Episode 26: The Science of Depolarization (Interview with Dr. Lisa Schirch)

(Music) Society builders pave the way to a better world, to a better day. A united approach to building a new society. Join the conversation for social transformation, Society Builders Society Builders with your host, Duane Varan. (Duane) Welcome to another exciting episode of Society Builders, and thanks for joining the conversation for social transformation.

Today we continue our sequence of episodes exploring the science of depolarization, how we can help bring antagonistic groups closer together. Now, most of our previous episodes on this theme have explored solutions, and in some ways we've been talking about solutions before fully exploring the underlying problems and their causes. So today we're going to go back a step and dive in further on why we're seeing this explosion in polarization globally, what's behind it, what's helping cause it.

And today we're going to explore just one of these major drivers, an accelerant that's greatly fanning the flames of polarization. And here, of course, I'm talking about social media and how social media contribute to this polarization disease.

And my guest today is one of the world's leading authorities on this question, Dr. Lisa Schirch, who's the Senior Professor of the Practice of Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame and who is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Toda Peace Institute. She's the author of 11 books and countless academic articles exploring this theme, including her most recent book, Social Media Impacts on Conflict and Democracy: the Tech-tonic Shift.

So we're incredibly fortunate to have the benefit of her insights today. So Lisa, welcome to Society Builders. (Lisa) Thanks so much. Great to be here. (Duane) It's such a thrill to have you.

Your research has really been focusing on such a crucial question in this whole polarization arena, and that is about the role that social media play as this accelerant that's feeding this whole polarization machine. That's what we really want to talk about today.

It's kind of like there was this romantic period where when we were talking about technology, we talked about it in terms of how it was going to give voice to people, how it was going to unite people, how it was going to improve democracy. We're not talking about it quite like that anymore. Now it's like technology has suddenly become unbridled. And now we're fearing the consequence. I mean, it's a very different way that we view social media today than perhaps we did a few years back.

So maybe we can start here and talk about how it is that social media contribute to polarization. (Lisa) Sure, great question. A lot of people will point to the fact that there was polarization before social media. So it's not the origin of why people disagree with each other. And there are other factors also.

So I want to point out that political polarization through radio, through legacy know tv shows like Fox News and MSNBC, for example, we've had this creation of partisan media, and that is also part of polarization. But I think the contribution of social media to this phenomena of increasing dehumanization and hatred of each other, really, that it's played a big role, because the way that social media is designed rewards bad behavior.

So it actually amplifies the worst aspects of human behavior in terms of, if you can imagine us driving down the highway and there's an accident, and everyone slows down to look at the accident the same way on social media, when there's an argument, that's what draws people's attention. Social media is a lot like an amphitheater or more like a coliseum, where there's gladiators fighting in the center. So most people on social media are just watching.

I think it's often just 1% of people on social media that are behaving really badly, arguing with each other in a very dehumanizing way, but it's contagious. So while many people might not be arguing online, it's affecting people and what they think of the world online. And I would say it's the design of social media platforms as gladiator arenas where people come to fight, and the whole design of how it helps people watch that fighting. We can design social media in a different way.

It doesn't need to be amplifying those fighting people by putting them on the stage in the middle of all of us. And I think that it's what we call algorithms on social media that drive our attention to see who's fighting today. So the first thing when you open your computer in the morning, or you turn it on and you look at your Twitter or your Facebook, the algorithm is going to show you who is fighting. And so that's how it's a gladiator arena.

(Duane) So, Lisa, one of the themes we want to explore today is how intentional the social media push to polarization really know. I think people might assume that polarized content is naturally floating to the top, so to speak. People are clicking on content, and that's naturally resulting in polarized content being viewed. But actually, that's not the whole story. It's not happening naturally or by popular selection.

There are actually very deliberate forces that are biased to amplifying the polarized content, giving it a disproportionate voice. And there are a variety of reasons for this, which we want to explore. So, first, let's talk about commercial reasons why this kind of polarized amplification occurs. What commercial interests drive this amplification? (Lisa) ((Great question. So why companies want to highlight why their algorithms highlight who's fighting today.

Because, yeah, the profit is related to how long people stay online. So they make more money the longer each of us stays on their platform, because they show us more ads, the longer we're there. So they get money from advertisers for the minutes that a user is on the platform looking at that specific ad. So they get financially rewarded for keeping us there. What keeps us there are the fights and the arguments.

