Splitting into Separate Social Media Worlds is not the Answer — it’s the Problem

3 min readNov 17, 2020

Photo credit: Pamela Hazelton on Medium

Last week, after the election, Twitter’s efforts to deal with misinformation and disinformation led hordes of conservatives to depart for Parler, where they found waiting for them more people who shared their beliefs.

They also found me. I joined the site months ago, for the same reasons I read RedState and The Daily Caller and follow Trump voters on Twitter. I want to know what people think, and that includes people with whom I don’t agree.

We should all do more of that. Settling into our own corners doesn’t solve anything (although it did clean up my Twitter feed).

And what do you know? I have an unexpected ally in my new cause. This morning I read an article about Charles Koch, a man whose family funded most of the conservative causes of the past three decades. Of course he has a book out.

Do you know what he said? “Boy, did we screw up! What a mess.” At age 85, he now regrets his partisanship, and wants to dedicate the rest of his life to restoring unity and helping social causes like poverty, addiction, recidivism and homelessness. Duh.

Before you just dismiss Koch as an old man afraid of meeting his maker in the afterlife, remember that when we sow division, we reap not only what we sow, but the “gifts” of the law of unintended consequences. After a lifetime of libertarianism, Koch has realized that his family has helped create a society in which nobody cares about anybody else.

That’s the unintended consequence of libertarianism, or at least of American individualism.

The truth is, we do need each other, and this pandemic should have taught us that more than ever before. Fighting over small things like politics in the face of sickness, poverty, and death misplaces the emphasis, as Koch has figured out after losing his own brother. At the end of the day is death, and it really doesn’t matter who is president.

This recognition is what leads me to want exposure to all different opinions. It’s why I don’t want Twitter and Facebook to act as my censors, and I don’t want Clubhouse to cut off my discovery of people I don’t (yet) follow because I haven’t met them yet. I’m a media literate adult, thank you, and I don’t need a safe space or a cancel culture to help me survive social media. I can listen without going down a rabbit hole. I can endure micro-agression and emerge resilient. I can read, and debate, and dismiss ideas that don’t make sense.

I sure hope Charles Koch is able to do something about all the social issues he disregarded for the past decades. If I were him, I’d begin with helping our education system and teaching kids critical thinking and reading skills. If the public were only educated, the rest would take care of itself.

Splitting into Separate Social Media Worlds is not the Answer — it’s the Problem

Written by Cloudsyndicatehd