The Social-mediafication of Politics

Being an American young adult 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. 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.

The Cable News Era

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 Press, usually presenting haphazardly assembled binary ‘package deals’, which mirrored the respective major two-party platforms.

Micro-political-silos or a few social media sites?

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 every day. 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 has derivative forums and websites that will repeat the values of the major social media websites.

4chan and Tumblr politics

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.

Value differences

During the mid-2010s, 4chan was associated with the Republican Party, but in practice, was not much like it at the time. It was much more white supremacist, openly racist, fiscally conservative, anti-puritan, openly sexually deviant, obsessed with mocking weakness, and openly and violently misogynist.

Tumblr was instead anti-racist, feminist, and considered societal powerlessness close to a virtue.

Tumblr also had an obsession with antidepressant usage and psychoanalytic culture. Occupied (dramatically) more by young, antidepressant-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 (a reference to trauma triggers).

Tumblr was slightly liberal-leaning, but didn’t take many economic positions throughout its heyday. Discussion was dominated by LGBTQ politics, encouraging gender fluidity, female reproductive rights, and ‘destigmatizing’ SSRI usage to the point of antagonizing those critical of them. It also introduced many gossipy blogs to ‘call out’ ‘improper’ behavior from men that women encountered in their real lives.

4chan users considered trauma obsession, gender fluidity, and sensitivity to be evidence of an ‘SJW’, their caricatured enemy. SJW stands for Social Justice Warrior. The epithet was that an SJW’s social politics were so laughable as to require overzealousness. 4chan built this caricature up so much that I believe it made those to whom it only barely applied at first adopt some rather nasty personality traits.

4chan users also made fun of Tumblr users’ antidepressant usage and feminist politics. The 4chan mindset and set of insults are recognizable today in the current Republican Party. This shows the power of social-media-derived politics; they can and likely do affect major party politics after a certain amount of time.

Downstream political effects and corollaries

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 of Tumblr values potentially influencing politics is when RFK Jr. was recently interrogated by Democratic Congresspeople. A little secret in Washington is that Congressional offices are primarily staffed and run by much younger adults, most or all of whom presumably remember online political culture wars. RFK Jr.’s opposition to psychiatric drugs drew public 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, Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom have both pushed for an expansion of mental asylums. Democratic Party-aligned mental health workers are also more vocal about expanding mental asylums.

Despite Trump’s pro stance on expanding asylums, Republicans have a stronger public aversion to psychiatry than Democrats. This has intensified in recent years to outright anti-psychiatry sentiment. People previously relegated to physically protesting outside the American Psychiatric Association are now speaking cordially to Congressional Republicans about law changes. The recent MAHA wing of Trump’s Republican administration has led to 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 vague and as contradicting other EOs, the 4chan community and the modern Republican Party are significantly more subversive to psychiatry than the modern Democratic Party. This genuinely is a new phenomenon compared to before 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.

Reddit politics

It’s high time to recognize “Reddit Politics” as a singular political set, one that can’t be simply broad-brushed as liberal or technocratic. 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 is their rabidly pro-nuclear power generation stance. They also have been complaining about vaccine skeptics to a very large extent, and way before COVID was first identified.

On a mass level, Reddit first found itself aligned with the 2016 and 2020 Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns, in many ways being its social media and call center hub. However, this collapsed by 2024, with virtually no commentary. You are very unlikely to find anyone promoting what Sanders campaigned on within Reddit nowadays, like a dramatic expansion of public housing, universal health care, and anti-homeless initiatives. On generic debate subreddits, public housing is usually trashed as unsuccessful, with proponents in the minority. Former Sanders aficionados have also largely given up campaigning for universal health care. Widespread, cruel, thoughtless, and violently anti-homeless attitudes are also increasingly common on Reddit (but not universal). Anti-homeless attitudes are even common on liberal subreddits, especially on the subreddit for San Francisco users.

When I interviewed Reddit users who used to support Sanders, 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’ à la Dasha Nekrasova. Dasha was one of the few Sanders celebrities, and she traded in Sanders support for reactionary politics, by her own admission, because she simply started making more money and no longer financially needed, for example, student debt relief. Dasha’s Sanders support and distancing journey is just an exaggerated and more partisan version of what Redditors went through.

Real-world ambitions

Reddit’s extreme sensitivity to anti-vaccine views has been incredibly consistent and loud on Reddit’s self-proclaimed “front page of the internet” for over a decade. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, and it becomes very activist.