But we also have to realize that the longer we're on the platform, the more information these companies are gathering from us. So they're extracting personal data from each person on any of the platforms about who they're friends with, what they like, where they are, and all of that data is then sold to advertisers to be able to target ads more clearly and precisely.

So there's this twofold profit model where they want to have us stay there to watch ads, and they want us to stay there and watch other people's content so that they can gain more information about what we like and what ads to feed us in the future. So that makes sense. So there's this big money sign over us staying on the platforms longer. And emotional content, what we say is sort of false and deceptive and hateful content keeps people there longer. This is the neuroscience part of it.

It's often referred to as the attention economy. The idea that each of us has a limited attention every day. And all those tech companies, Netflix, eBay, Amazon, Facebook, they're all fighting for a minute of our day because they make more money the longer we're on their sites. Not all of the sites are making money in the same attention sort of way. It's mostly the social media companies, but they are all fighting for our attention.

So when you have a social media company that is letting users make their own content, and users learn that making outrageous content gets them more attention, because the algorithm is driving people toward extremist ideas, angry, hateful ideas, what we know is that politicians in Europe actually figured this out, that if they just posted a regular campaign ad, they would not get very much engagement.

But if they used inflammatory language, sort of like very emotionally engaging language, then the algorithm on Facebook would show that to lots of people. And so politicians are like, you're making us more polarized, because you've incentivized us to be outrageous in our political ads. And so this is how this algorithm. We call it algorithmic extremism, algorithms that reward extremist content, it's turning up the heat in all of our conversations.

(Duane) So we see how this commercial imperative contributes to the problem. But it's actually a lot more sinister and malicious than this, because there are also other forces driving this amplification of polarized content. And perhaps the most malicious is the cyber warfare that is taking place here. And this is all the more sinister because there are often foreign governments acting to destabilize our countries that are behind this.

Lisa, can you comment on how these kind of malicious forces drive polarization? (Lisa) Foreign governments, and especially Russia, learned how Facebook works a long time ago, and it was before the 2016 election in the United States. And we know this because a bipartisan republican democratic Senate Foreign Relations committee did a big research project on how Russia interfered in the US election in 2016, and they interfered by gaming this system.

In fact, foreign governments at that point could actually profit from creating fake ads about Hillary Clinton going to prison, creating a meme with Hillary Clinton behind bars. And this would then spread like wildfire because extremist content gets more attention. And there is an affordance, a design feature on Facebook that lets you share things with other people that wouldn't have to be there.

And one of our asks in the 2024 elections is, stop the share button during election seasons, because this is how false and deceptive information travels so quickly and so fast. But we know that Russia was doing that to a bunch of different candidates, so they were playing different sides. They were also pretending to be black activists in the United States. And in those black activist chats that Russia was posting information, know, why would anybody want to vote for Hillary Clinton?

And we should all just stay home? So they were pretending to be different Americans. And the goal is really to divide Americans, to undermine democratic processes, to make us doubt political leaders, to doubt our media. It's sort of amplifying disinformation, but also leading to a collapse of what is true. The collapse of truth and the collapse of trust, social trust, public trust. We can't trust who is on our side.

All we sort of see online is chaotic information that's very, very polarized, and it really just sorts people into us versus them. (Duane) There's a certain irony here, because a lot of this feels like it parallels what was happening in Iran in the 1953 coup. And this is well documented. I mean, it's not a conspiracy theory I'm sharing. This is now more than 50 years later. This is all out in the open.

But what would happen is the CIA would pay these protesters to go march in the streets with these anti Mossad death messages, and then they would pay the same protesters to walk the other direction with these anti Shah messages. So they would just walk back and forth, just feeding the passions on both sides. And now, ironically, you have state actors, including Iran, including Russia, and many others, who are now kind of like bringing that same kind

of tactic now into the cybersphere. (Lisa) Absolutely. And they're called chaos actors. It's not really clear and easy to see foreign operatives on social media because they're causing chaos. They're causing the collapse of information and how we think and make sense of the world today.

And so I think we need to understand how chaos contributes to polarization, because before there was toxic polarization all over the world, we disagreed politically with many of our neighbors, but we didn't think that they were evil or hateful. And if we had a question about why do you believe this? Or that, we could actually talk to them.

