Being an American early milennial or Gen Z individual will likely involve consuming political viewpoints via social media on a regular basis. Older demographics often follow the younger demographics in this trend but are still more likely to use television or books to build a political value set. Most major social media websites contain a limited, unique, but also very rigid political value set. These value sets are so rigid that the respective users politics are very predictable across the range of political viewpoints deemed important by the respective website.
For baby boomers and late millennials in the 1990s, a standard right-of-center individual would pay attention to Fox News Cable Television. A standard left-of-center individual would watch corporate sanctioned political comedy like Michael Moore, Al Franken, and Jon Stewart. Party lines were rigidly enforced on cable news television through television programs like Crossfire and Meet the Nation, usually presenting haphazardly assembled binary 'package deals', which mirror the respective major two party platforms.
A common talking point is that for Gen Z and younger millennials, politics is becoming increasingly 'siloed' into ~20 person chat rooms. This is the right trend to look at but highly exaggerated and ignores the large platforms we use everyday. There are not thousands of 'bunkers' of young adults in chat rooms, each with their own spin on politics, but there are meaningful divisions across larger social media websites.
Each of these major social media websites have derivative forums and websites that will repeat the values of the major social media websites.
I'm not the first person to acknowledge a division of rigid political value sets across multiple major social media websites. There was mild coverage of this in 2013-2016, when the concept of the 'alt-right' was argued by political authors like Angela Nagle to be directly downstream from the cultural values of the imageboard 4chan.org. 4chan's rival cultural site was Tumblr.com, which had its own collectively unique political values among its members. Of particular note, was that these political 'packages' of views were not strictly aligned with existing party politics of the time (and for at least a decade after their peak). 4chan, during 2013, was associated with the Republican Party, but in practice, not much like it at the time. It was way more white supremacist, openly racist, fiscally conservative, anti-puritan, openly sexually deviant, and openly and violently misogynist. It was also oppositional to the values of Tumblr, including antidepressant usage, psycho-analytic culture, trauma obsession, and self-victimizing narratives. As this collection of values is more recognizable today in the current Republican Party, that shows the power of social media derived politics, they can and likely do affect major party politics after a certain amount of time.
Tumblr was the cultural enemy to 4chan. Occupied (dramatically) more by young anti-depressant consuming shut-in women of the late 'Prozac era', the site took a certain kind of ultra-sensitive, non-empathetic, gossipy, and feminine approach to politics. Potentially offensive text was encouraged to be hidden into an expandable HTML textbox called a 'trigger warning' box. Those who may not want to read simply could avoid clicking "expand" and not read anything potentially offensive. Tumblr was (slightly) liberal leaning, but didn't take many economic positions throughout its heyday. It was instead obsessed with LGBTQ politics, encouraging gender-fluidity, female reproductive rights, "destigmatizing" SSRI usage to the point of antagonizing those critical of them, and also introduced many gossipy blogs to 'call out' 'improper' behavior from men women encountered in their real lives.
Many of the values of Tumblr have been seen in today's Democratic Congress. I remember wishing during 2013-2014 that this would never happen, but it has happened recently to a certain extent, albeit to a lesser extent than 4chan influenced Republicans. A good example is when RFK JR. was recently interrogated by Democratic Congresspeople. His opposition to psychiatric drugs drew criticism from Democratic Congressmen. This is a bit of a deviation from the New Left and Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which were primarily responsible for the gutting of mental asylums and the proliferation of widespread anti-psychiatric sentiment. This piece of mid-20th century history is a fact many of today's Democrats would like you to forget or not investigate. After all, Harris, Gavin Newsom, and Trump have all pushed for an expansion of mental asylums. Democratic Party aligned mental health workers are also more vocal about expanding mental asylums. Despite Trump's stance on asylums, Republians are still a bit schizophrenic on psychiatry. For example, the MAHA wing of Trump's administration have led the passage of executive orders questioning conventional psychiatric drug treatments, calling for investigations into SSRIs, and later promoting (limited) psychedelic drug treatment. While from my perspective this is not much of an improvement from prior Republican statements as it was presented as vauge and contradicting other EOs, the 4chan and modern Republican Party are significantly more subversive to psychiatry than the modern Democratic Party. This genuinely is a new phenomenon compared to prior to 2013, when Tumblr was at its height.
While the 4chan/Tumblr divide has been well documented, we've seen the arrival of entirely new political groups, defined by the social media conglomerates they immerse themselves in.
It's high time to recognize ''Reddit Politics'' as a singular political set and without simply broadbrushing them as liberals or technocrats, it's much more nuanced than that, especially nowadays. They have their own focus and priorities, which involve science topics, a large tech community that used to be progressive but is now borderline luddite, a skeptic community that emerged from the aforementioned luddites, and a geeky culture that includes a video game obsession. Above nearly all unique and widely consistent opinions of Reddit users are their rabidly pro-nuclear power generation stance. They also have been complaining about vaccine skeptics to a very large extent and way before COVID happened.
