High-Tech Communication Media Problems

3. Factors That Make Conflict Intractable

This introductory article was written by ChatGPT at the direction of Heidi Burgess, who reviewed, edited, and approved the final content.
For more information

Modern communication technologies have made it possible for almost anyone to reach large audiences almost instantly and at very low cost. This has many benefits: citizens can organize, expose wrongdoing, find support, and learn about events that powerful institutions might otherwise ignore. But the same technologies also make it easier to spread rumors, propaganda, hate, outrage, and misleading claims faster than older democratic institutions know how to respond. This is another of what we call conflict “overlay” problems, because bad communication systems can make already-difficult conflicts much harder to understand and resolve.

One serious problem is speed. False or inflammatory claims can circulate before journalists, officials, experts, or community leaders have time to check them. A major MIT summary of a Science study found that false news on Twitter spread farther, faster, more deeply, and more broadly than true news. In a crisis or polarized conflict, this speed matters. A misleading video clip, fake quotation, conspiracy theory, or rumor about an election, protest, crime, war, or public-health emergency can shape public understanding before corrections ever catch up. And when corrections are made, they are often hardly noticed.

A second problem is the design of attention-based media systems. Social media platforms, online video sites, partisan websites, podcasts, talk radio, and cable television all compete for attention. Content that triggers fear, anger, moral outrage, ridicule, or tribal loyalty is often more engaging than calm explanation. Research published in PNAS found that social media posts about political opponents were especially likely to be shared. Cable news has also become more polarized; a University of Pennsylvania 10-year analysis found a growing partisan gap in cable TV news, especially in prime-time programming. These systems can reward the people who intensify conflict more than those who explain it.

A third problem is fragmentation. Citizens no longer share a small set of common information sources. Instead, they often get news from different platforms, influencers, cable channels, group chats, podcasts, and social media feeds. A Pew Research Center study found large partisan differences in which news sources Americans use and trust. Another Pew fact sheet shows that many Americans now regularly get news from social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. This does not mean everyone lives in a perfect “filter bubble”; the Reuters Institute cautions that the evidence is more complicated. But it does mean that many people experience public life through very different information environments, which makes shared problem solving harder.

A fourth problem is deliberate manipulation. Domestic political actors, foreign governments, extremists, scammers, and conflict profiteers can use modern media tools to impersonate ordinary citizens, target narrow audiences, amplify grievances, and make societies distrust their own institutions. RAND’s analysis of the “firehose of falsehood” propaganda model explains how repeated, rapid, high-volume falsehoods can overwhelm people’s ability to sort truth from lies. The harm is not limited to elections or policy debates. Amnesty International concluded that Facebook’s systems helped amplify anti-Rohingya hate speech and misinformation in Myanmar before and during atrocities there. This is an extreme case, but it shows how communication technologies can intensify real-world fear, hatred, and violence.

The result is a dangerous gap between technological power and social wisdom. Our tools for spreading messages have advanced far faster than our ability to build trustworthy information systems, protect free speech, limit manipulation, and preserve the mental and social well-being of users. The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on social media and youth mental health reflects one part of this broader concern: communication technologies affect not only politics, but also identity, anxiety, belonging, and emotional health. Constructive conflict work does not require rejecting new technologies. It requires learning how to use them in ways that inform, rather than inflame, connect, rather than isolate; and help citizens solve shared problems, rather than turn every disagreement into a battle between enemies.

This page was created by ChatGPT in response to this prompt. It was then reviewed, edited, supplemented and approved by Heidi Burgess. More information about how and why we are using AI in this way, and about the growing number of ways in which Beyond Intractability is using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI systems to generate content and build out the BI system, is available on our BI/AI Overview Page.