And so it's sort of this chaotic and hateful environment now that we see on social media that is just fueling sort of people disengaging from politics in many ways and just deciding this is too chaotic, too angry, too hateful. And it encourages passivity, actually. It encourages just opting out of voting and engagement.

(Duane) I'd like to go back to what you were talking about, the algorithms, and how these algorithms really build on some underlying passions and build on that, again, not in a disinterested or not in an objective way, very clearly with this bias tooth accelerating it.

But still, one of the things which is really interesting about this, and you talk about this in your book, the limbic neurophysiological human, the reptile human, what Baha'i's would call this conflict between our lower nature and our higher nature, our animal self and our transcending of our animal self, our more divine self, if you will, this battle that exists. And what seems to be playing out is that those mechanisms of our lower nature, our passions, are being fed and fanned in this way.

And that is what gets this fire going so rapidly. And it just seems like that opportunity that has a more rational, more measured, more thoughtful, more insightful, that kind of more elevated conversation gets lost in that traffic somehow. So that seems to be this underlying tension that is this engine, this catalyst that drives these algorithms so radically. (Lisa) So really, neuroscience is behind a lot of conflict behavior.

When human beings can sit down calmly and breathing regularly, we can solve problems together. We can disagree about issues, but we can maintain a sense of human dignity, relationship with others. And we have our prefrontal cortex. I'm pointing to my forehead right now. We have this amazing brain, as humans, that can link up with other people's brains and figure out creative solutions to problems.

And really, that's what conflict resolution, conflict transformation building, that's what that's all about, is trying to create a setting, a condition where people can be their best selves and work with other people to find creative solutions to problems. So, as a mediator, for example, I'm used to sitting in a room with people who are very angry with each other, disagreeing something.

And it's my job as a mediator to lead them through a process of moving from the reptile part of their brain in the back bottom of the brain stem, and trying to sort of create enough safety in the room that they can come up to their forehead, where their thinking brain is, where they can actually solve problems together.

And so even before all this, social media, I think neuroscience really underlies a lot of the process of conflict transformation, moving from just an emotional response to be able to think and be mindful of our ability to solve problems together. So I think when you think about neuroscience and social media, there's a few things happening. It's showing us the emotional content which keeps us at that brainstem.

My colleagues at the Center for Humane Technology call it the race to the bottom of the brain stem on social media. So it's this race to show us the most outrageous emotional content to keep us engaged at an emotional level. But it's also just sort of this addictive comparison. Like, there's so many dynamics on social media that keep us on these platforms, and it's been shown to really have a negative effect on most people, especially children.

All this social comparison that happens with, here's what I'm doing, here's the fun thing, here's how beautiful I look, and all these selfies. It's such a weird culture, and it's bringing out really bad parts of humanity where we don't feel like we're all one and we're connected, actually. It makes us feel alone, lonely, inferior, insecure, depressed, anxious.

The levels of all of these emotional issues and children using social media is skyrocketing, and it correlates directly with the start of social media. So it's polarization that's happening online because of some of the content, but also just this dynamic of what it's doing to our brains.

(Duane) Now let's go to a related problem, and I say related because there are a lot of parts to this other problem as well that also contribute to the polarization issue. And that is what is happening with journalism. Oh, my God, journalism. I mean, we're all seeing it like it's happening right in front of our eyes. The idea of objective journalism is dead as a doorknob. I work with most of the major news organizations in my professional capacity. Nobody aspires to objective news anymore.

It's like objective news is seen as a ratings killer. It's a horrible thing to see. But let's talk about this. I often talk about how the idea of objective news was itself the byproduct of the invention of the telegraph. Because before the telegraph, news was inherently partisan. People subscribed to the newspaper that reflected their perspective. And so this kind of perspective to a story was what differentiated a news outlet.

But the only thing that was more powerful than perspective was speed. And so if you were in the Civil War, if you were at a battle scene and you could report on that, and if you could get that story back, like near instantly, that would trump any kind of partisan perspective. And so the wire services were born because it was much more cost efficient to have one version of the story distributed to everybody. And the telegraph was massively expensive.

And so this created this idea that you wanted to have scale to the story, really created this idea of objective news. And really, it's been in the past 20 years that we've seen the underlying technology that, if you will, gave rise to objective news get challenged largely by digital technologies which were, of course, much faster, very different, but which are dramatically changing the dynamic of what journalism is.

