What's next? 🔮
Even while the votes are being counted, we’re peering into the future.
This week at CITAP: is the tech industry is coming to terms with the fact that it is not apolitical? We’ll see… Polarization remains as prevalent as ever, and election forecasting may not justify the modeling. Is your group text getting you through the election?
What doesn’t change
Political polarization is deeply entrenched. In an article for Slate (building on a piece for this newsletter), Shannon McGregor and Daniel Kreiss put it:
Most people generally have little interest in, and know little about, politics, and instead rely on things such as partisanship to make voting easier. And political scientists have shown that contemporary partisan identities are aligned with social identities in increasingly stark ways along the boundaries of race and class, geographic location, and religion.
The two parties are generally sorted now along racial and ethnic lines: The Republican Party is a predominately white political party and the Democratic Party is multiethnic. Republicans are more religious, rural, and wealthy; Democrats more secular, urban, and poor. Mapped onto political divisions, all of these social divisions make it increasingly difficult for many of us to see the other side as good-faith democratic citizens.
Where disinformation can be most effective is when it speaks to those identities and reinforces them. Deen Freelon spoke to the Science Friday podcast about how those narratives take root.
We’ve seen how “dark participatory culture” can generate new alternate realities, and how “doing one’s own research” [pdf] can reinforce and entrench previously-held beliefs. Our political differences are deep and will endure.
Should we drop election forecasting?
In case you missed it, Zeynep Tufekci suggested to New York Times readers that we should ignore the forecasts. These forecasts have become part of the horse-race norms of political coverage, with their own ability to sway the voting behavior of a public who don’t meaningfully understand the nuances of their predictions.
“For weather, we have fundamentals — advanced science on how atmospheric dynamics work — and years of detailed, day-by-day, even hour-by-hour data from a vast number of observation stations. For elections, we simply do not have anything near that kind of knowledge or data.”
Could technology companies embrace their new political role?
“I don't think you go back to a pre-political tech, or an apolitical tech,” Daniel Kreiss told Alex Kantrowitz. “That’s gone. All sorts of formerly nonmoral issues are now moral issues, whether that applies to immigration policy, progressive tax reform, or a Green New Deal. People see the opposing side in deeply immoral or amoral terms.”
Recent publications and appearances
Tressie McMillan Cottom joined The Daily Show with Trevor Noah during its live coverage of election night.
Francesca Tripodi joined a panel on disinformation, authenticity, and democratic participation:
Shannon McGregor spoke with the Associated Press and Business Insider about the tech platforms’ handling of election information. Spoiler alert: “We’re seeing exactly what we expected, which is not enough, especially in the case of Facebook.”
Parting thoughts
If your group text is ready for news that isn’t an updated count from Pennsylvania, send them this newsletter, maybe?