The presidential election of 2016 was the first time I truly paid any attention to politics, and what a dramatic let down that turned out to be. When I was little, I had always dreamed of becoming the first female president, but as I grew up, I slowly recognized that I wanted someone who looked like me in the White House a long time before my 35th birthday. So when Hillary Clinton won the Democratic Party Presidential Nomination in 2016, I was overjoyed by the thought that the United States was finally on the brink of breaking the ultimate glass ceiling. I mean how could she not win when her opponent was such a blatantly unqualified, misogynistic, racist, elitist twit? But she didn’t win. She lost because she was a woman, but mostly she lost because Donald Trump was able to impressively mobilize support for his fringe ideas and his dog-whistle politics by using social media platforms and more specifically, Twitter. In fact, Trump’s fame and unique brand of incendiary politics has always been driven by his social media presence and defined by the visceral emotions he evokes both in support and in opposition to this presence. He has unabashedly wielded the 280 characters Twitter provides to ruthlessly degrade his opponents and trumpet his ill-informed and even more ill-implemented policies.
     But I don’t think I truly understood how profound his ability to wield social media was until his comments and his brand encouraged such a disparate reality that his supporters felt empowered to violate a symbol of American democracy – the Capitol. I don’t think I truly understood how normal his brand of politics had become for myself and my generation until my parents’ reactions to the insurrection at the Capitol completely overshadowed anything I could even begin to feel. This event could be seen as my generation’s 9-11, but I could not and cannot summon anything more than slight shock or shallow rage. It is not that I have become numb to affronts on democracy. It is that I have never not known anything different. I have grown up in a world dominated by social media, and I came of age in a political era dominated by Trump. And if ever there was a lethal combination, it is that of social media and Trump. But the scary thing is, Trump is not the problem. Rather he is a symptom of a larger problem – social media – that is outwardly fostering connection and inclusion but is ultimately engulfing, weakening, and destroying my generation and with it our democracy’s future. 
     But if social media is imperiling our democracy, it begs the question of how something that has so fundamentally expanded our definition of democracy can simultaneously endanger it. How can platforms that have been founded on the ideal of “we the people” renege on the progress they have fostered? But maintaining progress is a constant battle and one which we are currently losing as social media gives fringe conspiracies and deliberately misleading propaganda a legitimating and wide-reaching platform. Yes, social media has allowed historically marginalized minorities to project their voice and have their perspective validated, spurring profound and positive societal change like that encouraged by the BLM movement. However, this expansion of democratic values is meaningless when we are no longer able to agree what constitutes fact and what constitutes fiction.
     In democracy, we are encouraged to argue the practicality of solutions, to debate the morality of issues, and to acknowledge the necessity of mutual respect even as we remain divided in our opinions. This all requires a shared concept of reality. But our shared concept of reality has almost entirely eroded in the face of the persistent and unregulated theories that social media presents as fact. We cannot even agree that climate change is real although I can step outside and tell you that I should not be tempted to wear shorts in winter. But many will deny the existence of climate change because they have been manipulated by social media into believing that scientists are wrong. Now, politicians cannot begin to address the very real threat global warming poses to future generations because they are not willing to step into a political minefield and acknowledge that it exists. This is what social media does. It alienates our senses of reality and shakes the fragile foundation of democracy even as it offers positive democratic gains. And we cannot lose sight of this: the gains of social media in empowering marginalized groups will be short-lived if the very platforms that are driving such gains are also generating parallel realities.
            But what if we can maintain these short-term gains and eliminate the pressing threat that disparate realities pose to our democracy? After all, social media can foster democracy as it fosters an increased sense of community that spans states and nations.  The Arab Spring of 2006 itself proves the strength of the type of online community that can encourage democratic debate. The fact that isolated “outsiders” in society can find their people online proves that social media has fostered a culture of inclusiveness by ensuring that every niche interest has an online community in which to shine. But these communities only exist in the interwebs, and they are threatening the actual in-person communities we do have.
    We have all become so attached to our thousands of closest “friends” online that we have lost the ability to interact with each other face to face. This loss is especially prevalent among teenagers who have never known a world without social media and the illusion of community it presents. I cannot tell you how many times I have been hanging out with friends only to realize that our hang out session is secondary to the ones they are conducting online. And maybe I am being overly cynical here since I have never actually had social media, but I think that it is my outsider perspective that has allowed me to critically analyze the effects of social media in a way that I would not be able to if I had a thriving online community of virtual friends.
            Nonetheless, it is difficult to prove that these communities are founded upon false pretenses. Many of us spend large portions of our lives feeling isolated within a society and culture that fails to embrace all quirks and differences, so it is difficult to question platforms that alleviate this isolation. It is difficult to condemn platforms that connect us with our people, people we might not find otherwise. However, we must question social media because in addressing our immediate need for connection, it only isolates us farther. Yes, we find people with similar interests but ultimately, we all end up living in echo chambers that simply reinforce our prejudices, preconceptions, and personalities.
