Noah Smith: Social media drove polarization by eliminating geographic and ideological segregation
Noah Smith · Is AI Really Taking Our Jobs? — With Noah Smith · Jul 2, 2025 · at 25:38
Noah Smith discusses why political grievance and societal unrest are rising in the United States despite improving economic metrics like real wage growth.
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“I think it's primarily social media. I think that social media so, so I think that Americans, America was this very big, diverse country. You had ideological diversity. We had geographic diversity, not just like racial diversity, which is what we typically think about. We had all these forms of diversity where you could really spread out and find your people. Like in, in, in, you could go, if you wanted to live a conservative life, you could go to Texas. If you want to live a liberal life, you can go to you can go to California. But then social media came, and especially Twitter, and suddenly everyone was thrown in one little room with everyone else, and not just people from America, but English-speaking people from all over the world, and we have the global language, right? So we've got people weighing in from Argentina, from Bulgaria, from Pakistan, from, you know, UK, and places like that. And so immediately it became this giant scrum where everyone was constantly exposed to people who hate them and despise them and disagree with them. We couldn't spread out, right? I think that this caused conflict in our society at every level of society, because people who had been able to segregate were no longer able to segregate. And so social media is what caused our thing because every day social media will find whoever hates you and concentrate them directly in your notifications tab.”
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