Social media and political polarization in America | 60 Minutes

With midterm elections in just two days, America is in a very angry moment.

Republicans attack Democrats, and Democrats return fire. Social media is a showcase of our anger.

An analysis by the New York Times this fall found that online use of the phrase civil war has exploded.

Now, leading voices in academia and tech are saying that rather than simply reflecting the polarization in society,

platforms like Facebook and Twitter are helping to create it.

60 Minutes first met Tristan Harris in 2017.

The co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology argued that social media platforms were addicting us to maximize profit.

Now, he's warning, they are generating billions by making us angry.

The story will continue in a moment.

The more moral outrageous language you use, the more inflammatory language, contemptuous language, the more indignation you use, the more it will get shared.

So we are being rewarded for being division entrepreneurs.

The better you are at innovating a new way to be divisive, we will pay you in more likes, followers and retweets.

In his 2020 documentary, The Social Dilemma, Tristan Harris made the case that social media platforms have hijacked our attention.

Now he cites a new study of Twitter showing that attacking political opponents is almost guaranteed to draw attention.

Each individual term referring to your political outgroup increased the odds of that post being retweeted or reshared by 67%.

Your outgroup being your opponents, people on the other side. Yeah, exactly.

These platforms, are they not just reflecting who we are and what we think and the divisions that are already there?

They're supercharging 100 or 1,000 times to one the worst parts of ourselves.

Here's an example from the day the Department of Justice released a photo showing classified documents in former President Donald Trump's Florida home.

A tweet highlighting a straight news story on the subject received about 2,000 likes.

But a tweet from a Republican congresswoman calling Trump's opponents dumbasses was liked 10 times as much.

And a tweet from the left labeling Donald Trump a traitor was liked 20 times more.

The straight news story, you know, got retweeted a couple of times. Right. The angry stories?

Exponentially more tweets. Exactly. Exactly. And, Harris says, anger skews the political landscape.

Why is it that the world knows more about Marjorie Taylor Greene than they know about all the other hundreds of congressional candidates?

It's because the enraging inflammatory stuff goes the most viral.

We are tribal creatures who love to do us versus them, and we're now learning to coexist with a technology that tries to force that down our throat, that tries to make us angry all the time.

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and professor at NYU's Stern School of Business.

In studying social media platforms' drive to keep us glued to our devices and to their ads,

he traces our current troubles to the invention of the like, share, and retweet features a decade ago.

These changes in the technology that made everything much more viral and explosive,

it's as though it gave everybody a dart gun. It's like it gave

everybody the ability to complain, attack, criticize anyone at any time in a very short space with no need for evidence, no accountability.

Height says the people most likely to fire their social media dart guns are those on the far right and the far left.

What percentage of the population are they? It's about seven or eight percent on each side. That's it? Yeah, that's right.

So the extremes have been handed the power to dominate, even though they are fewer in number. That's right. Exactly.

The moderate majority, Haidt says, is either exhausted or intimidated. It's what I call structural stupidity.

That is, you have very smart people, highly educated, highly intelligent,

but you put them in a situation in which dissent is punished severely, and what happens? They go silent.

And when the moderates or when anyone is afraid to question the dominant view, the organization, the institution gets stupid.

Take the case of Ronald Sullivan, a professor at Harvard Law School who was also the faculty dean of Winthrop House, an undergraduate residence hall.

In January 2019, Sullivan joined Harvey Weinstein's sexual assault defense team under the principle that every accused criminal is entitled to a robust defense.