The Rise of Political Violence in the Social Media Era
Affective political polarization has been growing in the United States for decades. Animosity mixed with hostile partisan media, inflammatory elite rhetoric, political segregation, and poorly moderated social media is the recipe for politically-motivated violence.
I’ve spent the last 20 years trying to promote constructive disagreement and reduce the risk of intergroup violence. In graduate school, I studied polarization, and how it leads to supporting the use of violence in pursuit of some moralistic goal that requires vanquishing some evil other. Typically, when one group engages in this righteous violence, the group targeted by the initial violence radicalizes and then retaliates. I’ve published dozens of peer-reviewed scientific papers on this cycle of violence.
Eventually, with Jon Haidt and Ravi Iyer, I co-founded a non-profit to help community groups intervene before the radicalization got too far and people became too entrenched with their co-partisans. Somewhere along the way in the mid-2010s, a radio show host asked me whether the political violence we were seeing in other countries could make its way to the US. I said ”absolutely,” and hoped I was wrong. Some of the other panelists laughed and dismissed my statement as alarmism; it wasn’t.
At the time, though, the temperature was significantly cooler. Sure, people argued over politics, unfriended each other, spent less time at Thanksgiving dinner in ideologically-divided places, and on rare occasions, threatened each others’ lives. Even more rarely, people would actually physically attack others who disagreed with their politics. Like, on August 12, 2017, when one member of a white nationalist group attending the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, decided to use his car to plow through a crowd of counter-protesters on a pedestrian mall. One of the people he hit, who later died, was Heather Heyer, a friend of mine.
Those tragedies are becoming more frequent and pervasive. According to the Capitol Police crime statistics, the number of threats against members of Congress increased tenfold between 2016 and 2021. The number of federal charges of threatening a public official more than tripled between 2013 and 2022. The latest data are still being compiled, but already show record-breaking numbers of charges against people threatening public officials.
Another study relying on about 4,000 subject matter experts across almost all countries around the world looked at politically-motivated violence from 1900 to 2023. This reveals some expected trends, like political violence increases in countries in the midst of civil wars and revolutions. It also reveals that non-state political violence has increased substantially in the United States in recent decades, and is at its highest point in over 100 years.
A related study looked specifically at whether people use social media to organize political violence between 2000 and 2023. In the early 2010s, social media catalyzed anti-government rebellions in Tunisia, Libya, and Syria among others during the Arab Spring. More recent investigations also reveal social media is used by some activist groups to orchestrate political violence in the United States. For example, Antifa, the Oath Keepers, and the Proud Boys coordinated their efforts publicly on a number of social platforms including Facebook, Parler, Telegram, and Twitter.
In the Digital Society Project study, the United States never appeared in the top 20 countries where people use social media to organize offline violence… until 2021. In the latest data available from 2023, the US ranks 8th out of the 179 countries studied. This puts the US slightly ahead of Syria, and just behind Afghanistan. Much like many other Middle Eastern and African countries near the top of this list, these countries have faced decades of government upheaval and political violence. The United States, on the other hand, typically has had peaceful transfers of power and relatively peaceful protests in the last century. Yet, Americans are slightly more likely to use social media to organize offline violence than people in some of these countries.
If you’d like to see more of these rankings over the last 23 years, check out this video.
This alarming trend also correlates well with the rising numbers of Americans who condone the use of violence to save their country. From 2021 to 2023, the number of Americans condoning political violence rose 53%. Today, more than 1 in 5 Americans agree that they may have to resort to violence in order to get the country back on track. Perhaps more alarmingly, this sentiment is even more common among gun owners. 42% of assault rifle owners, 44% of recent gun purchasers, and 56% of people who “always or nearly always carry loaded guns in public” support using violence for political ends. A related study also found a staggering 58% of Republicans who voted for former President Trump in 2020 and deny the election results support using political violence.
To be clear, though, this isn’t limited to gun-owners or people on the political right. 25% of Democrats also consider violence to be justified to advance political objectives. But, this story isn’t about Democrats and Republicans, or gun owners and non-gun owners. It’s about how the temperature is rising across social divides globally, and how the heat affects regular, unwitting people who happen to get targeted by culture warriors. These regular people have no interest in engaging in political fights, but their lives or work may be too close to something that conveniently fits some political narrative. And, every narrative needs a good villain.
Renee DiResta, author and former manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, is one of these regular, unwitting people who cares about researching a societally important topic: harmful experiences on social media. One harmful experience that she studies is misinformation. Misinformation happens to be a topic that triggers some people who believe that social media sites use that label to censor conservative political speech. Those believing this claim are required to ignore that conservative figures tend to get far more views on Facebook and Twitter (now X) than liberal figures. If that seems surprising to you, I encourage you to look at the Widely Viewed Content Report and at the studies conducted on Twitter before Elon Musk made accessing their data prohibitively expensive to most researchers.
Regardless, those studying misinformation are made into boogeymen -- or boogey-people -- and viewed as a threat. The fact that Renee’s summer job in college was at the CIA doing entry-level, non-sensitive work only made her a more perfect option to be the villain in this story. Over time, this narrative spread from more fringe political actors all the way to the US House of Representatives and Jim Jordan’s “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.” Onlookers may have taken this growing attention and used it to legitimize the incorrect claim that DiResta was a threat, and proceeded to send her death threats.
This isn’t an isolated event. Kate Starbird, another disinformation researcher and director of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, has also been targeted and threatened. People like Renee and Kate are subject matter experts and skilled researchers, but have no control over what multi-billion or trillion dollar companies decide to do with any of the content on their platforms. I was literally on the Civic Integrity team at Meta, and we didn’t even have the power to demote or remove this content. We could recommend it to the decision-makers way above our paygrade, but they made up their own minds. Too often, in my personal opinion, they opted to leave the harmful content online.
For a short while during the COVID-19 pandemic, the company cracked down more on health-related misinformation. I was one of the researchers working on this ad hoc team that would regularly brief the White House Coronavirus Taskforce. We studied ways to identify health misinformation, like dangerous and ineffective “treatments” proposed by people who had large followings and no medical expertise. Once we found a way to identify this content, we would change the weights in the ranking algorithm to reduce the visibility of this health misinformation.
This work literally saved lives.
Yet, one culture warrior data center technician was upset when he read about our experiments testing the best ways to implement the model we built. He decided to leak our unredacted reports and our personnel profiles to Project Veritas, and talk about it on Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, and probably many other outlets.
In the days that followed, anti-vaccine extremists made good use of our personnel profiles and started stalking our team of about 6 people. One of the engineers on our team owned public property and had a kid in public school, which made it easy for them to find him/her/them. The extremists went to the kid’s school at the end of the day and tried to prevent the engineer from picking up their progeny.
After that happened, the company’s global security team decided that we each needed security details. They had a team that patrolled my block monitoring for suspicious people. If I wanted to go out, I was to inform them so they could ensure my safety. I’m grateful that they took my security seriously, but the fact that I needed security at all is terrible.
As a lifelong peacemaker committed to trying to understand people who believe and think differently than I do, I gained firsthand experiences that made me less interested in peacemaking with them.
Everyone has the right to believe whatever they want, but nobody has the right to accost someone trying to pick up their kid from school or to threaten another’s life. If people remembered that their rights end where our noses begin, we would be much better off for it. Though, to reduce the risk of political violence, each of us needs to remember: Our rights end where the next person’s nose begins.
