Transcript

What should you do if you're spending too much time on social media asking for a friend? Well, you try to convince yourself that social media is actually good for Well, something, it's got to be good for something, right? But they say that social media increases polarization and gets you stuck in echo chambers full of fake news and so on. How bad is social media? That's what we'll talk about today. Social media has changed society profoundly. About 60% of the world's population now uses social media. It has made it vastly easier to find people all over the globe to connect with them and to get insulted by them. What does that do to society? It's complicated.

American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and sociologist Chris Beyer have compiled a public google doc in which they collect references on questions such as, does social media make people angrier, and does social media create political echo chambers? The most relevant thing you learn from this document is that whatever your opinion, you can find a paper that supports it. Honestly, I began working on this video thinking it will end up being one big shrug, because that's how sociology generally looks like to a physicist, but it turns out it isn't quite as bad. You just have to be really careful with phrasing the question. For example, you may remember the headlines claiming that fake news spreads faster than the truth. Then again, there were headlines saying that those headlines about fake news were themselves fake news. What is going on? Well, the original headlines were based on a 2018 paper published in Science by researchers at MIT.