An Excess of Certainty

Though this article in The Atlantic looks at the concept of political bias in social media through the lens of the recent elections in the United Kingdom (and focuses primarily on Twitter), what writer Helen Lewis has to say is important for any election, any electoral system, and any journalists or pundits or rank amateur political jibber-jabberers out there, whether from the left or not.

Twitter and its most active users, Lewis argues, exercise “outsize power to shape the political conversation.” Pretty sure we saw this when the left was shocked – shocked, mind you – to see Donald Trump win over Hillary Clinton in 2016. And it’s bound to happen again to the Democrats’ candidate running against Trump in 2020, no matter he’s an impeached president now.

I won’t re-hash all of her arguments and evidence here, but I will hit on the highlights:

1. Labour activists in the UK were convinced, listening to the Twitter Echo Chamber, Lewis says, that their party was going to win the general election, when in fact Boris Johnson’s conservatives handed them their worst defeat in almost a century.

2. The “echo chamber of social media reassures those extreme voices that they are in fact the mainstream.”

3. Freudian “narcissism of small differences” and legal scholar Cass Sunstein’s “group polarization” encourages divides even among like-minded individuals (and we’re seeing this locally, with the far right controlling the local Republican Central Committee and pushing far-right candidates, most of the time winning. This is all fueled by an “excess of certainty” that says even in defeat, “my side” certainly didn’t lose.

4. The opinions most commonly represented in mainstream outlets (Lewis says progressive outlets, but it works on both sides of the spectrum) are not held by the masses, including by the groups seemingly with the most at stake.

5. Far left progressive views, while not held by the mainstream, are shared by elite journalists. So the skew in politics enters into journalism. And this explains Fox News – only they skew to the right.

So, what are the lessons for the Weenie Man, such as I?



Don’t get all of your politic slop from social media. Or elite journalists. Think for yourself. Dammit.