This isn’t brainwashing - people don’t have to internalize this or that aspect of what social media presents to them, radically changing their beliefs and their sense of who they are. That sometimes happens, but likely far more rarely than we think. The more important change is to our beliefs about what other people think, which we perpetually update based on social observation. When what we observe is filtered through social media, our understandings of the coalitions we belong to, and the coalitions we oppose, what we have in common, and what we disagree on, shift too.
Most of the research I've read about social media's impact on democracy have focused on the individual.
Henry Farrell's text is about how social media paints a picture of public opinion that might or might not be true, and what that means for democracy.
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