I don't even understand how anybody who goes to a journalism program, you're still trained to be this objective journalist, but somehow you graduate and you go into a professional news organization, or even worse, into the social media sphere, and something happens and you become a very different kind of journalist overnight. So this is a major crisis because this is the diet that we're being fed to understand the world around us, and it's just not clear what that is anymore.

(Lisa) Well, I think that's a really interesting set of observations about the history of media. Sure. Polarization, again, is a long term human phenomena. I think there are some similarities. I talked about TV shows being more polarized now, too, because as technology has advanced, it's also much cheaper to create your own radio station, your own podcast, your own TV station, the newspaper. And so as the costs of technology decrease, more people create these things.

And then actually all media becomes more polarized as people start listening to things that reconfirm their beliefs. So there's part of that that's happening. But I think there's some real differences between traditional media and social media, and that is with traditional media, you still have editors such as yourself. As an editor of this podcast, you get to decide what part of what I'm saying you keep.

But an editor at the New York Times or at NBC News is deciding what are the stories, what are the priorities to say, and how are we going to tell these stories where on social media there are no editors, right? So it's everybody talking to everybody. There's no journalist or editor or editorial board who's just making these decisions, kind of trying to follow some semblance of professional journalistic ethics or thinking about the public interest.

So I think what we've seen is sort of the weaponization of the democratization of media. When social media first started, we thought of it as the democratization where everybody can now publish. It can be citizen journalism, and we can have human rights defenders all over the planet posting their stories and sharing and starting social movements like we saw with the Arab Spring. But yes, that still is happening. And actually, social media has really democratized access to tell your own story.

At the same time, we have millions of cyber armies around the world posting false, deceptive, divisive, polarizing information with the goal of dividing and undermining, splitting humanity. And so it's actually the same thing that's happened with weapon systems, because weapons are now also democratized, where it's really easy to get a machine gun now. And democratization of access to powerful tools like weapons or media has an upside and a real downside.

I'm not sure there's an upside to weapons, but anyway, with media, and there are consequences to this. (Duane) In your book, you have a number of examples, a number of studies that you cite that are really fascinating. I'd like to share some of these with the audience because they're so amazing. There was a study that you talk about that the Wall Street Journal did, where they found that a YouTube algorithm more often is more likely to recommend misleading content for reputable news.

I mean, that's scary, right? Other things being equal, you would think that an algorithm would pick the more reputable, the more reliable news. But here's the study saying, no, it's the opposite. You have these rumor cascades, and there's this MIT study that you talk about where false news will spread faster than true news. Again, what a shocker. How scary is that? You have this whole problem with people relying increasingly on social media for their news.

I mean, half of the world's population subscribe to Meta or Facebook. They're much more likely. The people who get their news from social media are far more likely to have an inaccurate picture of the world. They're much more likely to buy into conspiracy theories. You have the problem with the whole echo chamber phenomena, where because of the algorithm, looking at what you're clicking on, it's giving you more of what you're clicking on, and that accelerates.

And so it's easier to believe what you already believe is what everybody believes, because that's the reality that you see. And it becomes harder and harder for you to even understand that there can be an alternative view, because you never see the alternative view. All you see is the people who have the view that you already have reinforced more and more and more. So it just seems so consequential in terms of how people understand the world around them. (Lisa) Absolutely.

I think the other part of this journalism piece that I wanted to mention is also how the profit model of social media, which is making money on showing people ads, has undermined the profit model of public interest news sources. That the more professional journalistic programs on TV or on newspapers, they also rely on ads, some of them, and their subscriptions have vastly declined. So many local newspapers now have gone out of business because of social media.

So we actually have fewer professional journalists doing the work while we have more people getting fake news and reading what China, Russia or Iran are planting in the US social media sphere. Hiding as Americans, basically. (Duane) And it's not only that, it's also that it changes the way that journalists practice journalism because they have to respond to the pressure.

So just in my own interaction with journalists, just to give an example, I remember a decade ago when I would be called by a journalist for an interview, what I said wasn't good enough. Like, if I said, this company is my client, they didn't go on what I said. They had to verify that. So they would call the company and they would know. Duane says that you're his client. Are you really his client? Like, there was this need for verifying the accuracy of the story, and there was a lot of

effort that was put there. But that takes time. And when you're competing with the speed of social media, you just don't have the ability to do that anymore. As a professional journalist, by the time you do it, the story will have come and gone almost. So what you find is that professional journalists now are cutting corners. Suddenly. They don't do the verifying.

