Social media's role in fueling extremism and misinformation in a divided political climate

Half of U.S. adults say they sometimes get their news from social media. However, almost two-thirds of adults say they view social media as a bad thing for democracy. This raises the question of what responsibility social media companies bear for our increasingly divided political climate. Judy Woodruff explores that more for her ongoing series, America at a Crossroads.

Read the Full Transcript

Geoff Bennett: Half of all American adults say they sometimes get their news from social media. At the same time, almost two-thirds say they view social media as a bad thing for democracy, which raises the question, what responsibility do social media companies bear for our divided political climate?

Judy Woodruff explores that question as part of her ongoing series America at a Crossroads.

Katie McHugh, Former Extremist: Social media was my sad little life. I was a far right radical crazy young person who was a jerk. My personality was not pleasant.

Judy Woodruff: Less than a decade ago, Katie McHugh was a prominent figure in the online world of far right extremism. She was a writer and editor at the deeply conservative publication Breitbart, where she was especially known for her vitriolic tweets.

Katie McHugh: Whenever I was saying the really vile racist things that went viral, you find other right-wing people on social media, on Twitter, and you — if you follow each other, you boost each other, and then the network just expands.

And you say outlandish things to push the conversation that way. So you have this — the real-time interaction, real-time radicalization.

Judy Woodruff: McHugh has since rejected the far right. Today, she worries about her address being revealed, which is why we agreed to interview her in this hotel room.

Some of her viral tweets are still well-known.

I’m quoting: “Funny how Europeans assimilated, unlike Third Worlders, demanding welfare while raping, killing Americans.”

Katie McHugh: Yes, that’s what we believed. They’re taking our money, our taxes, people of color will rape the white women.

Judy Woodruff: You wrote: “It’s important to keep families together. We must deport anchor babies along with their illegal alien parents.”

Katie McHugh: Yes, the dehumanizing language I was using, they are alien, and they are dangerous, and they are existential threat. That’s what you believe on the right.

Judy Woodruff: And that’s what you believed at the time?

Katie McHugh: That’s what I believed at the time, yes, strongly.

Judy Woodruff: And then the day came when you tweeted this: “There would be no deadly terror attacks in the U.K. if Muslims didn’t live there.”

Katie McHugh: Yes, and that was the tweet that got me fired, and that was one of the best things that ever happened to me, to get me out of that environment.

Chris Bail, Polarization Lab, Duke University: Most of the things we try to do to discourage this tiny group of people who ruined the Internet have very limited impact.

Judy Woodruff: Chris Bail is the founder of Duke University’s Polarization Lab. His research focuses on how social media can be a driver of and a solution to political divisions. He says posts like McHugh’s get outsized attention.

Chris Bail: When we look at people who are highly politically active on Twitter, we find that about 70 percent of the content about politics is generated by just 6 percent of people, and those 6 percent of people are disproportionately very liberal or very conservative.

And so when we wander on to social media, we can wrongly conclude that everyone is extreme, and everyone is sort of out to get everyone else.

Judy Woodruff: Contrary to popular belief, Bail says, the problem is not so-called echo chambers, online bubbles where people only have their views reinforced.

Chris Bail: We recruited a large group of Republicans and Democrats who were using Twitter, and we thought, hey, if we could just show them some messages from the other side, that surely they would come to realize that there are two sides to every story.

Unfortunately, what we found at that time was that exposing people to the other side made them a little more polarized, not less.

Judy Woodruff: Which is fascinating, because that’s been the common assumption.

Chris Bail: Think about the last time that you saw a message from people you don’t agree with. Did it produce a kind of calm, rational deliberation about whether the idea had merit, or did it make you mad?

Judy Woodruff: Bail says the incentive structure on social media platforms leads to more extreme content rising to the top, as algorithms promote what gets high engagement, reactions, comments, and shares.

Chris Bail: We have made it all but impossible for people to gain status for sharing and voicing the moderate views that many of us think our country needs right now.

Taylen Harp, Mental Health Counselor: I have seen one too many posts talking negatively, namely about Black women. So I’m like, OK, this is when we turn this off.

Judy Woodruff: Taylen Harp is a mental health counselor in Raleigh, North Carolina, with expertise in serving people of color and members of the LGBTQ community.

She struggles with what she sees online.

Taylen Harp: If there is a lot of negative comments being made about Black women, if there’s a lot of negative commentary being made about the LGBTQ community, it’s one of those things where I’m disconnecting, I’m blocking those pages so that I am not constantly being fed with that.

