At a recent conference in Spain on polarization, Avila Kilmurray, a key player in the Northern Ireland peace process, reminded the gathering that the Good Friday Agreement received more than 71 percent support in a 1998 referendum. But, she said, “if the vote were held today, with the presence of social media, I don’t think it would pass.”
Kilmurray’s comment goes to the heart of the political, cultural and educational problems prompted not just by social media but also by the growing presence of all kinds of new technologies in our lives, especially artificial intelligence.
Is it even possible to weigh the costs of social media against its benefits?
Was the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 and 2024 one of the costs of social media? Is the rise in right-wing populism in the United States and Europe — accompanied by democratic backsliding in country after country — another cost?
On another front of equal importance, has a generation of young men and women, especially young liberal women, suffered heightened levels of depression and anxiety because of social media?
Are new technologies, especially artificial intelligence, weakening the ability of students to think and reason at length and in depth? Do they help explain declining reading scores?
The reality is that an accurate accounting of the first question — can the costs of social media be weighed against the benefits? — is an impossible task and may have little relevance, since there is no going back from a world with A.I., TikTok, Facebook, the internet, smartphones and Instagram, not to mention the technologies we don’t yet know.
“It’s simply not possible to walk back from social media or do anything beyond banning phones in schools,” Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist at Stanford, wrote in an email. “This whole world is changing very dramatically with the integration of A.I. into the way the platforms operate and how individuals interact with them.”
What can be done, however, is to attempt to assess the costs with an eye to minimizing harm.
Richard Pildes, a law professor at N.Y.U. who has studied these questions, put the complexities and ambiguities in perspective in an email:
On the overall costs and benefits of technological revolutions, the printing press helped fuel the religious wars of the 16th century; Martin Luther’s 95 theses weren’t just nailed to a church door; the newly invented printing press enabled them to be distributed quickly and widely throughout Germany and Europe.
Joseph Goebbels called the radio “the eighth great power” and said, without the radio and the airplane, the Nazis would not have had their successes. But we wouldn’t prefer to be without a free press, the radio or the airplane today.
Despite these cautions, Pildes argued that “Twitter and cable television (also part of the communications revolution), along with the modern use of primary elections rather than political conventions, all played a significant role in Donald Trump’s initial electoral success.”
“There’s no question,” Pildes added, that
new technologies have contributed significantly to the political fragmentation roiling nearly all Western democracies. These new technologies enable more widespread political participation, but they also mean challenges to government action will be easy to mobilize and perhaps continual. The technological revolution has made it more difficult in many ways to deliver effective government, but if governments fail to do so, frustration, anger, distrust and worse will continue to grow.
Other scholars are willing to go a step further in placing blame on technology.
In an Oct. 2 essay posted in Persuasion, “It’s the Internet, Stupid: What Caused the Global Populist Wave? Blame the Screens,” Fukuyama, after nearly a decade of examining the causes of rising global populism, wrote, “I have come to conclude that technology broadly and the internet in particular stand out as the most salient explanations for why global populism has arisen in this particular historical period, and why it has taken the particular form that it has.”
The advent of the internet, Fukuyama continued,
can explain both the timing of the rise of populism, as well as the curious conspiratorial character that it has taken. In today’s politics, the red and blue sides of America’s polarization contest not just values and policies, but factual information like who won the 2020 election or whether vaccines are safe.
The two sides inhabit completely different information spaces; both can believe that they are involved in an existential struggle for American democracy because they begin with different factual premises as to the nature of the threats to that order.
In an email, Fukuyama said that “without the internet, Trump’s whole narrative about the 2020 election would never have gotten any traction.”
Eswar S. Prasad, a professor of economics at Cornell and the author of the forthcoming book “The Doom Loop: Why the World Economic Order Is Spiraling Into Disorder,” wrote in an email that the new technologies were collectively disproving the adage that the truth will out:
In principle, the ease with which high-quality and reliable information can be disseminated should make it possible to squeeze out inaccurate or intentionally misleading information. In practice, however, the structure of media and information platforms has led to the opposite outcome.