While Reddit has subreddits for vaccine skeptics, they are dwarfed by the universality of those who call for activism against anti-vaccine views in generalized subreddits. For example, in a generalized doctor subreddit, Reddit users encourage doctors to speak negatively of patients refusing vaccines.¹ In Reddit’s generalized parenting forum, lack of vaccination sparks near-universal outrage. A single parenting thread on that subreddit about poor school vaccination rates provoked four separate instances of encouragement to contact legislators and 10 separate encouragements to contact schools.²

With the COVID pandemic and Congresspeople subsequently becoming increasingly interested in vaccine issues, Redditors and other vaccine activists found an opportunity to put their sensitivities more into action. Now Reddit users encourage real-life protests against those in federal office who do not meet their sensitivities.³

Downstream effect on Wikipedia

Reddit doesn’t just effect society directly but arguably through intermediaries as well, one of the largest arguably being Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is rabidly defended across large, generalized forums on Reddit and high profile Wikipedians maintain prolific Wikipedia accounts. The author of the Wikipedia history book “Wikipedia through the Looking Glass”, Eric Barbour, agrees with the notion that Wikipedia is merely “Reddit with a fake encyclopedia attached”.⁴

When something trends on Reddit or YouTube, it will provoke a Wikipedia article more so than even a widely published landmark investigative journalism piece. And while it’s a stretch to say Wikipedia has a Tumblr culture, it certainly shares a Reddit culture.

Wikipedia’s support or distancing from various topics follows Reddit. For example, after Reddit moved from being tolerant of self-identified incels to intolerant, Wikipedia soon followed suit.

Reddit also is home to skeptics who further branched out into Wikipedia. Reddit’s obsession with criticizing anti-vaccine views and alternative medicine has been present for over a decade, and now mirrors newer, dominant attitudes on Wikipedia. They more recently also share an overlap in self-expressed disdain for artificial intelligence.

Wikipedia politics

Contrary to public knowledge, Wikipedia operates partially as a social media site. Editors have dedicated personal profiles not indexed by Google, featuring a ’liking’ system and a set of countless templates for building an ‘About me’ type page. Additionally, Wikipedians accumulate social capital by following internal policies that the first rule in their own handbook says are entirely optional. They also have real-life social events, such as their large “Wikimania” conferences, which are exclusively advertised for further personal networking with fellow editors.⁵

Systemic political bias

According to the academic Guillermo Parra, who performed a study utilizing a dataset of 1,399 politicians and 271,400 historical snapshots of their Wikipedia pages, Wikipedia’s administrators exert significant power over political article content. According to Parra, their influence is partially used to minimize violence in antifa circles. Administrators are also reported to hide categorizable broader political affiliation within antifa circles. Parra found Wikipedia to have a systemic political bias which aligned with these administrators’ leaning.⁶ AI LLMs are prolifically trained on Wikipedia, and amplify Wikipedia staff editorial decisions to the public unless explicitly told not to.

Community political decisions

As alluded to earlier, there is now a dominant clique of Wikipedia editors who make it their life goal to whittle away at pages they feel are too accommodating to alternative medicine, anti-vaccination views, among other topics. Wikipedia has even gone so far as to ban the usage of AI LLMs to edit pages after a vote. Arguments often cited overall moral distaste for LLMs as a driving factor for rejecting its usage.

Wikipedians also make political decisions that more politically neutral sites find less biased solutions for. For example, a majority of English Wikipedians involved voted for a policy to blanket ban those regarded as “Nazis” and racists from their wiki.⁷ This is a policy that would be more likely implemented on a social media website than on an intellectual project. Wikipedia also created a blanket ban on cryptocurrency donations.

Influence on culture and politics

Wikipedia has massive cultural and political influence. A Wikipedia page is often the first Google search result for any controversial topic. While Wikipedia usage is still criticized in academic settings due to its tertiary source nature, this discouragement has become more thin. While I was growing up in the 2000s, it was commonplace to receive lectures from professors not to use Wikipedia. I once saw two students suspended for overusing Wikipedia in high school during the 2000s.

An early 2009 study specifically on academic attitudes toward Wikipedia found all academics studied considered Wikipedia unsuitable for academic citation, referencing its inferiority to other sources.⁸ This attitude clearly changed. A later BMJ study found that direct academic citations to Wikipedia in health science exploded by over 400% specifically during the year 2011 and continued to increase afterward.⁹ Also, modern guides for students on how to use Wikipedia are absent a disclaimer not to directly cite it.¹⁰

Academics are now more prone to defending Wikipedia as an adjunct research tool, and unfortunately, sometimes as a starting point. The way a Wikipedia article is constructed will directly inform how academic and news articles on the same subject are opinionated. An academic study of five of the largest American newspapers found that Wikipedia had become internally legitimized as a direct news source within each.¹¹

Wikimedia-associated individuals also publicly lobby political discourse in a way that informs of their prior leadership. Within months after stepping down, a recent, former Wikimedia CEO made a public appeal at a TED conference. She argued that “reverence for truth” is a “distraction” that “prevents us from getting things done.”¹² The idea that one can take a strong stance on a subject without consulting a primary source is a Wikipedia opinion, and also a common opinion among netizens at large. The call for a Wikipedia-style source after a claim is made by a primary source is a routine reflex in online discussion. The goal of this reflex often doesn’t include truth, which usually involves consulting more primary sources to arrive at truth. The goal is instead to capitalize on a lack of truthful reporting in secondary sources.

Predictable politics of social media addicts

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 the 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, their users may not be fully aware of the influence of the parent social media website on the boringly predictable and consistent views they have.

TikTok and highly algorithmic social media isn’t consistently political, yet

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 making their platform as safe as possible from a ’topic’ perspective despite the overall exploitative nature of the platform.

Breaking through social media blinders

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.