Now they get the story, they run with it, and you get all these incredible, ridiculous instances of major errors that journalists do because they're not the same journalists that they were a decade ago because of these influences that have come into their game, so to speak. (Lisa) I think you're absolutely right. And there's sort of an infantilization, actually, of all journalism, because as social media, highly emotional journalism is keeping people so emotionally aroused all the time.

And then they expect also their regular news to be emotionally engaging. In the same way, what we learn about cognitive development is that children, young people, things that are emotional, are overwhelming for them more often than for adults. The whole process of becoming an adult is learning how to acknowledge your emotions, manage your emotions, and to be able to reflect on your emotional state and control it in some states, or manage it. Not that emotions are bad. Emotions are good.

They indicate to us when we feel strongly. But as an adult, you're expected to be able to reflect. When I'm feeling angry or outraged, I'm going to moderate my behavior and how I interact with others. But what media now does to us is say that emotional engagement is profiting me. So I'm going to keep you emotionally engaged as much as I possibly can. And real journalists and news organizations are finding that sort of this infantilization of keeping people outraged is profiting them too.

And so I guess this is the question then, for humanity. We cannot solve problems when we're all completely emotionally engaged. How do we move people to the frontal cortex, to the front of their brain, where they can solve problems, where they can think rationally and make sense of complex information? This is degrading the IQ of humanity, and it's making it harder for us all to solve other problems. Migration, climate crisis, pollution, water shortages, all the many things that are

facing societies all over the world. Yeah. (Duane) This idea of shifting from, as you say, the lizard self to the rational self, it seems like that's the dilemma of our age, right? I mean, when you think about the ultimate remedy to these problems, it's not a particular social policy. It's about this much larger problem that we have of feeding this base self and trying to get that to transcend to the higher version of ourselves. I mean, that just seems like that's what it's really all about.

At the end of the day, what

I'd love to do is just to help illustrate how incredibly consequential this becomes. You have a number of case studies. I love the case studies looking at different nations. And one of the ones that really stood out for me was the story of what happened in Myanmar, the country formerly known as Burma. I'm sure everybody is really acquainted with this whole plight of the, you know, Ruhingya Muslims and their forced migration into Bangladesh.

I mean, it's such a very sad story, but I think what people don't know and the story that they don't understand is the role that social media played in the events that led ultimately to this great human catastrophe. So maybe you could tell us that story so we can better understand how that all happened. (Lisa) Sure. So, in around 2013, 2012, the Myanmar military began using Facebook to motivate and mobilize the public to be outraged at the muslim population.

And they did this by posting fake and inflammatory stories on Facebook, accusing Muslims of killing Buddhists in the country. It's a primarily Buddhist country, and it's a form of Buddhism. Just like there's forms of Christianity and Islam, there's some types of religious expression that become very extreme and violent. And this group of Buddhists is very violent. Yeah.

So they posted fake videos and photos of what they said was Muslims killing Budhists and basically told people to go out and kill Muslims. And that's exactly what happened. There was a genocide against the muslim population in Myanmar, and now there's been a lawsuit against Facebook by the allies of the Rohingya Muslims to know Facebook was the communication tool that allowed this genocide to happen.

And the civil society in Myanmar, they sent representatives to Facebook's headquarters out in San Francisco in Palo Alto, and said, please stop, turn off your algorithm, dismantle or deplatform these accounts that the military is using to spread this false information. And Facebook did not respond. And it was actually years before Facebook kind of recognized that this was not just happening in Myanmar, this was happening all over the world.

And so the authors that write the chapters in this book that, you know, they're detailing how Facebook is fundamentally changing their society and often polarizing people along existing divisions in different countries. Ethnic groups already are different. They have a different history. They sometimes don't like each other. They have different political views. But then what Facebook does is just throw fuel on that and light a match and just let it go.