Large platforms have little incentive to filter out bad information. They have attracted broad, diverse audiences by limiting the filters placed on the quality of content while reinforcing loyalty to the platform through algorithms that selectively feed users information that conforms to and corroborates their existing beliefs.
Thus, while technology has fostered the concentration of power in the hands of large platforms, it has also led to the fragmentation of information sources and the quality of content available on those platforms.
Some scholars are less critical and more ambivalent about the effects of technology on politics and democracy.
Maria Papageorgiou, a fellow at Newcastle University in Britain, where she researches Sino-Russian disinformation during British and U.S. elections, stressed both benefits and costs in an email responding to my queries:
Like other revolutionary technologies, such as computers and the internet, social media has both benefits and drawbacks. The main issue is that society was slow to recognize the profound impact it would have on communication, entertainment and political discourse. As a result, appropriate safeguards and education about responsible use were not developed in time.
While social media has played a significant role in elections over the past several years, she wrote that in 2016
Trump transformed political communication through his distinctive use of Twitter (now X). His direct, unfiltered and often provocative messaging style established a new form of political discourse that extended beyond traditional media and even influenced foreign policy communication.
Papageorgiou’s overall assessment of the role of technology in politics stood in contrast to Fukuyama’s:
Social media has amplified important issues and provided a platform for people to raise concerns that were previously ignored by the broader population. It has also allowed the public to directly respond to, criticize and oppose government policies. Social media has significantly changed the political tone — shifting it from a more formal and diplomatic style to a more direct and emotionally driven one aimed at reaching the general public.
While more positive in her evaluation of these new technologies, Papageorgiou contended that Trump far outpaced his adversaries in 2016 and 2024 on this front.
In a January 2025 paper, “Social Media, Disinformation, and A.I.: Transforming the Landscape of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Political Campaigns,” Papageorgiou wrote that in the 2024 election,
social media also played a pivotal role in monitoring public sentiment and tracking real-time engagement through metrics like likes, reposts and followers. Candidate follower counts highlighted the digital dynamics: Trump led with 95 million followers on X; his running mate, JD Vance, had 2.8 million; Harris had 21.1 million; and her running mate, Tim Walz, had 1.2 million. Trump’s engagement metrics on X were significantly higher than his competitors’, with a record-breaking interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast garnering extensive viewership across platforms like YouTube and X.
Duncan Watts, a professor in the department of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania, took his skepticism of technology doomsayers a giant step further than Papageorgiou or any others I reached.
In an email, Watts wrote:
I understand the temptation to draw causal connections between macro technological trends such as the rise of smartphones and social media on the one hand and macrosocietal trends such as the rise of global populism, increases in teenage mental health problems or changes in how students learn. Having said that, I think it’s a fruitless exercise — at least scientifically. (It can be very fruitful for building one’s personal brand as a public intellectual.)
Right now, Watts argued,
it’s fashionable to focus on the negative effects of social media, but it’s worth remembering that it can also have many positive effects. The very same technology that allows conspiracy theorists to cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of vaccines also allows for extremely high-quality science and educational channels to proliferate.
The very same technology that allows small groups of extremists to communicate and coordinate also allows for small groups of cancer survivors or others who suffer from chronic pain or social alienation to form support groups that improve their lives. And the very same technology that draws some people away from meaningful social connections allows others to form meaningful social connections — with prospective romantic partners, with neighbors (e.g., neighborly gifting groups) or with old friends who might otherwise have fallen out of touch.
At the same time, some analysts contend that technology is not inherently a negative force in politics and that it provides new ways to abuse the political process.
“I would not say that the costs of social media outweigh the benefits; it is more that the costs of unregulated social media outweigh the benefits,” Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, wrote by email.
“Hannah Arendt,” he added,
observed that a flood of lies does not necessarily lead people to accept all the lies as truth; rather such a flood makes it too much work for the average citizen to determine what is true and false When that happens, they lose confidence in anyone’s ability to determine what it true and what is false, and are likely to simply accept whatever the government says as probably true.
