Abstract

It is often claimed that social media accelerate political extremism by employing personalization algorithms that filter users into groups with homogenous beliefs. While an intuitive position, recent research has shown that social media users exhibit self-filtering tendencies. In this paper, I apply Hannah Arendt’s theory of political judgment to hypothesize a cause for self-filtering on social media. According to Arendt, a crucial step in political judgment is the imagination of a general standpoint of distinct yet equal perspectives, against which individuals compare their own judgments in order to test their defensibility. I argue that social media inhibit this step by gamifying the pursuit of social status, which encourages users to consider the perspectives of others not for the sake of a general standpoint but for the sake of improving their social status, resulting in self-filtering. Consequently, ameliorating political extremism on social media requires not just reforming the algorithms that deliver content to users, but the interfaces on which users present their social identities.

中文翻译：

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政治社会化：与汉娜·阿伦特一起重新思考过滤气泡和社交媒体

摘要

人们经常声称，社交媒体通过采用个性化算法将用户过滤成具有同质信仰的群体，从而加速了政治极端主义。虽然这是一种直观的观点，但最近的研究表明，社交媒体用户表现出自我过滤的倾向。在本文中，我应用汉娜·阿伦特的政治判断理论来假设社交媒体上自我过滤的原因。阿伦特认为，政治判断的关键一步是想象出一种不同但平等的观点的普遍立场，个人将自己的判断与这种观点进行比较，以检验自己的辩护能力。我认为社交媒体通过游戏化对社会地位的追求来抑制这一步骤，这鼓励用户考虑他人的观点，不是为了一般立场，而是为了提高自己的社会地位，从而导致自我过滤。因此，改善社交媒体上的政治极端主义不仅需要改革向用户提供内容的算法，还需要改革用户展示其社会身份的界面。