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In economics, moving from a concentrated market with a handful of dominant players to a highly competitive small player market usually considers good things. But when these players are targeting different consumer sets are alternative versions of reality as we know, it is not so clear that society benefits.
For all attention to disinformation, a narrow focus on objective untruths distracts us from a much more fundamental shift. Democratic risk of emerging are not so much that people believe in false things – they always have them. It is that they no longer believe the same things as each other, fake or otherwise.
If this sounds overpriced, try a recent example. In January, after Elon Musk attracted fresh attention to British scandals with his gangs through his social media platform X, Nearly half of reform voters in the UK They said they had heard of the story in the news in recent days, compared to only one of 10 work voters or LIB DEM.
This is not so much a question of whether a particular information is true or false, as well as whether different people have encountered the same information at all.
In the past, the established media organizations have largely followed the same agenda, within national borders. But in more and more without the limit and a broken information environment, the old goalkeepers and norms They get around more and more.
This has led to a liquid bifurcation Publishing on network platforms, including social media, in open areas of right -wing and left, where different programs abound. As a double citizen X and Bluesky, there are clear differences in topics I see on two platforms.
Here’s another one Discourse disinformation weakness: that this is a unique problem on one “side”. Research reveals that although American conservatives are on average likely to trust false statements about climate change, liberals More likely to trust false statements about nuclear energy. Other studies From now on, they reveal that those who went to college are no better judges about the truth of news than those who have only high school education.
I do not point out that I criticize any particular group. Quite the opposite. I do this to emphasize that most people – left, right, more and less educated – simply do not examine every claim they encounter.
People are su-maximizers of efficiency, looking for shortcuts at every opportunity. It is true that the vast majority of us will never invest the fact of checking the facts or evaluating all the information we consume. If it seems convincing and comes from a source that we don’t actively believeThat’s good enough.
Combine this heuristics with explosion Information providers upgradewhich tend to act in pockets unprecedented fragmented media landscapes, and you will get interesting results.
While evidence of the echo and bubbles of the filter were mixed To date, most research has preceded a very recent shift to Finely adjusted algorithms of real -time recommendations.
Analyzing data from the British election studio, I found that people who received their news from Tictok are more likely to become supporters of reforms in the UK between 2021 and 2024. From those who are not, even after control of age, gender and education.
Significantly, the pattern is much stronger in men than women, in accordance with the idea that different groups now populate rather different information and political environments on the Internet – even within the same platforms.
Similarly, in Germany, A strong presence of a ticter Some believe both of AFD and Die Linke who have increased their support among young men and women, contributing to a Stark native gap Between the patterns of the Youth of the Germans in last month’s elections.
The connection between this fragmentation and democratic dysfunction shows wherever you look. American Polarized media ecosystem It matches far wider political divisions than in nations with more cohesive media landscapes. Longitudinal studies find Divided media create polarized policy.
And looking through age ranges, young people, whose sources of information differ the most from previous generations and from the other (in the sense of young men and young women), now show the widest ideological division on many measures.
AND disinformation discourse It will undoubtedly rush, but like a teenager glued to the screen, it misses a wider context.
John.burn-murdoch@ft.com,, @jburnmurdoch
Data sources and methodology
The analysis of connection between the use of the Tictoka and the support of UK reforms in the general election was conducted by using waves 21 and 28 British election studies, following the same British adults over several years, measuring their political views and other attitudes over time.
The logistics regression model has been used to predict the likelihood that someone who votes in the UK reform in the 2024 elections will be conditioned for their previous support and self-administration on the political ladder of the left and right three years earlier), their use of different social media platforms, as well as their gender, age and education. Interaction conditions are included for the interconnection between the social media and sex platforms, assuming that different people can see different facilities on each platform.
You can find r code to reproduce analysis here.