     In and of themselves, most of these echo chambers seem outwardly benign if not positively revolutionary. In fact, many of my friends have become increasingly active politically as a result of their social media feeds, leading them to protest racial injustice or rampant misogyny, or simply become more confident in the validity of their voice. Instead of discussing high school gossip, my friends and I can now discuss abortion rights, the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, and a $15 minimum wage. And in a society which is entirely reliant upon a well-informed electorate for governance, it would seem that we should celebrate this change, this movement towards increased interest in politics. It would seem that we should be able to condemn the echo chambers that propagate messages of stolen elections while heralding those that propagate messages of increased equity. But this is not the case. Echo chambers, whatever their potentially positive real-world implications, are fundamentally detrimental to our society.
     For me, it is hard to say this, to declare that even the social media networks that strengthen voices pose a threat to our democracy. I have watched so many of my friends go from fearful of their voice to empowered to change the world because of social media. But any mechanism that further divides our society should concern us. We already live in a world in which we are separated by nationality, by race, by gender, by ethnicity, and by sexuality. And now with the inception of social media, we are also divided by our interests, by things as simple as whether or not our feed shows videos of cakes or of vegan juices and as complex as the science of climate change. And in this separation, we no longer even recognize the other side or attempt to understand their version of reality.  Social media platforms have not just made it easy for us to ignore those who do not believe what we believe, they have functionally made it impossible for us to seek out those with different beliefs.
    This situation is not simply a social media fluke or malfunction. In fact, social media algorithms have been specifically designed to reinforce these echo chambers by monitoring exactly what we click on and how much time we spend looking at certain posts, ads, and videos. This information then predicts to what else will we be drawn. And so begins the cycle, where our interests are singled out by artificial intelligence technologies so as to ensure our continued presence on social media. These technologies are not designed to challenge us or our beliefs or truly dissipate isolation. That would not be a profitable business model because no one likes being told that they are wrong. So instead, social media platforms have crafted algorithms that appear to alleviate isolation but truly just cure one form of isolation with an isolation that is profoundly more concerning and that can lead to rampant misinformation. Functionally, we are all living in our own, personalized utopias that are quickly fostering dystopias in the real world.
     And really, how did we not see this coming? We have assumed, since the inception of social media, that social media corporations are capable of self-regulating just like we assumed that all the new industries that emerged in the Gilded Age were capable of the same. We have assumed that when Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook franchise has subsumed other social media platforms and created a media monopoly, it is somehow different and somehow less damaging than John D. Rockefeller’s iron-grip over the oil industry in the late nineteenth century. Perhaps then, in the Gilded Age, we did not know better. But now we do. We know that corporations are entirely too focused on profits to engage in any activity that could possibly endanger the bottom line. And for social media corporations, profits are indelibly tied to clicks which are indelibly tied to the algorithms that calculate our interests and provide us with tailored feeds. And if we continue to follow this logic all the way through to the disconcerting end, we will realize that social media corporations have a vested interest in dividing and alienating our realities.
     For too long, these corporations have played fast and loose with the truth, ignoring the dystopia quickly unfolding around us as their profits take precedence over human interactions and democracy. Capitalism has always fostered an America that is relentlessly focused on profits instead of kindness, on an expansive and impractical definition of freedom instead of societal responsibility. And for years the problems that have arisen from this irresponsible economic system have been relatively fixable when the government has cared to intervene. This remains true for the realm of social media. We must begin to hold social media corporations accountable for the misinformation that is spread on their websites. We must begin to insist that social media corporations monitor fact and fiction, clearly delineating the difference. We must diminish the addictive effects of these platforms by eliminating the technologies that carefully cater to our quirks instead of challenging our beliefs. There are no precedents regarding reforms and regulations for companies who cry “free speech” every time their profits are threatened. But there are precedents for what happens when capitalism goes unregulated, when governments allow corporations to prioritize profits over humanity.
     And perhaps Donald Trump’s most noteworthy accomplishment throughout his four tumultuous years in the White House was the way in which he not only prioritized profits over humanity, but also simultaneously hastened what was always inevitable – the evolution of social media into a monster capable of alienating every imaginable faction in our nation. How do we move on in our nation and return to governance and solving issues like climate change when a significant portion of the population believes Joe Biden was not elected president? How do we move on in society when we can no longer agree what constitutes a fact? And how do we move on in the world if we have lost our ability to engage in genuine human connection? 
     We have all become so completely isolated in our perfect utopias and so content in this isolation that we have blindly embraced the arbitrary divisions social media has encouraged. As such, it is past time to meaningfully confront the danger that social media poses to our democracy for if we continue on this path of blind trust and contented division, Donald Trump, however reversable his legislative legacy, and social media corporations, however alluring their illusions, will have succeeded in not just normalizing democracy’s destruction but in actually enacting it.  So, to borrow and tweak the Notorious RBG’s metaphor, it seems more logical to whip out an umbrella without knowing if it will work than to stand under a rainstorm unprotected, desperately hoping the deluge will end.