The Age of Polarization: How to recognise and stay ahead of digital propaganda
By: Vaishnavi Kumar
Tags: Social Media, Psychology, Anthropology, Digital, Sociology

We live in a world where there is no dearth of content. Social media has become a part of our lives to the point where addiction to it is common- almost an extension in our mental model of social media. On Joe rogan’s podcast Maynard James Keenan goes on to say “Likes are dopamine inducers. A sense of validation that keeps pulling us to be online.” And then we have all this content that’s accessible to us from around the world curated just the way we like it. How do we have access to this huge database of information for free?

If the service is free, we are the product.

The world is shifting at an unprecedented speed. Master storyteller Dave Christian’s History of Our World in 18 minutes shares light on how short our journey has been in the existence of the universe. We use collective learning to evolve as a species. It’s the ability to store ideas and information within the collective memory of communities so they can be shared through generations. we have progressed the fastest since the advent of the internet.

It’s been 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang, we made our first appearance only 200,000 years ago

Collective learning also eliminates the load that accompanies processing information. We think fast to connect dots with the data we have at hand to make sense of what the information is about and what we think of it.

Social media’s endless stream of curated content makes it accessible for us to stay entertained any time we want. It also uses our data to push curated content into our feed and keep the service sticky which makes being online addictive. Since the content is endless, our scrolls are endless too. Before we can wrap our heads around what we’ve seen, There’s something new that catches our attention.

The new shiny thing changes every time we blink.

Free services push advertisements into our feed to earn revenue. With so much content available, if companies want to truly fulfil their agenda, they compete for viewer attention- and they have a team to do just that.

How they do it:

Through shortened content to cater to our diminished attention span and the age-old advertising gimmick: shock value.

Shock value thrives on extremism. It’s provocative nature makes the content stay in our memory long after we’ve seen it to influence recall.

Shock value also increases our threshold of psychic numbing- a psychological phenomenon that causes people or societies to feel indifferent to the suffering of large numbers of people to prevent pain from empathising towards traumatic circumstances.

New concepts and news that demand us to think slow are now being judged in 5 seconds or the length of our next scroll. If you see that content multiple times and across platforms, the content is flagged as important in our memory.

With our short attention span diverted towards news on our feed that’s cultured in a lab with a philosophy that centers around getting an emotional response- we’re always wired.

As the 5 seconds on the subject go by, the reader is armed with a polarized opinion- and a hazy recollection of facts regurgitated on the news with no real depth on the subject. If it’s depending on unreliable sources of news, the content might as well be biased in narrative to influence propaganda on the subject which is unconsciously adopted by unsuspecting viewers flipping through headlines.

No one is wrong in the digital world- if you look hard enough you’ll get validation for every opinion you have because it’s easy to find like-minded people on the internet.

Trump’s whataboutism method is the perfect representation of how any argument can be discredited by neither directly refuting nor disproving the opposing argument. Satirist John Oliver talks about the dangers of deligitimising the media, whataboutisms and trolling used extensively during Trump’s presidency on Last Week Tonight.

Whataboutism attempts to discredit the opponent by claiming something else is worse without addressing the initial claim

The Cambridge Analytica scandal grew attention because of how a political consulting firm had surreptitiously obtained more than 87 million Facebook member profiles and used the data to build psychographic profiles for targeted marketing to assist the Leave campaign in the Brexit vote and the Trump 2016 presidential campaign among other elections around the world. With a bold statement- Democracy is Dead, Netflix documentary The Great Hack brings to attention the dangers of modern misinformation campaigns that can be misused to sway opinions in favor of political agendas and to fuel propoganda.

Do you know who is using your data and how?

How we cope with it:

Apart from our acquired levels of psychic numbing and short attention span, the distraction we have today is propelling our addiction to stay online. HBR published a piece on how smartphones can affect our cognitive ability. Just having our smartphone nearby for accessibility can take a toll on our thinking but to us, a few minutes off the internet would mean missing a thousand updates. The fear of missing out is as real as ever and yet staying connected has never been so stressful.

How we can fix it:

1. Practice delayed decision-making

Daniel Kahneman’s bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow explains the behavioural psychology around decision-making.

Instinctively, we ‘think fast’ which centers around our intuition and gut reaction. After that we ‘think slow’ which is the critical, analytical approach to make decisions. The first one is useful for fight-or-flight reactions where jumping to conclusions is sought-after but falls short on decisions that require careful consideration, reflection and problem-solving.

The slower we think, the more we exercise our analytical thinking.

Delayed decision-making requires reflection and understanding of different perspectives because everything’s grey not black and white!

2. Give yourself a break

Set a few hours of your day to spend time away from your smartphone. The device should be on your beck-and-call not the other way around.

Use applications available on your app store to limit the time you spend on your go-to social platforms. You can plan how much time you’d want to spend on the apps once and let the application remind you when you exceed your limit thereafter.

This applies to your news consumption as well. Keep a hour a day to catch up on the news. Pick a time of the day when you are most alert so you can pay attention to what you’re consuming and always go to reliable news sources for content.

3. Pay for your content

If you pay reliable platforms for your content, it’s more likely to be well-research, quality content that’s ad-free and follows ethical journalism practices. You’re also providing support to good media platforms so they can continue building great content.

4. Rethink past opinions

When you encounter an opinion you’ve made in the past and still hold it to be true: find out what your opinion is based on. Reflection on the decision-making might uncover bias in the facts used to build that opinion on. If you recognise any, rethink your opinion with a fresh perspective!