The Internet is Worse Than Ever – Now What?

In 2022 nearly half of Americans expected  a civil war in the next few years, one in five now believes political violence  is justified. And it's not just the US but around the world. People increasingly  see themselves as part of opposing teams.

There are many different reasons  for this, but one gets blamed a lot: social media. Social media divides us,  makes us more extreme and less empathetic, it riles us up or sucks us into doom scrolling, making us stressed and depressed. It feels like we  need to touch grass and escape to the real world.

New research shows that we might have  largely misinterpreted why this is the case. It turns out that the social media  internet may uniquely undermine the way our brains work but not in the way you think. The Myth of the Filter Bubble You've probably heard about online filter bubbles:  Algorithms give you exactly what you want, or what they think you want.

You only see information  that shows you opinions that agree with yours, while dissenting opinions or information are  filtered out. Since you only see content close to your world view, more extreme and toxic opinions  suddenly seem less extreme. You are trapped in a radicalising filter bubble and your view of  the world becomes narrower and more extreme.

But is that true? Extreme filter bubbles seem to be rather rare Studies that investigated what people actually  look at online or are shown by search engines, found little evidence that you are ideologically  isolated. It is the exact opposite: Online you are constantly confronted with opinions  and world views that are not your own.

It turns out the place where you are the most  ideologically isolated is your real life, in the real world, with real people. Your  real world interactions with your friends, family, colleagues and neighbors are  much less diverse than your online bubble. The filter bubble exists  in your real life, not online.

Ok wait. Online filter bubbles have been  the prevailing explanation as to why we’ve all started hating each other more over the  last two decades. If that's not the case, shouldn’t the internet open our minds and  make us more empathetic with each other?

Unfortunately your brain is stupid. Your Brain is Stupid Human brains didn’t evolve to understand the true  nature of reality, but to navigate and maintain social structures. Our ancestors desperately  needed each other to survive, so our brains had to make sure we cooperated.

That's why social  isolation or exclusion feels so horrible, because it was actually life threatening. A tribe that  worked together survived, a divided tribe died. The way communities worked for  thousands of years is that, sure, you may have disliked a neighbour, but because  you lived close to each other, you also rooted for the same sports club or saw them at the church.

You both thought that the people from the other village were idiots. Being physically  close made you familiar and created similarities that bridged the gap of different world views so  you didn’t murder each other. And your world view was probably not that different in the first place  because it was formed by the same local culture.

When our brains evolved, this was enough. Whoever  was around, was similar to us. We liked what was similar to us – this kept us aligned enough  to work together despite our differences.

As humanity moved on from small tribes to towns  and cities, from chiefdoms to kingdoms to nations, our brains and our communities had to adapt to  more diverse sets of neighbours. We began to meet on the town square or in universities  where we argued and screamed at each other – but in the grand scheme of things  communities were still relatively isolated, we were still pretty similar and  aligned with the people around us. Conflict and disagreement are not  a bad thing per se.

Tension over how we should live can create new  and wonderful things. Our values, norms and taboos are always evolving  and whatever we think is normal today, will not be normal in the future. But we also  need social glue to hold our societies together, because our brains don’t care about the meta  level of humanity but about being safe in a tribe.

Until about 20 years ago  we did something truly new, that hit our brains like a freight train: the  social media internet, the digital town square. Don’t You Dare Disagree With Me – Social Sorting In a nutshell: Our brains are not able  to process the amount of disagreement we encounter on the social internet. The very  mechanisms that made it possible for our ancestors to work together in the first place  are derailed in ways we were not prepared for.

Whether you want it to or not, your brain  sorts people by world views and opinions, into teams. This is not simply tribalism, it goes further. Researchers have  called this process social sorting.

On the digital town square you encounter people  that express opinions or share information that clash with your worldview. But unlike your  neighbour, they don't root for your local sports club. You are missing the local social glue your  brain needs to align with them.

For your brain, the disagreement between yourself and them  becomes a central part of their identity. And this makes it less likely that  you will seriously consider their position or opinion in the future.  If you hear bad things about them, your brain is much more likely  to believe it uncritically.

On the flipside, there are people who  share your world view and are maybe even more similar to you than many people  in your real life. Which makes your brain like them a lot and kind of hyper align with  them. People who think like you are probably good people because you are a good person and  whatever social group you belong to is good!

