By Mikayla Bunnell | University of Connecticut
December 27, 2024
Like most Americans, the first thing Jaimie Harnois did when she woke up in her University of Connecticut dorm room on Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024 was to check the results of the presidential election.
The next thing? She went on Instagram and unfollowed anyone who was celebrating Donald Trump’s win. These people, she said, not only voted against her preferred candidate – they voted against her as a woman.
“You can’t vote against me and want to be my friend,” Harnois said. She pulled up an Instagram post from account @mikemaeshiro which read: “‘We can disagree and still be friends’ DOES NOT apply to racism, sexism, homophobia or transphobia.”
Taking a stand against opposing viewpoints by unfollowing or blocking those who post such viewpoints has become the newest trend on social media. A poll published by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics in May 2023 found that 38% of surveyed registered voters have “unfriended or stopped following someone on social media because of their political views,” in part because of Americans’ increasingly negative view of the opposing party.
Ten years ago, Pew Research Center reported that 43% of Republicans had “very unfavorable” opinions about Democrats; 38% of Democrats felt the same about Republicans. As of 2022 those numbers had increased dramatically. Pew Research found 62% of Republicans feel “very unfavorable” about Democrats; 54% of Democrats feel the same about Republicans.
Seth Warner, an assistant professor of political science at UConn who studies state and local politics from a behavioral perspective, said while it seems that polarization and social media have always been intertwined, “It took [researchers] longer to find a link than you would’ve expected.”
Early social media research showed that “people were only looking for politics if they wanted it and that… the large majority of people on social media for non-political reasons were getting pretty balanced exposure,” he said.
With the recent rise of influencers and content creators, people are using social media as a form of entertainment rather than a way to keep up with friends.
“You’re picking content like you might’ve picked cable channels in the past, except it’s more diverse,” Warner said. “[It gives] people who don’t care about politics other things to look at so they become less invested and [gives] people who care about politics more politics to look at.”
Only about 20% of social media users are extremists, he said, but they are a loud minority. Hyper-partisan creators tap into consumer’s emotions, knowing that “moralization [and] anger tend to be pretty strong emotional pulls,” Warner said. This is why regular, informative news stories are not going viral, but the aggressive, profane posts are.
For example, on X (formerly Twitter), NBC News’ post announcing that Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election got 728 likes and 359 re-posts as of Nov. 7. A post by user @SydneyAneglaa saying, “If you voted for Trump, don’t ever speak to me again and I’m deadass!” got 132,000 likes and 28,300 re-posts.
Extreme posts – rife with angry, emotional language – gain the most traction. This aggressive and emotional form of polarization is called “affective polarization,” defined as “seeing one’s opponents as not only wrong on important issues, but also abhorrent, unpatriotic, and a danger to the country’s future,” according to a Sept. 2021 New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights report titled “Fueling the Fire: How Social Media Intensifies U.S. Political Polarization – And What Can Be Done About It.”
Affective polarization makes political compromise virtually impossible. A way to combat this, Warner said, is to remind people our ideological differences are not as big as we think. He said it is important to remind Republicans that not every Democrat is a member of the LGBTQ+ community and to remind Democrats that not every Republican is a millionaire, for example.
But compromise and friendship are not impossible. UConn student Grettel Atterberry said she has many friends who have completely opposite political opinions from her.
“At the end of the day, I was friends with them before I knew their political views,” Atterberry said. “I don’t talk about politics with them that much because I know they have a different view. I’ll be open about [talking about politics] but as soon as I hear they’re getting aggressive… I stop and change to a different topic.”
Atterberry says it is important to be open to hearing different views.
“I try to keep it respectful and understand where they’re coming from,” she said. Atterberry acknowledged that that can be hard, especially regarding “stuff that really hits home… like women’s rights and immigration.”
Many people are simply not interested in politics. Meriden resident Ahmed Hernandez has friends with different views than his own, but he isn’t passionate enough to argue with them about it.
“I honestly don’t really pay attention,” Hernandez said. “I’ll listen and then drift off because I can’t really keep a political conversation going long.”