A look at the presentiment that social media is bad for society, as some researchers find the fears are overstated and others warn about effects on individuals
There's a general sense that it's bad for society—which may be right. But studies offer surprisingly few easy answers. Tweets: @brendannyhan , @kreissdaniel , @sivavaid , @kreissdaniel , @ayshardzn , @tomgara , @jacobtwop , @jacobtwop , @jacobtwop , @jacobtwop , @jacobtwop , @princetonupress , @alkhateraziz , @bernstein , @dgolumbia , @sapinker , @deaneckles , @ethanz , @wexler , @deaneckles , @kmmunger , @michaelluo , @raohackr , @brendannyhan , @griverorz , @dangillmor , and @benedictevans Tweets: Brendan Nyhan / @brendannyhan : My takes in excellent new Gideon Lewis-Kraus @NewYorker story on what we know and don't know about the effects of social media https://www.newyorker.com/... https://twitter.com/... Daniel Kreiss / @kreissdaniel : More broadly, this piece is missing all the work on movements - in the U.S. context BLM, #MeToo - all the scholarship that shows how social media is expanding the public sphere, creating new forms of accountability... @sivavaid : @chutry @kreissdaniel No mention of 15 years of social media work, as if it all started two years ago. No discussion of Myanmar or Brazil or Philippines. No disaggregation of “social media,” as if it's all one thing, working one way. And WTF Haidt being even considered a media scholar? Daniel Kreiss / @kreissdaniel : It is pretty stunning there is not a single mention of Black Lives Matter, or as far as I can tell any citations to any Black scholarship on social media, in this article. https://twitter.com/... @ayshardzn : Generally people think social media is bad for society but really, it's not that straightforward. https://www.newyorker.com/... Tom Gara / @tomgara : A lot of interesting stuff in here, but this particular detail is just so obviously true, and it's kind of maddening that such a wildly wrong understanding of it became so mainstreamed https://www.newyorker.com/... https://twitter.com/... @jacobtwop : This isn't exactly a new thought but it was expressed to me in a way that really got to me. Behind every “do trans people exist” is a “should they” and it's a shout, not a whisper @jacobtwop : reminds me of my stepmom asking why I kept saying my sister was getting “gay-married” and not just “married.” The glib All Lives Matter response to something as central as whether or not I exist fully as a human being, or if I'm just a broken version of something more acceptable @jacobtwop : when you consider the aim, which is to eliminate trans and nb people altogether. If I don't want you to exist, and refuse to *accept* your existence on your own terms, then that's not even intolerance — extermination is exactly what I am advocating for. @jacobtwop : It was so hard at Facebook to get across why debating the existence of trans people is so hateful — how “just asking questions” leads directly to suicides. But the “extermination” language is the correct way to look at it. “Debating the trans question” is a much darker phrase @jacobtwop : they kept saying “you're too close to this” and it's like, sure but that's WHY you should listen to me. a person who like every other queer person has nearly gone crazy because of cultural messages that we don't, can't, and shouldn't exist @princetonupress : What do we really know about social media? @chris_bail, author of Breaking the Social Media Prism, speaks with Gideon Lewis-Kraus for @NewYorker about the impacts of social media platforms, echo chambers, foreign misinformation & algorithms: https://www.newyorker.com/... @alkhateraziz : [social]media has left us particularly vulnerable to confirmation bias, or the propensity to fix upon evidence that shores up our prior beliefs. We all suffer from confirmation bias, and the only cure is other people who don't share our own. https://www.newyorker.com/... Joe Bernstein / @bernstein : Glad to see this. https://twitter.com/... @dgolumbia : interesting report on efforts to assess effects of #socialmedia on #democracy & “political dysfunction,” though I'd like the article to have talked about the funding & industry ties of those who downplay concerns (the individuals, & in general) https://www.newyorker.com/... Steven Pinker / @sapinker : How Harmful Is Social Media? Echo chambers, fake news, & radicalization rabbit holes are almost certainly overblown, but effects at the margins can be significant, & there's much we don't know. https://www.newyorker.com/... via @NewYorker Dean Eckles / @deaneckles : I really appreciate when journalists don't shy from highlighting that sometimes the best answer is “it depends” — and not just because we don't know, but because we really do have diverging evidence from different settings! https://www.newyorker.com/... https://twitter.com/... Ethan Zuckerman / @ethanz : “These are the three stories—echo chambers, foreign influence campaigns, and radicalizing recommendation algorithms—but, when you look at the literature, they've all been