So your brain is more likely to believe their  opinions. If you hear bad things about them, your brain is much more likely  to dismiss it uncritically. The engagement driven social internet makes it  worse because it wants to keep you online as long as possible.

And the most engaging emotion  is, unfortunately: Anger. The more angry you get, the more likely you are to share and engage,  and this leads to social media amplifying the most extreme and controversial opinions. It  optimises not only to show us disagreement, but the worst disagreement possible.

And because  your stupid brain is sorting people into teams, whatever the worst opinions are, it assigns the  same opinions to everybody on the other team. What is striking and new about online polarisation  is that all the aspects of our lives that make us individuals, our lifestyle choices, the  comedians or shows we watch, our religion, sense of fashion and so on are condensed,  making it seem that they are parts of opposing and mutually exclusive identities. This simplifies and distorts disagreements about how we should run society so much that  it often seems as if the people on the other team are actively, willfully making the  world worse.

That they are almost evil, beyond convincing with rationality, facts or civil  discussion. While you are of course on the correct team, it may be hard to process that you may  seem like that to people on the other team. On a societal level this is dissolving the  social glue that is the foundation of our democracies.

If we think our neighbours  are evil, how can we live together? This is especially bad in the US, where the  two party system makes it extra easy to think of people in terms of teams – negative opinion  about the other party has reached record highs. Ok.

Is there something we can learn  from this? Is there something we can do? Something more positive – Opinion Part In the end, It is important to be  aware of what social media does to your brain.

It's easier to change  yourself than to change the world, so you can self examine why you believe the  things you believe and whether you dismiss or believe information based on who the  person is who is stating that information. The internet comes with a lot of  ups and downs and just like we had to adapt from living in small tribes  to living in cities, we need to adapt to the information age where we have access to  billions of people. Evolution is too slow, so we need to find models that work with  what our brains are able to tolerate.

One model that seemed to work well was the pre  social media internet old people might remember: Bulletin boards, forums, blogs. The  main difference to today was twofold: For one there were no algorithms fighting to  keep you online at anycost – at some point you were done with the internet for the  day, as mind blowing as this may sound. But more importantly: The old internet  was very fractured, split into thousands of different communities, like small villages  gathering around shared beliefs and interests.

These villages were separated from each  other by digital rivers or mountains. These communities worked because they mirrored  real life much more than social media: Each village had its own culture and set of rules.  Maybe one community was into rough humour and soft moderation, another had strict rules and banned  easily.

If you didn’t play by the village rules, you would be banned – or you could just go and  move to another village that suited you better. So instead of all of us gathering in one  place, overwhelming our brains at a town square that in the end just leads to us  going insane, one solution to achieve less social sorting may be extremely simple:  go back to smaller online communities. Because what our stupid brains don’t realize  is that we are actually all on the same team: Humanity, on a wet rock speeding through space  in a universe that doesn’t think about us.

We are all in this together – but until our  brains adjust to being able to deal with that, we might be better off being a tiny bit separated. One of the worst things about the media we  consume is that most news organizations tend to cater to one team, making you  feel you are on the correct side. Ground News, the sponsor of this video, is  trying to make these biases more transparent by giving you tools that help you think  critically about the information you consume – a mission we wholeheartedly  support.

Ground News gathers related articles from around the world in one  place so you can compare how different outlets and sides cover them. They provide  context about the source of the information, if they have a political bias, how reliable  their reporting is and who owns them. This makes the news less stressful and makes you  understand the world much better.

If you want to check them out go to ground got news slash  nutshell. If you sign up through this link, you’ll get 30% off their unlimited access  plan. A subscription supports Kurzgesagt and Ground News, so they can continue  to build more media literacy tools.

Our favorite tool has a personal background:  in 2018 kurzgesagt founder Philipp, who wrote this video, was going through chemotherapy  and was intensely bored – so he ended up reading all the big German newspapers,  even the ones he hated, front to back, every single day. Aside from the obvious biases,  what was the most shocking were the stories each side did not talk about. Both sides ignored  things that are inconvenient to their world views.

The Ground News Blind spot feed highlights this  exact thing - showing you news stories that are heavily covered by one side of the political  spectrum and ignored by the other. So check them out at ground. news/nutshell  to make sure you’re seeing the full picture.