So from Kenya to Zimbabwe to Colombia and Venezuela, this is happening all over the planet, where violence and hate speech starts online and then quickly slips off into the real world. Into real world violence. (Duane) Yeah. The beauty of the chapter as well. It's so well written is that it paints the picture. Not so much of Facebook being like an evil party trying to make this happen. That's not the story. The story really is more that know. I think the term was an absentee landlord.

I mean, it's not happening accidentally. Most people's understanding of the Internet in Myanmar at the time was Facebook. Like, there was no other Internet. I mean, that's what they understood as the Internet. They had gone through this telecommunication liberalization program, which made mobile phones very accessible. Facebook was on the phone for a period of time. Facebook had this program where access to its platform was free. And so that was what people could experience as the Internet.

It was in their local language, so it wasn't foreign content that they couldn't read. So all of this was the reason why Facebook was in the position it did. But the part that makes Facebook so culpable in the story was the negligent kind of, like, approach they took to their platform. Know, you could count literally on one hand, it was less than five people throughout this entire period that had any knowledge of Myanmar, most of whom didn't even speak Burmese.

Who are the people who are responsible for all the decisions about what Facebook and Myanmar is going to be. And so there was really no capacity to moderate. And once you had bad actors who understood how to capitalize on that system, I mean, they could just basically use it for anything. It's not the first time that we've seen these studies that look at the relationship between media and genocide.

Rwanda with radio, of course, is a classic example, but there are dimensions to the social media which are so dramatically different to the more traditional media instruments that we've seen historically in the past. (Lisa) Yeah, absolutely. That's why the title of my book is Social Media Impacts on Conflict and Democracy. The subtitle is the Tech-tonic shift.

It's a play on the word tectonic, spelled T E C H, because technology is fundamentally shifting the way societies hold together or fall apart. And I think that technology has the potential to hold us together. And a lot of my work now is on peace tech and democracy tech. But technology as it stands today, in 2024, it is having a negative impact on societies. It is polarizing and amplifying the problems rather than solving problems. (Duane) Oh, great point. Very true. So true.

So, Lisa, let's talk now about what we can do about this problem. So I think you've done a great job. You've made the case social media play a role, however it is that we want to understand what that role is. It's consequential, for sure. And in your book, you talk a lot about social policy, those kinds of things that are high level solutions to the problem. But I want to bring you down to the ground level. I want us to talk about what we can do.

One of the thoughts that I had as I was reflecting on your book was we have become very conscious as societies about our diets and what we eat. It wasn't always the case. But I mean, now you go to McDonald's or you go anywhere, you look at what the calories are, you go to the store, you buy something. I mean, we have become very conscious as a society of our diet. We may still eat bad things, but we're very aware that that's what we're doing. We eat a potato chip, we feel a little bit guilty.

We've just become very aware of diet. And in the same way, I think what we click on, what we do, that is our diet as well. I mean, it's our intellectual diet, our communication diet. But what is it that we can do in our own lives, in the things that we ultimately control in the limited circles of people that we interact with? What can we do at that level to help address this particular problem with social media?

(Lisa) Thanks so much for asking that question, because many of the solutions are not in our hands, but we do have power in this situation. I would start off by just saying, being aware of our emotional state and recognizing when content that we see online is emotionally engaging, but maybe pushes us a little bit too far, too emotionally obsessed, or sort of, what is our level one to five of emotion when we're reading something? And is it allowing us to think through the issue?

Or is it sort of a five keeping us sort of hyperemotionally engaged and wanting to respond out of that emotion rather than out of an ability to think complex thoughts or think about the ambiguity or the complexity of the situation. So that's the first thing. And I would say the main lesson here is if you're feeling really emotional when you read something online, do not share it and really don't even comment on it.

Come back later if you want to, but just really note that you're being manipulated online. The design of these platforms is emotionally manipulated. And the more we understand that as individuals, the more we can get a hold of this manipulation and hunch through it into some sort of sanity. Again, I love that because definitely a big part of it is creating a moment of separation between reading it and reacting to it.

And if you can create that moment, it just gives you the opportunity to reflect instead of just react, which is so much a part of how those algorithms really work. Yeah. The second choice is to really look for spaces online where people are actually engaging and learning from each other, where there's some kind of norms within the group that promote learning.

And so you go online to exchange views, to actually have a real exploration of how different experiences that people have had in their life have led them to different conclusions. I think, for me, I'm getting less and less interested in the dramatic arenas where people are fighting, and I'm more interested in really learning how people of the other political party in my group here, how they think about things. What led them to think about this?

