Divided We Fall
Armon Owlia: Coming up on “This American Divide…”
President Donald Trump: “Let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue…”
Owlia: “Things are bad. Really bad. And I want to know why.”
Todd Washburn: “We all live in our own information bubbles…”
Ceally Smith: "The shift for me was when Epstein was arrested for the allegations that he was being arrested for."
Owlia: “Let’s put the house together again.”
Owlia: Do you like what you see?
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Michael Smerconish: Is social media harmful? That’s the question being raised and debated.
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Joe Fryer: We’ve got families all over the country who are dealing with this.
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Tom Costello: As anti-Semitic content has surged on Twitter after Elon Musk, who emphasized free speech, took full control. Use of the N-word also jumped 500 percent.
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Jo Ling Kent: After close reviews of the President’s recent tweets, it banned him, “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
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President Joe Biden: It was an enraged mob that had been whipped up into a frenzy.
Alisyn Camerota: The alleged attacker posted conspiracy theories on Facebook.
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Brian Latimer: The social media business is evolving a lot these days.
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Alisyn Camerota: “Spider-Man” star Tom Holland announcing he’s taking a break from social media for the sake of his mental health.
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Jake Tapper: Cherished ideals of free speech are in the hands of erratic billionaires.
Owlia: It’s time to examine “This American Divide.”
Owlia: It was just another Wednesday morning in January, about 9 o'clock. I was doing my usual morning routine, sitting in the kitchen of my San Francisco home, having an early hot chocolate. Looking through the news cycle and reviewing social media feeds had provided nothing but disappointment. Another Donald Trump tweet. Another conspiracy theory. Another casualty of misinformation. It’s been years of this. First, it was "Build The Wall," then it was "Drain The Swamp," next, "Fake News," "Fine People On Both Sides," then "COVID Is Not A Big Deal." All were manufactured by Trump or those in his camp, then endorsed through inaction by his party's leadership.
Marty McFly: Grays. Sports. Almanac.
Owlia: I’m reminded of "Back To The Future II" where Biff stole the almanac from Marty in 2015 and gave it to himself in 1955. Writer Bob Gale claimed that he and Robert Zemeckis modeled it after what they thought America would’ve looked like if Trump became President. A chaos-ridden, dystopic, casual-disregarding-of-the-facts America, with bullets flying everywhere and constantly putting your head on a swivel whilst one man’s name was constantly in lights whether you liked it or not. The world may have laughed in 1989, saying, "This is just fiction." We aren’t laughing now. But back to the kitchen. On this January morning, the buzz phrases de-jour were "The election was stolen/rigged" and "Stop The Steal," despite every piece of evidence, every judge, and every election official pointing to the contrary. Trump and his party's most influential representatives refused to admit defeat against then-President-elect Joe Biden. A perfect backdrop for the certification of said election inside the walls of the U.S. Capitol.
Amy Klobuchar: Mr. President, the certificate of the electoral vote of the State of Arizona seems to be regular in form and authentic and it appears…
Owlia: Watching the certification on CNN, I decided to flip through the channels to see who else was covering it.
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Owlia: FOX wasn’t showing the certification. Instead, they covered a rally in front of the White House, with Trump giving a speech to his followers, urging them to not give up on their claims the election was stolen. And then...
President Donald Trump: We're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And we're going to the Capitol, and we're going to try and give. The Democrats are hopeless — they never vote for anything. Not even one vote. But we're going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don't need any of our help. We're going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Owlia: Donald Trump, the President of the United States, on national television, had given a crowd of his supporters permission to march down to the Capitol and interfere in a democratic process. I proceeded to watch every moment of the January 6 insurrection in utter horror. Tear gas flying everywhere, rising like the tension on the Capitol steps, providing a foggy atmosphere during which you could make out the supporters scaling the walls, and breaking the windows. Absolutely unimaginable sights playing out in front of the eyes of the nation. How did we allow ourselves to become this badly divided? Don't get me wrong: I've known how divided America has been for quite a while. The numbers show since the mid-1990s, Americans have been moving like an iceberg towards the ideological extremes of their parties. According to academics and researchers alike, America is more divided now than at any time since the Civil War.
Todd Washburn: My name is Todd Washburn. I teach a course called "The Polarization of American Politics" that I've taught since the fall of 2019.
Owlia: Washburn teaches the course at the Harvard Extension School.
Washburn: The number of people who identify as Liberal or Conservative or who place themselves at one end of the scale has gone up significantly. On top of that that, ideological thinking has been on the rise. So more and more people actually think in consistent ideological terms. And therefore, the gap between, say, the average Democrat and the average Republican in terms of how they think on the issues has grown.
Owlia: To me, the parties were just two sides of the same screwed-up coin. And I’m not the only one. 27 percent of Americans, according to a recent Pew study, also hold a negative perception of both political parties. So we’ve established that things are bad. Really bad. And I want to know why. In looking for a starting point, I realized, after conversations with friends, family, and old acquaintances, the best place to begin was social media.
