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The case against social media is stronger than you think

A reply to Dan Williams

While I am an avid reader and admirer of Williams’s work, I think he is engaged in what has unfortunately become a fashionable form of academic contrarianism: arguing that despite what very much seem to be foundational, risk-laden changes in our social order, all we observe is in fact business-as-usual, and to the extent it seems otherwise, that is because of some mix of psychological bias and media overhype. al. (2025) found in two different field experiments ( n = 494, n= 1,133) that unfollowing “hyperpartisan social media influencers" on Twitter (they give the examples of Palmer Report on the left and Breitbart News on the right) “improved [participants’] recent feelings toward the out-party by 23.5% compared to the control group, with effects persisting for at least six months,” (p. 2). At least within the Western world broadly construed, the spread of social media has consistently produced more extreme forms of political behavior, including xenophobic violence in the most severe cases, but also protests, shifting voting patterns, and presumably much more that scholars have yet to study in detail.

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