I'm truly curious, and I want to be in places where everyone's curious and they're willing to learn from each other. I think making that choice as an individual is a huge change, that not every space on the web is equally bad. There are places where people talk kindly and respectfully to each other, and they engage with issues in good ways. I'm part of the group Braver Angels. For example, Braver Angels is a U.S. group that works on political polarization.

You know, they host meetings where Republicans and Democrats can talk to each other. They have moderators that help the conversation stay civil and constructive. And people are asked to come and learn. And I think that instead of battling people online, we should be thinking of it as a learning opportunity to understand how people in our communities think differently. (Duane) Wow, that's great, Lisa. So pick the forums that you go into, because not all are equal.

Some are going to be more respectful, and some are going to know less respectful, and let's find those environments where the conversation is more dignified, more elevated. And then we've talked so far about kind of like how we read the social media universe. But let's talk about how you communicate, how you speak, how you talk in the social media world, and the need for some kind of new etiquette for how it is that people should communicate in this space.

What do you think we should be doing in terms of building this new kind of, like, etiquette for expression in the social media sphere? (Lisa) Yes, absolutely. So when I am mediating between two people who disagree, the very first step is asking each person to share the experiences that they've had that led them to the current conflict, so they each tell their own story. And I think that we have sort of always skipped on social media to, this is what I believe.

Now, rather than helping, backing up and explaining. So, like telling stories, personal experiences is a great way to start talking about an issue, because it allows people to humanize you to see that we do change our minds. And some of us really had really important experiences that have led us to shift beliefs. And this kind of humility too, of saying that I don't have all the answers. I used to have a different position.

This starts creating a situation where there's a little vulnerability, but there's also just a sense of putting humanity in the center of the conversation of people telling their own stories. I think that if that's a norm on a platform, a norm is like the middle of the road. A guideline or a rule on social media is the edge of the road. And what we don't have right now are, what are the norms, the middle of the road, what you should aim for.

And really, social media platforms should be reminding us not only of the rules, the edge of the road, but the middle. What do we aim for? What do we aspire to here? Like, to learn from each other, to share experiences, to understand different points of view. If we had pop ups that were telling us and reminding us of these things, I think that it would be better so we can make our own pop ups.

Just write it down, a postit note, and put it on your desk to remind yourself to tell a story, share your experiences, and ask other people about what are the experiences that led you to that belief? Can you share a little bit more about your story? I use that line all the time on social media where nobody has maybe offered their story, but I'm inviting them. So I'm asking questions. I'm showing curiosity and why someone else believes something differently than I do.

And that asking questions can also really take down the tone of a hostile and disagreement, (Duane) and to just be respectful, dignified, elevated human personal interaction.

Here I'm visualizing life at the neighborhood level, and how is it that we can reengage in interpersonal dialogue at that level, you bump into people at the school, people in your work environment, in your work circles. Just how it is that we can not become overly dependent upon social media for our human interaction, but make sure that we have a real diet of human personal interaction as well.

(Lisa) Well, I think that that's really tied to this emotional, addictive design of social media platforms. They are not a replacement for real world relationships, and there's all kinds of really, actually chemical things that happen between people when they are actually sitting in the same room or talking in the park to each other that don't happen on social media. So we have to be aware it's not a replacement. It's not the same thing.

And I think I pay a lot more attention to when I meet one of my neighbors or somebody in the park. What are the social graces that we all learn? We say hello to each other, how are you doing? And my writing more recently has been like, how do we bring that online? So when somebody comments on something that I've posted online and it's a little bit hostile, I will say to them, oh, good morning. Nice to see you here. Almost like I would do if I saw them at the park.

I want to start bringing on these social graces to social media to say, we have to greet each other. We don't just dive into arguing on something. It's really weird, actually, when you think about it. For all of our lives, we've learned that you say hello to somebody if you meet them. You don't just walk up to a stranger and start arguing with them. And that's across cultures, too. It's not just an american thing.

It's many, many people in many places have had things that are normal ways that human beings interact with each other. And so paying more attention to that.. (Duane) I think, like you're saying, when there is this chemical interaction, when you're talking to a person and you say something, you're getting a layer of feedback that you don't get when you're interacting, like, in the social media sphere, the same way.

