Why the Internet Veered Right

As countries became more educated, their political views moved in a liberal direction. So, religious tolerance increased, and attitudes toward minorities became more favorable. In the digital age, there was a sharp reversal to intolerance and hatred. Why?

The idea that education promotes liberal views is sometimes referred to as the modernization thesis or the secularization thesis. The central concept is that as people become more educated, they also become more open-minded and tolerant, and less committed to dogma. In the digital era, we are exposed to more information than ever before. Why do we not become increasingly liberal? A number of explanations are possible. Most involve the basic design of algorithms that run social media.

The Post-Truth World Is “Medieval”

In the world of social media, there is little fact-checking by platforms because they do not have the same exposure to legal liability that print media do. In this environment, it is difficult to check facts against reliable sources. In that uncertain world, opinions are as good as facts.

Conspiracy theories that lack any grounding in reality not only survive but may flourish, as seen with the QAnon hysteria about liberals abusing children. This particular delusion spread profusely around the globe. More recently, there has been a resurgence of Fascist beliefs on TikTok, particularly among younger people.

Such extremist movements invoke a black-and-white morality where the in-group is good and the out-group is bad. In such “medieval” morality, out-group members are considered fair game for merciless punishment. In most cases, this is rhetorical, but it occasionally spills over into the real world in the form of race riots inflamed by social media.

Division of a society into groups that see each other as mortal enemies rather than people who differ in party or opinion can clearly be aggravated by social media. This phenomenon is related to the software design of the social media algorithms that maximize user engagement.

Social Media Algorithms Are Biased and Monetize Hatred

Social media algorithms maximize user attention. Attention is monetized through advertising. These algorithms use outrage to gin up user interest. In effect, they monetize hate. This is not a careless choice of words. Indeed, there are numerous examples of social media platforms fomenting violence.¹ One example is the Facebook-mediated genocide in Myanmar. Another is the January 6 insurrection in the U.S. Capital in 2020 that was organized on encrypted platforms like Signal and Parler.

Social media companies are shielded by freedom-of-expression principles in the United States and elsewhere although that situation is changing, particularly in Europe.

Promoting hate speech lays the groundwork for right-wing propaganda. This is because right-wing authoritarians believe that we live in a dangerous world where we must be willing to fight for our own group interests.² They strongly favor in-groups and are hostile to perceived out-groups. The post-truth climate feeds into this mindset.

A Lack of Reliable Sources Encourages Tribal Loyalty

If there are no longer any reliable arbiters of truth, then people identify with stories that confirm their group loyalty. Trump's claim that he had won the 2020 U.S. presidential election is one conspicuous example. Why did his followers go along with an obvious self-serving lie? They did so because this confirmed their identity as supporters.

This is a surprising move in a secular organization like a political party, but it is standard fare in religious communities. Religious groups require their members to accept preposterous claims as fact. This might be salvation from a world-ending flood in an alien spaceship, or the more familiar claim that people who are long dead will come back to life. Fudging election results is a small test of human credulity by comparison. So, how do we explain the counter-intuitive rightward shift in digital era politics? There is no simple explanation.

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All of the Above?

If a person fancied themselves as a social engineer and wished to promote right-wing politics, they could do no better than to bring an unregulated Internet to a society that lacked one. This is exactly what happened in Myanmar where Facebook was introduced as the only form of social media. This provoked an ugly genocide based on widespread belief in extremist propaganda disseminated on the platform.¹

The extraordinarily successful Facebook algorithm was explicitly designed to promote engagement. Facebook engineers' algorithms boosted hate speech because this generates maximum engagement.¹ The view that out-groups are dangerous and evil feeds into conservative preconceptions about a dangerous world and would make targets amenable to extremist right-wing propaganda. This vulnerability is seen in younger people who would normally be the most liberal generation but are shifting right given their considerable exposure to social media.