glue to hold our societies together, because our brains don't care about the meta-level of humanity but rather about being safe in a tribe. Until about 20 years ago, we did something really new, which hit our brains like a freight train: the social networks of the Internet, the digital town square. Don't You Dare Disagree With Me: Social Sorting Bottom line: Our brains aren't capable of processing the amount of disagreement we encounter on social media.

The same mechanisms that made it possible for our ancestors to work together in the first place are derailed in ways we were not prepared for. Whether you want it or not, your brain classifies people according to their worldview and opinions, into teams. This is not simply tribalism, it goes beyond that. Researchers have called this process social classification. In the digital town square you encounter people who express opinions or share information that clashes with your worldview. But unlike their neighbor, they don't support their local sports club. You're missing out on the local social glue your brain needs to align with them.

For your brain, the disagreement between you and them becomes a central part of its identity. And this makes you less likely to seriously consider their position or opinion in the future. If you hear bad things about them, your brain is much more likely to believe them uncritically. On the other hand, there are people who share your worldview and may be more like you than many people in your real life. Which makes your brain really like them and align with them. People who think like you are probably good people because you are a good person and any social group you belong to is good!

Therefore, your brain is more likely to believe their opinions. If you hear bad things about them, your brain is much more likely to dismiss them uncritically. The interaction-driven social Internet makes it

worse

because it wants to keep you online as long as possible. And, unfortunately, the most attractive emotion is: anger. The angrier you get, the more likely you are to share and interact, and this leads to social media amplifying the most extreme and controversial opinions. It is optimized to not only show us disagreements, but also the worst possible disagreement. And since your stupid brain sorts people into teams, whatever the worst opinions are, it assigns the same opinions to everyone on the other team.

The surprising and new thing about online polarization is that all the aspects of our lives that make us individuals, our lifestyle choices, the comedians or shows we watch, our religion, our fashion sense, etc., are condensed , making it seem like they are parts of opposing and mutually exclusive identities. This so simplifies and distorts disagreements about how we should run society that it often seems as if people on the other team are actively and deliberately making the world

worse

. That they are almost evil, beyond convincing with rationality, facts or civilized discussion. While you are, of course, on the right team, it can be difficult to process the fact that you may appear that way to people on the other team.

On a societal level, this is dissolving the social glue that is the basis of our democracies. If we think our neighbors are bad, how can we live together? This is especially bad in the United States, where the two-party system makes it easier to think of people in terms of teams: negative opinion about the other party has reached record levels. OK. Is there anything we can learn from this? Can we do something? Something more positive – Part of Opinion In the end, it is important to be aware of what social media does to your brain. It's easier to change yourself than it is to change the world, so you can self-examine why you believe the things you believe and whether you discard or believe information based on who the person is saying that information.

The Internet has many ups and downs and just as we had to adapt from living in small tribes to living in cities, we must adapt to the information age where we have access to billions of people. Evolution is too slow, so we need to find models that work with what our brain is able to tolerate. One model that seemed to work well was the pre-social media Internet that older people may remember: bulletin boards, forums, blogs. The main difference compared to today was twofold: on the one hand, there were no algorithms fighting to keep you online at all costs;

At some point, you were done with the Internet for the day, as mind-blowing as it sounds. But most importantly, the old Internet was very fractured, divided into thousands of different communities, like small villages that gathered around shared beliefs and interests. These towns were separated from each other by rivers or digital mountains. These communities worked because they reflected real life much more than social media: each village had its own culture and set of rules. Maybe one community liked harsh humor and gentle restraint, another had strict rules and easily banned them. If you didn't follow the village rules, you would get banned, or you could just go and move to another village that suited you better.

So instead of us all gathering in one place, overwhelming our brains in a city square that in the end just leads us to go crazy, a solution to achieving lower social ranking may be extremely simple: return to communities in smaller line. Because what our stupid brains don't realize is that we're actually all on the same team: humanity, on a wet rock speeding through space in a universe that doesn't think about us. We're all in this together, but until our brains adapt to being able to deal with it, it might be best if we stay a little apart.

One of the worst things about the media we consume is that most news organizations tend to cater to one team, making you feel like you're on the right side. Ground News, the sponsor of this video, attempts to make these biases more transparent by providing you with tools to help you think critically about the information you consume, a mission we wholeheartedly support. Ground News brings together related articles from around the world in one place so you can compare how different outlets and sides cover them. They provide context about the source of the information, whether they have a political bias, how reliable their reporting is, and who owns it.

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Aside from the obvious biases, what was most shocking were the stories that neither side talked about. Both sides ignored things that are inconvenient to their worldviews. The Ground News Blind Spots feed highlights exactly this: it shows you news that is widely covered by one side of the political spectrum and ignored by the other. Check them out at ground.news/nutshell to make sure you're seeing the full picture.