overstated.” Yes, social media sucks, but in a more complex set of ways than we think:https://www.newyorker.com/ ... Nu Wexler / @wexler : “Even if not that many people were exposed, the narrative that the world is full of fake news, and you can't trust anything, and other people are being misled about it—well, that might have had a bigger impact than the content itself.” —@BrendanNyhan https://www.newyorker.com/... Dean Eckles / @deaneckles : @BrendanNyhan Thanks for your great contributions to this article. One annoying little historical correction to what perhaps should be best understood as just a turn of phrase: when Zuckerberg had seven people working for him there was no feed at all! https://www.newyorker.com/... https://twitter.com/... Kevin Munger / @kmmunger : Truly excellent article here. But why is our knowledge of social media so confused? Data access, yes, but the bigger problem imo is “academic agenda setting”: The words “echo chamber”, “algorithmic radicalization” and yes “misinformation” are not useful https://www.newyorker.com/... Michael Luo / @michaelluo : Huh. Some surprising takeaways in this Gideon Lewis-Kraus dive into the research, including “most of us are actually exposed to a wider range of views on social media than we are in real life...” https://www.newyorker.com/... Arun Rao / @raohackr : How Harmful Is Social Media? | The New Yorker. Gideon Lewis-Kraus just wrote the best article on it, with heavy cites to the best studies and the researchers' debate. It's complicated and no one will like this answer. https://www.newyorker.com/... Brendan Nyhan / @brendannyhan : My key point: “There's so much focus on sweeping claims that aren't actionable, or unfounded claims we can contradict with data, that are crowding out the harms we *can* demonstrate, and the things we *can* test, that could make social media better.” https://www.newyorker.com/... https://twitter.com/... Gonzalo Rivero / @griverorz : This is pretty much the argument that @ajungherr, @PFCdgayo and I made in Retooling Politics: if you look at the literature with some distance, neither the dismal post-2016 view of digital media nor the rossy one of the early 2010s have much hold https://www.newyorker.com/... Dan Gillmor / @dangillmor : What's widely agreed usually lacks nuance, and is often just wrong. Read this article for some nuance you'll rarely see in news coverage and public discussion. https://twitter.com/... Benedict Evans / @benedictevans : My theory of Internet radicalisation is that social media confronts you with opinions outside your bubble much more than you would face in the physical world or in analogue media, and that is a big reason why people get so angry. https://www.newyorker.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Gideon Lewis-Kraus's New Yorker survey lands in a debate that has been running hot for years: after The Social Dilemma was criticized for stoking fear over evidence and researchers called for treating social media's societal impact as a "crisis discipline" like climate science, the field is now openly split between those who think the harms are exaggerated and those who see real damage to individuals.
What makes the piece matter is who is quoted doing the splitting — political scientists like Brendan Nyhan and Daniel Kreiss, platform insiders-turned-critics, and methodologists like Dean Eckles — against a backdrop where Facebook itself shelved internal research into its polarizing effect, leaving outside academics to fight over data the company declined to release.
First-order effects
- Researchers arguing the harms are overstated gain a mainstream venue for their case, directly challenging the moral-panic framing that documentaries and op-eds have built since 2020.
- Facebook and other named platforms face renewed questions about why their own polarizing research stayed internal while public claims about societal harm remain empirically unsettled.
Second-order effects
- With no consensus on harms, pressure shifts from the platforms' products to their data practices — expect more demands that companies like Facebook release internal findings so independent researchers can adjudicate.
- Alternatives pitched as remedies, such as the human-curated "slow media" model proposed by historians and designers in late 2019, get a stronger argument only if the individual-level warnings in this piece hold up.
Third-order effects
- If the "crisis discipline" framing takes hold, studying platform effects could institutionalize the way climate science did — shared methods, registered studies, and a standing expectation that companies supply data rather than press releases.
- Policy debates over section-style regulation or algorithmic disclosure would then rest on contested effect sizes rather than assumed catastrophe, changing which interventions are politically defensible.
The trend: The social media harm debate is moving from moral panic toward contested empirical measurement, with the credibility of platforms' own withheld research as the swing factor.