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In economics, the transition from a concentrated market with a handful of dominant players is usually considered a good thing to a highly competitive small player market. However, when products that these players focus on different sets of consumers are alternative versions of reality as we know it is not so clear that the company benefits society.
For all the attention paid to misinformation, the close focus on objective deception distracts us from a much basic shift. The emerging democratic risk is not so much that people believe false things – they always have. It is that they no longer believe the same things as each other, false or otherwise.
If it sounds exaggerated, try a recent example. In January, after Elon Musk alerted fresh attention to the British gang scandal through his social media platform X, Almost half of the reform voters in the UK They said they have heard of the story in the news in recent days compared to one of the 10 voters Labor or Lib Dem.
This is not so the question of whether specific information is true or false if different people meet the same information at all.
In the past, established media organizations have largely managed the same news agenda within the national borders. But in increasingly without border and fragmented information environments, old guards and Standards They are increasingly bypass.
This led to the ongoing Bifurcation Publishing online platforms, including social media, to apparently true and left -wing spaces where various agendas are abound. As a dual citizen X and bluesky there are clear differences in the topics I see on both platforms.
Here's another weakness of misinformation discourse: That this is a unique problem on one “side”. Research finds that while American conservatives are on average to believe in a false statement of climate change more often, Liberal It is more likely to believe false statements about nuclear energy. Another study From the US, they find that those who attended college are not better judges for truthfulness than those who have only secondary education.
I do not show me to criticize any particular group. On the contrary. I do so to emphasize that most people – left, right, more educated – simply do not send any claims they encounter.
People are maxisers of efficiency and look for shortcuts on every occasion. The truth is that the vast majority of us will never invest time to check the facts or evaluate all the information we consume. If it seems credible and comes from a source that we actively do not trustThat's good enough.
Combine this heuristics with explosion Information providerswho tend to act in pockets unprecedented fragmented media environment and get interesting results.
While the evidence of the echoes of the chambers and the filter bubbles were mixed To date finely tuned algorithms of real -time recommendations.
When I analyzed data from the British election study, I found that people who received their news from Tiktoku became more often supporters of the UK reform in 2021 and 2024 than those who do not, even after age, gender and education.
In particular, the pattern in men is much stronger than women, which is in line with the idea that different groups now inhabit quite different information and political environment online – even on the same platforms.
Similarly in Germany Strot tiktok presence Afd and Die Linke are about some that some have strengthened support between young men and women, which contributes to ka Stark Gender Gap Among the voting patterns of young Germans in the elections last month.
Wherever you look, there is a link between this fragmentation and democratic dysfunction. America Polarized media ecosystem It is compared from much wider political divisions than in nations with more cohesive media landscapes. Longitudinal study find The divided media provokes polarized policy.
And looking at the age range, young people whose information sources differ most from previous generations and from each other (as regards young men and young women), now show the widest ideological abyss for many measures.
The disinformation discourse It will undoubtedly be a doubt, but like a teen glued to the screen, there is no wider context.
john.burn-murdoch@ft.com, @jburnmurdoch
Sources of data and methodology
Analysis of the Association between Tiktok's use and support of the UK reform in the British General Elections has been carried out by means of waves of 21 and 28 British election studies that have been following the same British adults over several years and measure how their political views and other attitudes change over time.
The logistics regression model was used to predict the likelihood that someone voted for the reform of the UK in the elections by 2024, conditional on previous support and self -unification in the political left right scale (measured three years earlier), their use of various social media platforms and their gender, age and level of education. Interactions were included for interplay between social media and sex platform, provided different people can see different content on each platform.
You can find the code R for reproducing the analysis here.
