Why the Internet is Worse Than Ever for Humans

In 2022 nearly half of Americans expected a civil war in the next few years, one in five now believes political violence is justified. And it's not just the US but around the world. People increasingly see themselves as part of opposing teams. There are many different reasons for this, but one gets blamed a lot: social media. Social media divides us, makes us more extreme and less empathetic, it riles us up or sucks us into doom scrolling, making us stressed and depressed. It feels like we need to touch grass and escape to the real world. New research shows that we might have largely misinterpreted why this is the case. It turns out that the social media internet may uniquely undermine the way our brains work but not in the way you think.

The Myth of the Filter Bubble You've probably heard about online filter bubbles: Algorithms give you exactly what you want, or what they think you want. You only see information that shows you opinions that agree with yours, while dissenting opinions or information are filtered out. Since you only see content close to your world view, more extreme and toxic opinions suddenly seem less extreme. You are trapped in a radicalizing filter bubble and your view of the world becomes narrower and more extreme. But is that true? Extreme filter bubbles seem to be rather rare Studies that investigated what people actually look at online or are shown by search engines, found little evidence that you are ideologically isolated.

It is the exact opposite: Online you are constantly confronted with opinions and world views that are not your own. It turns out the place where you are the most ideologically isolated is your real life, in the real world, with real people. Your real-world interactions with your friends, family, colleagues and neighbors are much less diverse than your online bubble. The filter bubble exists in your real life, not online. Ok wait. Online filter bubbles have been the prevailing explanation as to why we’ve all started hating each other more over the last two decades. If that's not the case, shouldn’t the internet open our minds and make us more empathetic with each other?

Unfortunately, your brain is stupid. Your Brain is Stupid Human brains didn’t evolve to understand the true nature of reality, but to navigate and maintain social structures. Our ancestors desperately needed each other to survive, so our brains had to make sure we cooperated. That's why social isolation or exclusion feels so horrible, because it was actually life threatening. A tribe that worked together survived; a divided tribe died. The way communities worked for thousands of years is that, sure, you may have disliked a neighbor, but because you lived close to each other, you also rooted for the same sports club or saw them at the church. You both thought that the people from the other village were idiots. Being physically close made you familiar and created similarities that bridged the gap of different world views so you didn’t murder each other.

And your world view was probably not that different in the first place because it was formed by the same local culture. When our brains evolved, this was enough. Whoever was around, was similar to us. We liked what was similar to us – this kept us aligned enough to work together despite our differences. As humanity moved on from small tribes to towns and cities, from chiefdoms to kingdoms to nations, our brains and our communities had to adapt to more diverse sets of neighbors. We began to meet on the town square or in universities where we argued and screamed at each other but in the grand scheme of things communities were still relatively isolated, we were still pretty similar and aligned with the people around us. Conflict and disagreement are not a bad thing per se.

 Tension over how we should live can create new and wonderful things. Our values, norms and taboos are always evolving and whatever we think is normal today, will not be normal in the future. But we also need social glue to hold our societies together, because our brains don’t care about the meta level of humanity but about being safe in a tribe. Until about 20 years ago we did something truly new, that hit our brains like a freight train: the social media internet, the digital town square. Don’t You Dare Disagree with Me – Social Sorting In a nutshell: Our brains are not able to process the amount of disagreement we encounter on the social internet. The very mechanisms that made it possible for our ancestors to work together in the first place are derailed in ways we were not prepared for.

Whether you want it to or not, your brain sorts people by world views and opinions, into teams. This is not simply tribalism, it goes further. Researchers have called this process social sorting. On the digital town square, you encounter people that express opinions or share information that clash with your worldview. But unlike your neighbor, they don't root for your local sports club. You are missing the local social glue your brain needs to align with them. For your brain, the disagreement between yourself and them becomes a central part of their identity. And this makes it less likely that you will seriously consider their position or opinion in the future. If you hear bad things about them, your brain is much more likely to believe it uncritically.

On the flipside, there are people who share your world view and are maybe even more similar to you than many people in your real life. Which makes your brain like them a lot and kind of hyper align with them. People who think like you are probably good people because you are a good person and whatever social group you belong to is good! your brain is more likely to believe their opinions. If you hear bad things about them, your brain is much more likely to dismiss it uncritically. The engagement driven social internet makes it worse because it wants to keep you online as long as possible. And the most engaging emotion is, unfortunately: The angrier you get, the more likely you are to share and engage, and this leads to social media amplifying the most extreme and controversial opinions.

It optimizes not only to show us disagreement, but the worst disagreement possible. And because your stupid brain is sorting people into teams, whatever the worst opinions are, it assigns the same opinions to everybody on the other team. What is striking and new about online polarization is that all the aspects of our lives that make us individuals, our lifestyle choices, the comedians or shows we watch, our religion, sense of fashion and so on are condensed, making it seem that they are parts of opposing and mutually exclusive identities. This simplifies and distorts disagreements about how we should run society so much that it often seems as if the people on the other team are actively, willfully making the world worse. That they are almost evil, beyond convincing with rationality, facts or civil discussion. While you are of course on the correct team, it may be hard to process that you may seem like that to people on the other team.

 On a societal level this is dissolving the social glue that is the foundation of our democracies. If we think our neighbors are evil, how can we live together? This is especially bad in the US, where the two-party system makes it extra easy to think of people in terms of teams – negative opinion about the other party has reached record highs. Ok. Is there something we can learn from this? Is there something we can do? Something more positive Opinion Part In the end, It is important to be aware of what social media does to your brain. It's easier to change yourself than to change the world, so you can self-examine why you believe the things you believe and whether you dismiss or believe information based on who the person is who is stating that information.

The internet comes with a lot of ups and downs and just like we had to adapt from living in small tribes to living in cities, we need to adapt to the information age where we have access to billions of people. Evolution is too slow, so we need to find models that work with what our brains are able to tolerate. One model that seemed to work well was the pre social media internet old people might remember: Bulletin boards, forums, blogs. The main difference to today was twofold: For one there were no algorithms fighting to keep you online at any cost at some point you were done with the internet for the day, as mind blowing as this may sound.

But more importantly: The old internet was very fractured, split into thousands of different communities, like small villages gathering around shared beliefs and interests. These villages were separated from each other by digital rivers or mountains. These communities worked because they mirrored real life much more than social media: Each village had its own culture and set of rules. Maybe one community was into rough humor and soft moderation, another had strict rules and banned easily. If you didn’t play by the village rules, you would be banned or you could just go and move to another village that suited you better. So instead of all of us gathering in one place, overwhelming our brains at a town square that in the end just leads to us going insane, one solution to achieve less social sorting may be extremely simple: go back to smaller online communities.

Because what our stupid brains don’t realize is that we are actually all on the same team: Humanity, on a wet rock speeding through space in a universe that doesn’t think about us. We are all in this together – but until our brains adjust to being able to deal with that, we might be better off being a tiny bit separated. One of the worst things about the media we consume is that most news organizations tend to cater to one team, making you feel you are on the correct side.