The Truth About America's 'Divide' That Social Media Won't Tell Us

What 77% of Americans agree on and why it matters more than politics.

Dear Friends,

I first thought I had covid, but after further tests, I learned I have had pneumonia. It is good to be back.

Today in the U.S. is election day. If you have not already, I urge you to go vote. Your voice is important!

xoxo, WRW

THE TRUTH ABOUT AMERICA’S ‘DIVIDE’ THAT SOCIAL MEDIA WON’T TELL US:
What 77% of Americans agree on and why it matters more than politics.

We are our stories. An amalgamation of our life experiences.

Each of us has stories that are beautiful, joyous, and triumphant coupled with others that are bitter, heart wrenching, and evoke feelings of shame or regret.

Our stories shape who we are, how we see the world, and our place in it. The resulting perspectives are meaningful and unique, creating our viewpoints, beliefs, and values. Our background tinting the lens through which we interpret, feel, and engage. Giving birth to what makes us tick, including our biases.

Together our histories are the collective threads that make this American quilt known as the United States.

The 2024 U.S. Presidential election underway at this very moment, is one of those intense communal events shaping America, of which we each have our own unique vantage point of what is important and what is at stake.

Uncertainty, sometimes, is painfully hard for me. Other times, it’s not at all, and I flow with it easily. Right now, I feel within and around me, a collective vibration. An energy permeating. A low level, yet frenetic simmer. I’m hoping we don’t boil over.

I remind myself that everything is always happening for our best. This I believe. Even the discomfort, the set backs, and disappointments are for our greatest outcome. I breathe. Forcing myself to tap into a long, slow, deep, recalibrating breath. We will be fine great. We are exactly where we need to be. Today is a great day. I can. I will.

In the #1 international bestselling book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari invokes us to critically reflect…

“So why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.”

We study history to expand our consciousness and understanding, thereby enabling us to recognize that we have more possibilities than we could ever imagine.

We are not bound by the past. And the future is unknowable, awaiting to see the endless ways we may rise to meet the road ahead of us.

Last week the remaining results of the New York Times/Siena College nationwide poll of likely voters was released. Answers to three questions in the late October poll jumped out to me and genuinely made me feel hopeful.

First, when voters were asked whether they thought of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris supporters as “fellow Americans who you disagree with politically” or “the enemy.”  Among all respondents — both Harris and Trump supporters — 77% said they view these supporters as their fellow Americans verses 16% who said they were the enemy.

Specifically, 78% of Harris supporters described Trump supporters as fellow Americans, while 17% saw them as enemies. Similarly, 84% of Trump supporters considered Harris supporters as fellow Americans, compared to 12% who did not.

Reading this reassured me in our shared common humanity and unity as Americans over Party. I am leaning into this.

For the research shows that the “divide” is more a narrative construct the mainstream media, social media, and the candidates themselves would have us believe when the real truth is something quite entirely different.

Which leads me into the next two questions I found perversely reassuring, too.

Likely voters were also asked whether they considered a range of subjects, including Social Media and Mainstream Media, to be “good, bad, or neither good nor bad for democracy.”

Specifically, voters were asked if they viewed Social Media as good, bad, or neither good nor bad for democracy, of which 51% of respondents found the platforms to be bad for democracy. When asked how they viewed Mainstream Media, 55% of respondents responded that Mainstream Media is bad for democracy.

Over 50% of the polled voters, representing a subset of the greater population, see social media sites and the major news networks as nefarious and not trustworthy.

I find these statistics extremely hopeful for they show that more people than not understand that these sources need to be engaged with skeptically, with eyes wide open, and their critical thinking caps on.

People are waking up.

In the early days of building Facebook, Founder Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker, Facebook’s first President, strategically employed psychological hacks to exploit a vulnerability in the human mind. As Parker recalled at a media conference years later, he and Zuck learned that they needed to give us a little dopamine hit in order to get us to contribute more content and engage more with the platform and others on it.

The name of the game was, and still is, to increase user engagement via the “social-validation feedback loop.”