On a mass level, Reddit first found itself first aligned with the 2016 and 2020 Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns, in many ways being its social media and calling center hub. However, this collapsed by 2024, with virtually no commentary. You are very unlikely to find anyone promoting what Sanders campaigned on in Reddit nowadays, like a dramatic expansion of public housing, universal health care, and anti-homeless initiatives. Most on Reddit today are opposed to public housing and have largely given up campaigning for universal health care. Widespread, cruel, unthoughtful, and violently anti-homeless attitudes are also increasingly common on Reddit (but not universal), even on liberal subreddits, especially on the subreddit for San Francisco users. When I interviewed Reddit users who used to support Sanders,s they talked to me about 2016 as if it were their youth and they had simply outgrown Sanders politics to meet the demands of the world of their new professional class status, cheekily admitting to being 'Sanders sell-outs' ala Dasha Nekrasova. Dasha was one of the few Sanders celebrities and traded in Sanders support for reactionary politics, to her admission, because she simply started making more money and no longer financially needed, for example, student debt relief.
Reddit's influence can be seen broadly through Wikipedia administrative and user decisions. As the surprisingly knowledgeable Wikipedia criticism forum 'Wikipediasucks.co' agrees over, some of the highest profile Wikipedia administrators are also regular Reddit users. They joke that Wikipedia is Reddit's wiki. When something trends on Reddit or YouTube, it will provoke a Wikipedia article more so than even a widely published landmark investigative journalism piece. I agree with the Wikipedia Criticism board on this. And while it's a stretch to say Wikipedia has a Tumblr culture, it certainly shares a Reddit culture. When Reddit moved from being tolerant of incels to intolerant, Wikipedia followed suit, albeit delayed. Wikipedia, at least prior to 2024, had a voracious community of 'skeptic' editors who shared the same values as their Reddit counterparts. They would make it their life goal to whittle away at pages they felt too accommodating to alternative medicine, anti-vaccination views, religious promotion, and cryptocurrency promotion.
Reddit's influence can certainly be felt in today's broader politics, but it's not entirely clear if this is circumstantial due to the COVID pandemic making vaccine political positions topical. But I don't think it's a coincidence that top Democrats are parroting the most pro-vaccine views that Reddit spent years spearheading. The degree to which Democrats are now aligning to pharmaceutical companies, possibly because of Reddit and Tumblr influence, has led pundits, like Angela Mcardle, to paint even the most prior New Left-y politicians as flip-flopping to pro-pharma positions all of a sudden, and they are not wrong on that point.
This fracture of political alignment to multiple major social media hubs has made the political landscape a bit more dynamic than the prior Republican vs Democrat alignment of the 1990s, but also, I argue, more predictable. Even in the 1990s, there were always political independents, and supposedly there are more now. But the political independents of past might fall under one of 200 different third parties, or simply have their own political philosophy. Nowadays you can very predictably judge what someone's positions will be given what social media website they respect the most, consciously or not. As some websites are directly downstream from the larger social media websites where the overarching political views originate, they may not be fully aware of the influence of the parent social media website on the boringly predictable and consistent views they have.
Generation Alpha has an even newer form of social media to contend with: TikTok and associated websites where the overall platform might not have a definable shape, but their neuroses may be exploited by algorithms meant to captivate their attention for long periods of time. How this might manifest politically is ultimately hard to tell, TikTok has led to the spread of minor political-adjacent subcultures, but to a much lesser political extent than digital journalism might have you believe. Additionally TikTok is incredibly censorial, entire topics are banned and they have aggressively catered to make their platform as safe as possible from a 'topic' perspective despite the overall exploitative nature of the platform.
It's truly hard to find people who have opted out of social media, because of how absurdly socially useful it is. Independent political opinion is largely shunned on social media websites as their collective political viewpoints become quite rigid, and nearly all use shaming techniques if you cross the political consensus. While Discord silos provide a place for more nuanced discussions, they rarely have a political focus. We still have not truly seen a decentralization of social media where online bulletin boards devoted to individual political topics don't become calcified, and are instead spread to reflect a broader view of potential human thought. Mastodon was created in a way to potentially facilitate a broader array of political opinion, but it is sparsely populated on an individual server level, to the point that there is very little continuous discussion. Another reason why Mastodon failed to diversify political opinion more is that it retained the microblogging style of Twitter, which dramatically limits nuanced thinking and actively encourages black and white thinking and angry intolerance, rather than mutual discussion and nuanced discussion. Perhaps a better federated platform would be one that involves less of a 'profile' and status update focus, and more of a community discussion focus. In fact, it'd probably be better to completely eliminate any technological means to have a 'profile' and status update focus on a new federated social media attempt.