The Great Balkanization: How Trump’s Ban Accelerated Internet Tribalism (And Why It’s Not as Bad as You Think)

Introvert Alarm Bells. That’s the codeword my girlfriend and I use to mean we’d like be alone for awhile. It’s curious we need alone time to begin with. It’s not that we don’t like each other; we do. We do all the things normal couples do–we seek each other out over physical distances, smush our faces together, fall asleep in the same spaces. But occasionally, we just like to be alone.

Why is that? It turns out our default social state is actually mild annoyance. Think back to the last few times you met someone. Isn’t it the exception, rather than the rule, that you genuinely felt you’d like to spend gobs more time with them? This isn’t to say you couldn’t have been cordial, even affable–but how many people do you meet that you really make an effort to be around? Not very many, right?

This is what social scientists call homophily: the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others. It turns out, since the dawn of humanity we’ve been sorting ourselves into groups, along all kinds of axes: shared interests, duties, DNA, and so on.

One of the novelties of the internet was a grand experiment in whether we could transcend our group formation tendency and instead be together in the same (virtual) space. Facebook united us with the gossip and political views of our family and friends; Twitter with the whole world.

The result? Failure. Looking back, of course it was a failure. Have we all forgotten high school? If there’s one thing we learned shuffling between science class and locker rooms, it’s that nerds like to hang out with nerds, and jocks with jocks.

A Day that Will Live in Tweetfamy

On Friday, January 8th, Jack Dorsey brought down the hammer and permanently banned Trump from Twitter. Soon thereafter–curiously soon thereafter–Facebook, Instagram, and other social companies banned Trump as well. This sparked a mass migration to Twitter’s conservative doppelgänger Parler, which was swiftly cut short when Google, Apple, and Amazon deplatformed Parler altogether. Twitter then banned around 70,000 QAnon accounts and Facebook removed content with the words “stop the steal.”

Conservatives went, to put it delicately, apeshit. Despite having spent decades decrying the ills of corporate regulation, suddenly, there was a groundswell of support for invasive, draconian government regulation of what speech private corporations must allow.

Hypocrisy notwithstanding, they have a point. But that’s beside the point. By the time we would have or will have dragged social media companies through the courts in anti-trust suits, alternative social media spaces friendly to conservatives will be flourishing.

It looks bleak right now, given that Liberal-owned internet companies have been initially successful in forming a virtual blockade against fledgling conservative platforms, but in time–not very much time, even–alternatives will develop. The internet is fundamentally too open, the payday too great, and the business models too proven for enterprising conservatives not to create their own platforms.

But make no mistake: the era of nonpolitical platforms is over. Henceforth, the denizens of the internet will sort themselves by platform and ideology.

(And Why It’s Not as Bad as You Think)

To many, this looks like the worst possible development for the so-called filter bubble problem. With a newly installed hermetic seal between the two sides, no information will be exchanged between the two. Our tribes will splinter and drift into two entirely separate realities.

I’m not saying that isn’t possible. But there are reasons to be suspect. The first is that we happen to inhabit the same spatiotemporal reality, even if we tell different stories about it. Whether you’re a conservative or a liberal, coronavirus has killed someone you know. Whether you’re a conservative or a liberal, you know that most of us aren’t racists. Whether you’re a conservative or a liberal, you know your side sometimes wins and sometimes loses. No matter how many stories we spin, there are basic facts which do ground us–or at least the vast majority of us–in a shared reality.

Second, there is good reason to think that being together in the same space is fomenting a whole lot of anger and hate. It’s as if we’ve been forced to endure a decade-long Thanksgiving meal with each other. We’re friggin’ tired. We’re conflict-fatigued. Perhaps having a corner to retreat to will help us recharge our internal batteries and allow us to meet the other with empathy and respect.

That may sound like a pipe dream, but consider that’s been the story of the United States thus far. It’s written on the dollar: e pluribus unum. Out of many, one. We have always sorted ourselves into groups by our homophilic tendencies. We have so far succeeded as a nation because our mostly cocooned tribes were blessed with leaders who found ways to see the other and work together.

Perhaps that kind of tribalism, the kind that sees the other but is not fatigued by the other, is the way forward.