In his book The Chaos Machine, Max Fisher, former international reporter for the New York Times where he contributed to a series about social media that was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, writes

“The early conventional wisdom, that social media promotes sensationalism and outrage, while accurate, turned out to drastically understate things. An every-growing pool of evidence, gathered by dozens of academics, reporters, whistleblowers, and concerned citizens, suggests that its impact is far more profound. This technology exerts such a powerful pull on our psychology and our identity, and is so persuasive in our lives, that it changes how we think, behave, and relate to one another. The effect, multiplied across billions of users, has been to change society itself.”

Social media technology manipulates the parts of our brain susceptible to being hijacked, such as our attention, and employs tactics to create addictive behavior.

Much like the electronic cigarette companies use the exact same playbook as Big Tobacco to get people hooked. So, too, does Big Tech use parallel plays to get us addicted to living on their social media platforms as casinos use to get people addicted to gambling. Yet, how many of us would choose to hang out in a casino off an on all day, every day, let alone let our kids gamble against the stacked House for hours each day?

Further research and development found that dialing into morality — and specifically outrage — is a pivotal lever that drives social media engagement.

“Popular culture often portrays morality as emerging from our most high-minded selves,” says Fisher. The angel sitting on our shoulder whispering into our ear.

However, sentimentalism, supported by neurological research, says our morality is motivated by conformity and reputation management. When faced with a moral dilemma, before our conscious, reasoning mind has a chance to step in, our emotions have already decided our perspective and response.

The fact that our feelings are first in control, not our rational mind, means that our emotions are freely open to be manipulated by propaganda, extremist, agendas, and bad actors, simply by “rallying people to their side by triggering outrage — often at some scapegoat or imagined wrongdoer.”

Hello cancel culture!

“The platforms, they concluded, were reshaping not just online behavior but underlying social impulses, and not just individually but collectively, potentially altering the nature of ‘civic engagement and activism, political polarization, propaganda, and misinformation.’ They called it the MAD model, for the three forces rewiring people’s minds. Motivation: the instincts and habits hijacked by the mechanics of social media platforms. Attention: users’ focus manipulated to distort their perceptions of social cues and mores. Design: platforms that had been constructed in ways that train and incentivize certain behaviors.” ~ The Chaos Machine

Infractions are met with moral outrage, a highly combustable combination of anger plus disgust. And moral outrage equals more engagement. Which is exactly what social media platforms eschew to our feeds via their algorithms — fringe, extreme, emotionally triggering content.

“Our worst biases and impulses activated many times beyond their baseline. Our basest instincts, which we have worked over eons to contain under the seal of civilization, suddenly amplified and distorted at world-altering scales. Billions of individuals pulled a few notches toward tribalism, aggression, and distrust, the consequences visible at every tier of public and private life.” ~ The Chaos Machine

Betsy Levy Paluck, Princeton professor and winner of the MacArthur Foundation ‘genius grant,’ conducted research that found ‘social referents’, those who drive the most engagement are purposefully, disproportionally, and artificially put in front of us on our social media feeds regardless of the value, thoughtfulness, or truth of what they have to say. These ‘superposters,’ at best, heavily influence, at worst, control our culture by being the loudest, most vitriolic, moral outrage creators, manipulating the emotions and thus moral decisions of billions.

Jonathan Haidt shares this insight in his book The Righteous Mind.

“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us to the ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”

His wisdom succinctly sums up the U.S. Presidential election on social media. The platforms are hijacking our minds to “bind and blind” us to representations that are sensationalized and polarizing.

And yet, I absolutely find so much hope in the end of that last line. “… each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”

We have a choice in how we move forward regardless of what happens when the ballots are tallied. When so many of us are feeling uncertain, not only of what the outcome will mean for each of us independently, but also collectively as Americans, as a country, as a democracy, we need to remember that we have agency in how we show up and move forward.

Perhaps our agency begins with taking Max Fisher’s advice:

“Cut the cord. Free yourself. Set new norms that treat these technologies as what they are: poison. The new cigarettes.”

Lastly, according to author Jim Rohn, we “are the average of the five people [we] spend the most time with.” That is to say, the five people who have the greatest influence on us, profoundly shape who we are. Let us pick very carefully who we give our attention to, online and off, and who we take our moral cues from.

And let’s remember that we are more united than divided when we get out of the algorithmic rabbit hole.

Have a great day. Sending you and yours my love!