By Jason Lim
Remember the early summer of 2008 when the Lee Myung-bak administration faced the greatest crisis of its young term when tens of thousands of regular folks, scared that the government’s lifting of its ban against U.S. beef would lead to mad cow disease, poured out onto the streets week after week? At its height, there were 80,000 people protesting the government’s policies. The mainstream media had ignored this phenomenon at first since it actually started with an obscure online petition by a high school student who voiced the concerns and encouraged fellow students to protest. These protests were then covered by citizen reporters who uploaded them to online platforms, which propagated the news in real-time and led to the general public joining in the effort — mostly self-organized within the Agora forum on Daum — until it forced Lee to apologize twice and clean out his senior advisers’ corps. Regardless of the veracity of the claims, this incident was notable since it was the first time when a significant political movement emerged out of Web 2.0 ether through an organic coalescing of storytelling and self-organization leveraging digital platforms.
What happened with mad cow protests was especially interesting to me since I had just studied the characteristics of the emerging social media phenomenon in school and learned that the No. 1 rule was that birds of a feather flock together. What the mad cow protests showed was that enough birds of a feather flocking together would dominate the public narrative and drive changes. All it needed was a compelling story and means to self-organize. This was mad cow 1.0.
The influence of social media platforms on presidential elections became undeniable in 2016. The most fascinating thing to come out of the 2016 U.S. presidential election was the rise of so-called “microtargeting.” We found out that political campaigns and organizations used social media’s data-driven algorithms to target specific demographics with tailored content, often playing on fears or reinforcing existing biases. This targeted approach was highly effective in driving further polarization, as users were only exposed to content that aligned with their views. Instead of engaging in a broad national discourse, voters were segmented and influenced based on their personal data, making it difficult to foster a sense of unity around common issues, which was exactly what the campaign wanted since it created a stronger sense of “us vs. them” and “right vs. wrong” that would arouse citizens to become partisans motivated enough to act.
So, birds of a feather still flocked together, except the birds were sought out specifically and provided the means to flock together on digital platforms, making these social media platforms all-powerful in dictating the ebb and flow of public discourse. This was mad cow 2.0. If mad cow 1.0 was an open agora waiting for people to seek it out, then mad cow 2.0 was the agora itself seeking you out.
In 2024, this “birds of a feather flock together” phenomenon is metastasizing to the actual platforms themselves. Before, it was the bifurcation of the “us vs. them” dialogue on the same social media platform based on individualized feeds. In other words, I would see a completely different feed on my Facebook page compared to the next guy, based on what Facebook’s algorithm thought would appeal more to my preconceptions and biases, which would lead to more engagement, which meant more advertising dollars for the platform. But we would still be on the same social media platform. We were in the same place, albeit separated by rhetorical echo chambers.
No longer. Our bifurcation has literally landed us in completely different digital nations. Our flocking birds are actually flying in different skies altogether.
According to Pews, “Women make up greater portions of regular news consumers on Nextdoor (64 percent), TikTok (62 percent), Facebook (60 percent), Snapchat (60 percent) and Instagram (59 percent), while men make up greater shares on Reddit (68 percent), X (64 percent), Rumble (60 percent), Truth Social (58 percent) and YouTube (57 percent). News consumers on Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, X and Reddit tend to be younger than those on other sites. Other patterns are unique to individual sites. For instance, 48 percent of news consumers on WhatsApp are Hispanic — much higher than on any other site. Overwhelming shares of regular news consumers on Truth Social (88 percent) and Rumble (83 percent) are Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, as are half of those on Facebook and YouTube. On Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, Reddit and Nextdoor, news consumers are more likely to be Democrats or Democratic leaners. X news consumers are about evenly divided by party.”
It remains to be seen what this means for the 2024 U.S. elections. But it’s fair to note that the polarization of public narratives has become so severe that we no longer even occupy the same digital space. We literally are living in different digital nationhoods. It’s reminiscent of the Spring and Autumn Period in Chinese history whereby smaller nations were vying each other for power, eventually leading to the bloody Warring States period where violent consolidation occurred. Hope history doesn’t repeat itself.
Jason Lim ([email protected]) is a Washington-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect The Korea Times’ editorial stance.