In July 2019, a team of researchers led by Nejla Asimovic asked a group of people in Bosnia and Herzegovina to delete their Facebook accounts. The study drew from a range of ethnicities, with participants identifying themselves variously as Bozniaks, Serbs, Croats and “Bosnians”. It took place over the annual week of commemoration for the Srebrenica massacre, usually a period of heightened ethnic tension and abuse.
Nejla Asimovic and her team found something unexpected. Popular narratives tend to blame Facebook for driving polarisation. But during their social media blackout, these Facebook users became more hostile, not less, to other ethnic groups. They had lower levels of news knowledge, and were less likely to cooperate in activities with other communities – although they did also enjoy lower levels of anxiety and loneliness. Switching off Facebook seemed to entrench the wounds of a genocide, not heal them.
Watching my friends’ social media during the current conflict in Israel and Gaza has left me in despair. We are undergoing a time of profound domestic polarisation in response to a geopolitical event; incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia in Britain are both spiking.
Amid such online division, it’s hard to credit the research I’ve described above – is it possible that social media isn’t the problem?
I have never known a fortnight of more fear and anxiety amongst the British Jewish community. I am less equipped to speak to the British Muslim experience, but I understand that it is also a time of deep pain. Part of life in any minority community in 2023 is the constant sense of conditional assimilation. We don’t accept overt discrimination in today’s Britain on the grounds of race, religion, gender or sexuality; it has become covert instead.
But for some of us, we’re always slightly wondering what’s said when we’re out of the room. Social media allows us to see what our friends are saying when they’ve forgotten we’re still in the room with them. It shows us what our friends think are healthy, even normal views – when no one who might challenge them is present to incept a thought before they press “send”.
Social media shows up our selection biases. It reveals what spurs us to action. It reveals what doesn’t move our hearts.
Selection bias matters. British Jews – at the very least, the ones with whom I spend much of my life – are well aware of the horror of life as an ordinary Gazan. They’re not offended when Gentile friends post on Facebook to deplore Palestinian deaths. But British Jews will ask you why, on the deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust, you said nothing. They’ll quietly wonder why, only after Israel retaliated to terrorist invasion, did you begin to publicly deplore the horrors of war? Why, of all the bungled attempts by the post-war British Empire to draw up ethnically monolithic states, is it Israel’s painful birth for which a global “lobby” is blamed?
When it comes to India, for example, also founded on the horrific displacement of communities in the late 40s, we do much better. No one refers to the trauma of Partition – a profoundly cruel population swap between India and Pakistan, in which both Hindus and Muslims suffered deeply – as one community’s act of “colonisation”. The 40s expulsion of Jews from Arab lands to Israel is repeatedly referred to as exactly that: “colonisation”.
When new horrors happen in India, virtuous Brits seem capable of understanding that the British Hindu community are likely to be emotionally impacted, or even have relatives affected, because that is how diaspora works. But bien-pensant left-liberals would never blame them for the Modi government, or accuse them of participation in a “lobby” to murder Kashmiri children. Why can’t they hold the same nuances in their heads when it comes to Israel and British Jews?
When social media becomes your signal for the causes you pick and choose, the friends for whom you don’t choose empathy will notice. We shrink tighter into our existing communities; I have found myself spending time only with friends who, like me, fall into the category of “Jewish-ish-ish.”
As my friend, the anti-polarisation expert Alison Goldsworthy wrote to me this week: “War is a time when we all feel added uncertainty. Uncertainty leads us to grip to identities tighter, which makes it harder to process information in an ‘unbiased’ way.”
When I get despairing about social media, however, I think back to the Srebenica study. Logging-off isn’t always the right answer. One explanation put forward for that research is that when we log-off social media, we spend even more time with our existing groups. There is still value to an interconnected world. If only we did social media better than we do war.