So you say something and you look and you see that what you said has hurt the other person, and you're human, and that's not what you really want to do. And so that has a disarming effect on you in terms of getting you to cool down a little bit and think about how to say it maybe a little bit differently so that they won't be as heard. But your message is constantly adapting on the basis of how another person is ultimately reacting.

But the minute you go into the social media universe, you don't have that same dimension anymore. You're not seeing a person's eyes, and you're not seeing their facial expressions, and you don't understand how they're reacting when you're saying something. And so it becomes easier for you to just become insensitive to all that stuff.

And that helps that process of that dialogue kind of like gravitating and becoming a little bit more dehumanized a little bit more, maybe degrading all of that as it feeds that passion that's driving whatever it is that motivated your comments? (Lisa) It's why I really think social media platforms need to enable us all to give our intentions what we post.

It's not currently something that's offered anywhere, but in my sort of design code for how we should design social media to improve social cohesion. This is one of the points, actually, is that when I'm feeling sad or when I'm feeling lonely or upset, I should be able to indicate that as I'm posting that I'm truly curious about this issue, or I'm coming here with an authentic question. I'm not angry at you.

And that we should be allowed to sort of state our intentions of the conversation and communicate what we would normally communicate on our faces with a smile or with raised eyebrows, or we have all kinds of ways in person to signal, I'm not here to attack you. I really care about you. Yeah, and we're missing all that on social media, so we should find other ways to send that same signal of our intention.

(Duane) So we've been a little bit critical today because we've been looking at understanding the problem, really. But where do you think this all goes? What do you see as the future for social media? (Lisa) Great question. I think that there's actually an exciting future, but we all need to be working together. So if we just let tech companies go off on their own, it will continue to just be for profit and centered on amplifying our divisions.

We need to be involved, and we really need to be engaged with the tech companies to express, we want something different. We want a different product that serves humanity and serves our societies. And we need to let our governments know they need to be involved, too.

There need to be tax credits for companies that produce social cohesion, help societies hold together, and there needs to be taxation of companies that are divisive so that we actually have then a whole incentive structure, creating new tech tools that help society make decisions together. And I've already seen some of these platforms, Remesh and Polis, I'm writing about them a lot. They help people make decisions together. They incentivize where there is common ground.

They help people see each other's point of view and really listen to each other. At scale, we could be building the kinds of design affordances that are in Polis and Remesh into all of our social media to ensure that every conversation brings out the best of humanity, so that we're learning from each other. We don't have to have perfect harmony, but we have to be able to appreciate the humanity of the other.

So that's what I'm working for, designing a social media that will enable us to humanize each other, to continue enjoying all the good things about social media, but then adding to it sort of a benefit to society, a benefit to holding us together. (Duane) Wow, that is such an exciting future. Lisa, thank you so much for sharing that.

And thank you for all the insights that you shared in helping educate us on how it is that the social media universe is kind of like contributing to this polarization issue that we're all suffering from. Thanks again, Lisa. Thanks for joining us today. (Lisa) Thanks so much for your wonderful questions.

(Duane) Wow, so many interesting insights there. First and foremost, I think Lisa did an amazing job in demonstrating how social media greatly accelerate the polarization issue. And she's helped us understand, I think, how this is not a natural or an accidental byproduct, but it's something that directly results from both commercial and malicious efforts to feed and capitalize on our lower nature, on our animal or our reptile brain.

I loved her explanations of the neuroscience behind all of this. And she leaves us reflecting, I think, on what it is we can do individually and in the circles in which we move to become more conscious and aware of our own social media diets and of our responses, highlighting really what the Universal House of Justice calls for as the need for an etiquette of expression, something we'll explore further in a future episode.

Now, we continue our journey into depolarization in our next episode, where I'll interview yet another global authority in this discourse. This time, I'll be interviewing Nealin Parker, who's the Executive Director of the US Office for Search for Common Ground. That's one of the world's largest nongovernmental peacebuilding organizations with offices in some 30 countries.

Now, Nealin is also part of initiative engaged in tackling polarization, an effort that has already identified, wait for it, over 6700 organizations in the United States alone. I mean, wow. So Neelen will help us get a better sense of the kinds of like-minded organizations we might want to explore collaborating with as we engage in depolarization. So don't miss my interview with Nealin Parker. That's next time on Society Builders.

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