This publication was co-edited by Build Up and ICIP. Fundamentally, social media trends are about a consensus held by a specific group. In the peacebuilding field, we worry about how misinformation erodes truth, damages institutions, and leads to violence. But it’s essential to dig a little deeper into the causes for this erosion of truth.
Truth in a post-modern sense is not static; it is dialogical, or, in other words, the reflection of a societal consensus that provides stability and the common ground needed for disagreement, until this consensus itself is constructively challenged. Social media has impacted truth and stability by mining societal consensus, and the key characteristic of this mined consensus is not so much misinformation — that is, a signal or, at most, a tactic — as affective polarisation. Affective (or toxic) polarisation is distinct from issue-based or idea polarisation. It refers to situations in which one believes certain people for who they are, not for what they say. The more powerful social media trends and digital sub-groups are, the more affective polarisation, and the more a broad societal consensus on the truth splinters into sub-group consensus. It’s not so much that truth has been eroded; it’s more that it has been fragmented.