Judy Woodruff: But she says social media has also helped her connect with her community.

Taylen Harp: Anything having to do with Black, indigenous people of color and also LGBTQ rights, different things happening within the LGBT community, that’s really where my focus comes to on social media.

Matt Perault, University of North Carolina: I do remain an optimist that, on balance, the technology, the developments that we will see will make our lives better.

Judy Woodruff: Matt Perault was the head of global policy development at Facebook until 2019. He’s now the director of the University of North Carolina’s Center on Technology Policy, which receives funding from Facebook’s parent company, Meta, among others.

Matt Perault: I was never in a meeting where someone said, here’s something that we could do that’s good for the world, and here’s another approach that’s going to be good for our bottom line that’s going to make us money, and people said, let’s just do the money approach and not the good for the world approach.

Judy Woodruff: Is there an inherent conflict here in — you have — these are for-profit companies that want to grow audience, they want to increase engagement. And what their mission is not always going to be consistent with promoting accurate information.

Matt Perault: I agree with what you’re hinting at in your question that isn’t necessarily aligned with the public good. It might not be good for the world if it’s a more connected world.

That, I think, is a good rationale for smart regulation of the tech industry where there are those kinds of market failures that produce harms.

Judy Woodruff: I asked him about Meta’s decision to reinstate former President Trump after he had been banned for praising people involved in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Matt Perault: It is not clear to me that censorship results in stronger outcomes down the road. President Trump didn’t disappear just because his content wasn’t hosted on Meta. He started his own social network. He has lots of followers on that social network and he posts there regularly.

Becky Lew-Hobbs, Moms For Liberty: There’s the truth and there’s your opinion. And so people have muddied that.

Judy Woodruff: Becky Lew-Hobbs chairs the Wake County, North Carolina, chapter of the conservative advocacy group Moms For Liberty. She says she’s gotten hateful messages online after her group called for removing school library books that include descriptions of sex or discussions of gender identity.

Becky Lew-Hobbs: There’s a difference between not liking a statement I make and making somebody angry versus somebody wishing harm, death on you, a family member.

Judy Woodruff: I mean, is it your sense that the people in charge of content with these different social media platforms should do a better job of policing themselves, monitoring themselves?

Becky Lew-Hobbs: It gets really slippery when some bot or programmer tries to determine without true thought. What is offensive and what is not. That’s not a free platform.

Chris Bail: At the end of the day, these are businesses, these are corporations. And even though many of us don’t like the fact that corporations are now in charge of democracy’s public square, it’s de facto what has happened.

Judy Woodruff: Bail’s Polarization Lab has begun to develop tools they think could reduce conflict online, including an A.I.-powered assistant.

Chris Bail: Last year, Nextdoor, the social media platform that allows neighbors to connect to each other, came to us and they said, we have got a lot of toxic language going on. How can we identify solutions that are both good for society and profitable?

Judy Woodruff: Bail’s team helped Nextdoor employ A.I. to suggest less divisive language to its users.

Chris Bail: And this resulted in a 15 percent decrease in the use of toxic language on their platform. So these are real solutions that are low-hanging fruit that I think could be implemented with minimal cost to social media companies.

Judy Woodruff: So you’re saying these are things that companies would have to be persuaded would, frankly, raise revenue, right?

Chris Bail: Yes, I do think they — of course, they care about revenue. They’re beholden to shareholders. Much as I might not like that and many people might not like that, that is the reality.

Katie McHugh: These social media platforms, they’re disincentivized from cutting down on right-wing rhetoric, because again, it’s a moneymaker. It’s a huge moneymaker. Racism is very profitable.

Judy Woodruff: To help her work through her own painful experience, Katie McHugh reached out to counselors who help individuals leave hate groups and move beyond extremism.

Katie McHugh: I was very lucky and blessed to have people who I trusted completely helped me extricate myself from everything. And I described it as pulling shrapnel out of your brain. What I believed was vile, and I didn’t want to be that person anymore.

Having that community in place stops and defuses so much of the hatred, because a lot of online isolation will cause that.

Chris Bail: There are a lot of angry people in our country, and one way to understand what social media does is, it gives those people more of a platform.

And I worry that if we point all the blame at social media and don’t do a little bit of introspection, that we will be unhappy with the result.

Judy Woodruff: For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Judy Woodruff in Durham, North Carolina.