Washburn: The most extreme voices get easily amplified on social media.
Owlia: After all, social media blew up around the time the cracks of polarization started to show in America. Since the launch of Facebook, arguably the most popular social media network in the world in 2004, the number of Americans who use social media has gone from 5 percent to, now, 72 percent. That's unprecedented in the world of communication. However, as great as social media has been, and it has been great, there is a dark side that, only now, is starting to be acknowledged.
Ceally Smith: I would say that I was a believer of QAnon at one time.
Owlia: Ceally Smith is a 34-year-old entrepreneur, mother-of-two, and mental health advocate based in Kansas City, Missouri, who was introduced to QAnon by her then-boyfriend.
Smith: I think for him, he wanted us to have that connection. So it was important for him to have it be important for me, too, for us to grow closer together. And it just wasn't, it just wasn't something I was interested in. It didn't seem like a logical thing to put my time and energy into, but I knew for him it was important, so, I would do my best to try to act interested. But that's how I first got introduced to the movement and everything that was involved in it at first.
Owlia (in conversation with Smith): In the 2016 election between Trump and Hillary, you didn't vote, correct?
Smith: I didn’t.
Owlia (in conversation with Smith): So describe to me the moment when you first got into QAnon.
Smith: The shift for me was when Epstein was arrested for the allegations that he was being arrested for.
Owlia: QAnon theories had claimed that then-financier Jeffrey Epstein was a serial sexual predator.
Smith: "Wait a minute. I have been hearing so much through my partner that I was with at the time and seeing his posts or other people comment about this Epstein character, and now he's being arrested. So now there's some validity to what this movement is saying." And I decided to do my own research, and that is when it started for me.
Owlia: What I learned from Ceally is that this is more than a political issue. The problems with social media and political polarization come from multiple angles, each showing us different avenues that we need to explore to fully understand it all. Sure, there may not be an easy conclusion. In life, there rarely is. Indeed, one of the issues of storytelling on any level, including the news, is that we tend to package things into a neat, tidy narrative. Reality does not have that luxury at the end of the day. I’m reminded of Socrates’ famous remark, "The only thing I know for sure is that I know nothing." With that inspiration, let's blank slate this issue for the moment and start with what we do know. It seems that America is more polarized than ever, and there are many reasons for it. It didn’t appear out of thin air. It’s been around for a while. However, such extreme polarization has only become tremendously apparent within the past five years. One of these reasons is social media. The problems with social media, for all intents and purposes, have been known for almost a decade and have not only created and pronounced cracks in the foundation of the house known as American society, but it has also found ways to divide it further. Once again, Todd Washburn from Harvard University.
Washburn: Social media, obviously, the Internet, that sort of thing, have allowed us all to sort ourselves into online and geographic communities of people with whom we share similar values and lifestyle choices. You know, it's almost a cliche to say that we all live in our own information bubbles. But it's true, it's a cliche because it's true, and the Internet and the social media allows us to do that.
Owlia: We must look to the future, where we will find solutions and ensure that social media is safer for us and future generations, and ultimately creates a culture that rewards people who share the truth and punishes those who spread lies and misinformation, including the companies themselves. But before all that, we must look at our present in more ways than one. We must examine America's most influential people and companies who create the products with no limitations and no regulation.
Mark Zuckerberg: When we first launched, we were hoping for 400, 500 people. Harvard didn’t have a face book, so, that’s the gap that we were trying to fill and, now, we’re at 100 thousand people, so, who knows where we’re going next?
Owlia: We must understand the people of America who use the products and fall prey…
Smith: Further getting into QAnon and digging deeper and spending time researching and taking that time away from my business, most importantly, my family, and above all, my, my own health, I started mentally breaking.
Owlia: The algorithms that not only bring people back to the product but also create a perpetual spread of misinformation…
Sharon McMahon: You get fed more information that they, that the algorithm believes you're interested in. So, it increases these sort of silos of, you know, or echo chambers, if you will. That leads us to believe, you know, a certain viewpoint and that this is the correct viewpoint because we're constantly surrounding ourselves with only that viewpoint; it becomes difficult to see what other people are thinking.
Owlia: And the political agents who feed the fire and system while receiving the money from companies and doing very little despite the warnings…
Frances Haugen: During my time at Facebook, I came to realize a devastating truth: almost no one outside of Facebook knows what happens inside of Facebook.
Owlia: However, the most critical and probably the most challenging thing we need to investigate, not just in complexity but also introspectively, is ourselves. We must look inward, one of the most difficult things to do, and maybe even consider that we're not only part of the problem but also vulnerable. We must realize that our overall human nature, behaviors, and evolutionary process that have helped us survive for millions of years are being taken advantage of. If we don't stop it, we could lose even more than we already have. Let's put the house together again. But first, we need to learn from our history and our mistakes. Time to fire up the DeLorean.