“Unregulated social media makes it easy to flood the zone” with excrement, as Steve Bannon observed, Goldstone noted, “so that no one had much confidence that anything is true. That has created a political arena in which everybody can feel emboldened to lie to bolster their position or tear down their enemies.”
Without regulation, social media becomes a divisive force and threatens the survival of democracy, Goldstone argued.
He continued:
Democracy relies on people with different views finding their way to reasonable compromises and consensus built on a core of shared values and common goals. If a population becomes sharply divided into different identity groups that see their opponents as enemies whose goals — nay, whose very existence — is a threat to their own values and goals, then democracy is likely to fade away in favor of competition to control the state in order to wield state power to vanquish those dangerous enemies.
The debate over the adverse effects of technological innovation has by no means been limited to politics.
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at N.Y.U., and Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, have received widespread attention for their work showing that there is a clear correlation — and perhaps a causal relationship — between the rise of smartphones and an abrupt escalation of teenage anxiety, depression and suicidal tendencies, especially among girls growing up in liberal families.
Their studies have resulted in an international movement to ban smartphones in schools. There have been a number of domestic and European studies showing that doing so leads to significant improvements in student performance and behavior. Conversely, in April 2025 the British medical journal The Lancet published a study that concluded, “The findings do not provide evidence to support the use of school policies that prohibit phone use during the school day in their current form, and indicate that these policies require further development.”
A more recent concern has arisen over the growing use of artificial intelligence. Derek Thompson, an author of the book “Abundance,” described recent disturbing trends in a Sept. 22 essay published on The Argument: “We can already see how technology is affecting our capacity to think deeply right now. And I am much more concerned about the decline of thinking people than I am about the rise of thinking machines.”
Thompson argued that students’ use of A.I. is leading to “the demise of writing,” which matters because
writing is an act of thinking. This is as true for professionals as it is for students. In “Writing Is Thinking,” an editorial in Nature, the authors argued that “outsourcing the entire writing process to L.L.M.s deprives scientists of the important work of understanding what they’ve discovered and why it matters.
Thompson cited data from the Nation’s Report Card, which “found that average reading scores hit a 32-year low in 2024 — which is troubling, since the data series only goes back 32 years.”
The test found that the percentage of 12th-grade students reading below proficiency levels rose to 32 percent in 2024 from 20 percent in 1992, while the share reading above proficiency levels fell to 35 percent from 40 percent. Those reading at proficiency levels dropped to 33 percent from 39 percent.
The changes were most acute among the bottom two quintiles, and the data also showed that they sharply accelerated from 2015 to 2024.
As students read fewer, if any, books and turn increasingly to ChatGPT for writing, what’s being lost?
Thompson said:
It’s the patience to read long and complex texts, to hold conflicting ideas in our heads and enjoy their dissonance, to engage in hand-to-hand combat at the sentence level within a piece of writing — and to value these things at a time when valuing them is a choice, because video entertainment is replacing reading and ChatGPT essays are replacing writing. As A.I. becomes abundant, there is a clear and present threat that deep human thinking will become scarce.
While I agree with Watts that attempts to conclusively prove that social media, A.I. and other technologies cause specific political and social problems are a “fruitless exercise,” caught up in the morass of causation and correlation, that does not mean that attempting to explore the contemporary miasma of Trump, authoritarianism and right-wing populism through the lens of technology is a fool’s errand.
This exploration is crucial if the United States — and many other Western countries — are to pull out of their nosedive into autocracy, a process that will require human agency.
I want to close by quoting Pildes:
The challenge the communications revolution poses to democratic government is more profound than more familiar concerns with disinformation, misinformation, offensive speech and the like. The revolution might inherently undermine the capacity for legitimate, broadly accepted political authority — the authority necessary to be able to govern effectively in democratic systems.
Political fragmentation is the result of dissatisfaction with the way democracies have been governing, yet it also makes effective governance all the more difficult. Though there is insufficient appreciation of this new era of political fragmentation, overcoming this fragmentation and delivering effective governance is among the most urgent challenges facing democracies across the West.
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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Tuesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.
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