Essay On Political Polarization

Social media highly affects the modern society. Politicians of this day and age generally manipulate this influential platform to garner public attention. This overly effective utilization, however, is getting out of hand. Political use of online outlets encourages a biased, partisan media. Online personas of politicians disunite the modern American society by triggering political polarization—an individual’s identification of him or herself with a particular political party. Media advancements—initially encouraged to bridge people together and improve overall communication— creates a gap of credibility that separates the American public to its government. More of these disconnecting effects are analyzed in Bump’s Washington Post article, How
The Washington Post writer exemplifies this growing division by elaborating on how “conservative[s]... share articles from more conservative news sites” (2). This also reflects liberals’ social media activity, as visualized by the popularity of California Democratic representative Ted Lieu to twitter users with similarly liberal beliefs. Limiting ideas to political principles already instilled in one’s mind by social media partisanship may separate the population into political factions. Partitioning the society increases the probability of conflicts and disagreements. Furthermore, Bump adds to his dissents of political social media usage by introducing a report from Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center that concluded that political presence in Twitter, Facebook, and other media outlets stimulates the growth of “highly partisan and unreliable media” sources (2). Prejudiced news allows political polarization to take place. It might open up intellectual conversations, but the common citizen can be easily misled by biased information. Bump’s article uncovers the negatives of political usage of social
Some may argue that politicians’ online activity offers greater transparency for the public. This argument is credible. Take current US president, Donald Trump as an example. Trump’s twitter use allows the public to get an “unfiltered and unprecedented view into the thinking of a sitting president” (Folkenflik 2). It also serves as a window to the current administration. Or does it? Trump’s “comparatively neurotic” and misdirecting tweets established a “funny” yet “distracting” persona for the president (Folkenflik 4). His twitter page is certainly attention grabbing, but neither does he use it to address the important matters of the nation, nor direct the public to legitimate news. The president’s failure to inform Americans of the nation’s political situations disappoints the public and alienates them from the government. Moreover, using twitter to “insult people and … make bigoted remarks”, the president “lowered the tenor of political debate”, distressing the online society, and prompting the people to question the administration’s credibility (Folkenflik 6). Although online platforms fostered media transparency, political personas in social media do not boost public trust, nor did it enlighten the public of the American political scene