“There is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America… the pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats.” Obama addressed themes of togetherness in his 2004 DNC address, putting forth a hopeful vision of a unified, empathetic nation that could agree to disagree. A nation that could reach across the aisle, that wasn’t polarized. Yet with echo chambers seemingly everywhere, from red states to blue states, is that true anymore?
Those already in echo chambers often would rather wrap themselves further in the comforting confirmation bias of a friend’s agreement. As Lynch writes in “Kick This Rock”, to “take our perception as reality” just feels better. Of course, social media algorithms also play a part in reinforcing divisions. Your news feed is tailored to your interests. While this has some epistemic benefits, as it prioritizes articles and information the algorithm thinks you want to know about, it creates a bubble molded to the reader’s political bias. The reader might think they’re consuming a ‘correct’ media diet of truthful information, with accurate statistics, but they are unknowingly furthering belief polarization.
Furthermore, echo chambers become self-insulating and self-repairing, as any differing opinions are seen as conspiracies, and any differing presented facts are lies. Consider, for instance, the recent election. Fox News, one of if not the right-leaning media network, declared Arizona for Joe Biden after consulting with their election analysts. Arnon Mishkin, sat at the Decision Desk, doubled down on the call even as President Trump and leading conservative figures lambasted him for the call. Because Fox News no longer asserted what people believed, it was seen as false.
Echo chambers already discourage epistemic growth by limiting people from acquiring and updating their knowledge with new information. But what’s more worrying is when polarization turns violent. Take for instance the conspiracy theory QAnon, which has emerged from the depths of 8chan and Reddit to reach the U.S. House of Representatives. Its central message is that President Trump is going to save the world from a globalist cult of child traffickers. What would be just another conspiracy theory — albeit one saturated with antisemitic dog whistles — has instead been designated by the FBI as a potential domestic terrorism threat.
Despite many of Q’s predictions ending in failure, supporters of QAnon have stayed faithful, constructing walls of double-think to explain away inconsistencies in Q’s messaging. This is how echo chambers seal off from the outside epistemic world: new information and fact-checking simply doesn’t work anymore, because those inside the bubble take the knowledge as concrete ‘proof’ of the ‘deep-state’s’ plot.
In this way echo chambers filter out dissent, until the only members left are those who agree with the core message. But reaching across the aisle is still possible; there are forums filled with the stories of people who left QAnon. Perhaps then, the cure to too much of the same opinions is the vast sea of information available to us; we need peer past those who agree with us and connect with others. Would you stick your looking-glass outside your media bubble? Would the rest of America do so, and what would we see?
