- How can we bridge the gap between different political beliefs and values?
- What role do social media and the media play in shaping our political views?
- Can we find common ground and work towards solutions, or are our differences too great to overcome?
To me it would seem the role of social media and the internet in general is to make the extreme ideologies to become more mainstream, to be honest.
Before Youtube became popular and before it was common for people to have Personal computers on their homes, it was rather difficult for a person to become a radical or extremist on a political idea, it would take them to get out their way to find people who would encourage to harbor those corrosive ideas. Nowadays, one just needs to type some buttons and click a few times to find the most extreme ideas from the left and from the right at the reach of one's hands on the internet, and I am not even considering the impact disinformation can have on people.
Social media is also like a wild west for people to get fooled and pick on whatever fake news they see, those are usually made on purpose to push a political agenda.
That is why it has become harder to find moderate people on politics, in my opinion. Being centrist now a rarity, and both the left and the right seem to hate moderates.