Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have played a major role in fueling the political polarization that have led to violence, especially since the 2016 election, a report from the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights finds.

Funded in part by Craig Newmark Philanthropies and the Open Society Foundations and based on a review of more than fifty social science research studies and more than forty interviews with scholars, industry insiders, experts, and activists, the report, Fueling the Fire: How Social Media Intensifies U.S. Political Polarization — And What Can Be Done About It (32 pages, PDF), found that while social media platforms are not the original or main cause of extreme partisan animosity, use of those platforms intensifies divisiveness and contributes to its corrosive consequences. Those consequences include declining trust in fellow citizens and major institutions, legislative dysfunction, erosion of democratic norms such as respect for elections, loss of faith in the existence of commonly held facts, and political violence such as the January 6, 2021, insurrection on Capitol Hill.

According to the study, social media has helped exacerbate "'affective polarization,' a form of partisan hostility characterized by seeing one's opponents as not only wrong on important issues, but also abhorrent, unpatriotic, and a danger to the country's future," because their algorithms are designed to amplify divisive content to maximize engagement, creating "echo chambers" and "rabbit holes" that steer users to even more divisive content. The report also found that the impact of affective polarization was asymmetrical: Republicans had moved much farther to the right than Democrats had to the left, and fueled by former President Donald J. Trump, elements of the right have become more extreme — including in its rejection of shared facts and promotion of falsehoods and in radicalization and violence extremism.

The report's recommendations to President Joe Biden, Congress, and social media platforms include prioritizing a broad government response to the heightening of partisan hatred by social media, investigating the role of social media in the January 6 insurrection, empowering the Federal Trade Commission to draft and enforce an industry code of conduct, and adjusting algorithms to depolarize platforms more systematically and making those adjustments transparent.

"Social media didn't create today's partisan hatred, but it intensifies the problem," said Paul Barrett, the report's primary author and deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. "This is vital and urgent because the consequences of polarization range from a loss of faith in democracy to the sort of political violence we saw during the insurrection at the Capitol. To arrest these trends, it's critical that the social media companies — Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and others — acknowledge their role in the process and make significant reforms, while Congress and the Biden administration apply pressure for more transparency and accountability."