Americans who spend at least five hours a day on social media are more likely to feel heard, but also more open to political violence and less supportive of democracy, according to a major new poll released this week.
But researchers can’t say for sure whether platforms such as Instagram and X are the cause or the effect of those views, and other academics have found social media’s influence is limited.
The findings come from a nationally representative study of more than 20,000 Americans that Gallup and the Charles F. Kettering Foundation conducted last summer as part of their annual survey on the ways Americans experience democracy. Of those surveyed, more than 1 in 10 spend at least five hours a day on social media.
“I think most of what we’re observing is a reflection of self-selection into who becomes a heavy social media user,” said Jaime Settle, an associate professor of government at William & Mary and the author of “Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America.”
“A certain kind of person is opting into spending a lot of time on social media,” she said, “and they may be people who are more disaffected to start with.”
The poll offers starkly conflicting data about the influence of heavy social media usage on Americans’ relationship with their government.
On one hand, the longer someone spends on social media, the more likely they are to feel that other people value their opinions. And more than 60 percent of the heaviest users say that protesting, donating money or attending town halls is an effective way to influence the government. Only half of people who don’t use social media find those forms of civic engagement effective.
But those same heavy users are far less likely to believe democracy is the best form of government. Just 57 percent of heavy users agreed with that statement, whereas 73 percent of people who use social media for an hour or less each day say democracy is the best form of government.
Though researchers at Gallup and Kettering wouldn’t say officially why those contradictions may be true, Derek Barker, the senior program manager for research at the Kettering Foundation, suggested that a clue might lie in the data itself.
Heavy social media users are more open to political violence and less open to compromise, the survey found. They find it hard to get along with people who don’t share their beliefs. And they are less likely to believe everyone should have the right to vote.
“What I would be concerned about is whether social media might be reinforcing the tendency to associate with like-minded people who are reinforcing these more extreme beliefs,” Barker said.
Officials for Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, did not respond to requests for comment, but in the past, its executives have pointed to peer-reviewed studies that suggest social media’s influence on polarization may be slighter than people assume.
Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan is one of a dozen or so independent academics who studied Facebook and Instagram’s impact during the 2020 elections. While Nyhan called the Gallup findings “an interesting hypothesis to test,” he said he didn’t know of any strong evidence that offered a causal relationship between social media and a distrust of democracy.
As part of Nyhan’s work, he and others ran experiments where they randomly assigned some users to disengage from social media during the 2020 election season, and they reduced other users’ access to content from like-minded posters. Neither intervention significantly changed voters’ beliefs or actions.
Though officials at Gallup and Kettering said their findings “suggest that social media use may play an increasingly complex role in the health of U.S. democracy,” they, too, stopped short of assigning a causal relationship between the online platforms and a person’s beliefs.
“What we have are a series of relationships that are at least raising concerns about social media use and democracy,” Barker said. “Our idea is to present the issue, highlight these relationships and start a conversation about what solutions might look like.”
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