MANILA, Philippines – America faces an immense challenge for the November elections. Burdened with lies, rage, and splintered realities, how can it be assured of an outcome that reflects informed choices?

Nerve’s research on the information ecosystem, done through a combination of structured and unstructured data, shows failures in information cascades, leading to seven layers of manipulation that threaten individual agency. These were enabled by nearly a decade of unregulated technological development that has — based on previous Nerve research — corrupted and largely destroyed the public information ecosystem.

The situation, often described as a tech coup aided by the public’s implicit approval, ignited long-standing conflicts once managed by good leadership. Today, well-meaning leaders find themselves unable to communicate effectively because the design of the public sphere incentivizes an outrage economy, where radicalization has taken over politics, and extremism has become the norm.

This study provides a critical assessment of the US information ecosystem, highlighting key trends in news consumption habits and online information cascades ahead of the 2024 US elections.

It pulls data from the last three years and has three components:

• deep dives into three major highly emotional fracture lines often exploited by information operations — immigration, abortion, and the Israel-Hamas war;
• a survey on Americans’ media consumption habits; and
• a review of related literature. We analyze how Americans have gotten to this point and, perhaps, the possible steps forward to restore facts and a shared reality.

It is our view that Americans need to develop a more robust understanding of the country’s information ecosystem, how information streams have been weaponized, and how the situation has led to shifts in perception and power.

Given this context, we recommend short, medium and long-term tactics and strategies to restore information integrity.

Key Findings

Political Tribalism and Information Distortion

Social media and personalized content created echo chambers that heavily rely on hyper-partisan sources, blurring the line between fact and fiction, news and propaganda.

The platforms' incentive structure continues to fuel the spread of falsehoods, hate, and exclusionary narratives that foster hostility towards specific groups, often bringing real-world harm.

• Hyper-personalization creates information bubbles with less fact-based journalism, more partisan propaganda, and disinformation.
  • The research uncovers insulated networks that revolve around hyper-partisan sources and whose content is closer to propaganda than evidence-based news. These news bubbles have become breeding ground for disinformation, conspiracy theories, and exclusionary narratives.
• 4 out of 10 Americans get news from social media – platforms that depress the distribution of news from journalists and prioritize engagement over facts. This is particularly evident among younger Americans, with 6 in 10 reporting that they obtained information about abortion, immigration, and the Israel-Hamas conflict from social media.
  • News organizations share the space on social media with independent creators, who may or may not follow journalism standards and ethics but have nonetheless become news sources on digital platforms. The results of this study highlight how the reach and content volume of non-journalistic actors outstrip news organizations on social media.
• Local TV news is still the top source of news, but ownership issues and media manipulation surface.
  • Over the past decade, the local TV industry has undergone significant consolidation, driven by declining revenues and increased competition from Big Tech. Changes in media ownership regulations have allowed few broadcast conglomerates to dominate highly concentrated television markets, raising concerns about a “conservative takeover” of the local TV industry.

Growing Generational Divide

Evolving news consumption habits are widening divisions between younger and older Americans.

The study suggests that the youth’s high trust in and reliance on social media may not only be a contributing factor to their divergent worldviews; it also makes them more vulnerable to information operations and manipulation. Big Tech also allows brigading, dog-whistling, and gaslighting in such an emotional, factionalized landscape.

• The data shows that 45% of Americans are highly interested in politics and current affairs and use either social or traditional sources or both (Mixed Media). At least 25% rely largely on traditional channels (Traditional), especially local TV news, while 15% primarily get news from social media (Social). The remaining 15% are disengaged, with low interest in politics and attention to news.
  • Of Americans aged 55 and older, 57% are highly interested in politics and public affairs, and they get their news from both traditional platforms and social media. At least 31% of them still rely mainly on traditional platforms, especially local news television. 
  • For Americans aged 35 to 54, at least 43% use both traditional platforms and social media for news, with a slightly smaller percentage relying primarily on traditional platforms. This group also has the largest percentage of people with low interest in politics and news (21%). 
  • In the youngest age group, 18 to 34, at least 35% primarily get their news from social media, while 33% use a mix of traditional platforms and social media. This age group has the lowest percentage of people who primarily get news from traditional platforms like television.

• Young Americans are hyper-dependent on social media, where they are:
  • More reliant on social media for news
  • More likely to engage with political posts and
  • Most trusting of political content on social media

• Young Americans exhibit differing opinions from other age groups on political topics, including immigration and the Israel-Hamas conflict.
  • 45% of Americans support stricter immigration policies. However, younger Americans are the most divided on immigration policies: 41% support stricter immigration policies while 39% support more lenient policies.
  • 6 out of 10 Americans agree that abortion should be legal, with the younger generation showing the strongest skew.
  • Younger Americans are also divided on the Israel-Hamas war: 28% of 18 to 34-year-old respondents say they support Hamas, while 40% support Israel.
  • Americans who are aged 18-34 years old said they got their information on the three topics primarily from social media.

• Compared to the older generation, younger Americans rely on social media more for news and information on key political issues.
  • Americans aged 18-34 identified Facebook as their top source of news (53%). At least 45% also get news from X (formerly Twitter), and 41% on YouTube. Other age segments primarily got their news from local TV (43%), followed by news websites (28%)
  • Asked where they got information about key political issues, Americans aged 18-34 consistently chose social media. Other age segments consistently chose mainstream news sources.

• While social media brought the Israel-Hamas war closer to the American public, its design and incentive structure intensified out-group hostility and distorted the information environment.
  • Out of 33,000 sampled posts (N=321 million) on X, 19% were categorized as toxic, which is defined as “rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment that is likely to make you leave a discussion.” 12% meanwhile were identity attacks, 14% were insults, and 8% had high amounts of profanity. The data also show trace amounts (2%) of threats.
  • The scan reveals the boycott campaigns have become a key strategy of the pro-Palestinian network. The narrative reflects a collective effort to use economic means to express opposition to Israel's policies and actions.

Analysis & context

Americans are voting at a time of unprecedented conflict and violence against the backdrop of two wars in Ukraine and Gaza. October 7 has rekindled old nightmares for America’s Jewish community, made worse by the world’s response to the continued killings in Gaza and its impact on the youth. Charges of antisemitism and Islamophobia are thrown without regard to facts or motives, fueling fear and paranoia. The campus protests are testing America, and they are far from over.

This emotionally heightened environment is made worse by technological developments that have splintered reality even further: the first generation AI on social media, clustering, and microtargeting, maximizing surveillance capitalism for profit. What were once advertising and marketing platforms have been hijacked by geopolitical power. Information warfare targeted Americans as early as the 2016 elections, when both sides of Black Lives Matter were pounded by Russian disinformation, touching 126 million Americans. The goal then — and now — is chaos, and eight years later, few of the design problems that ran through the technology that connected us have been addressed. (As early as 2018, an MIT study showed that lies spread six times faster than facts on social media. In 2017, Rappler’s study showed that those lies spread even faster when laced with fear, anger, and hate. Women were attacked then at least ten times more than men. These problems remain.)

Fast forward to 2024, and we see most of the safeguards for the 2020 US elections have been rolled back: Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, dissolved its trust and safety council, renamed it X, and fired 80% of its safety engineers. Layoffs by Facebook and Google also ravaged their trust and safety teams. Americans are going to vote at a time when their news feeds will give them less facts and reliable information: personalization has turned the public sphere into an insane asylum, where every person can have their own reality.

That became even more chaotic after generative AI was released publicly in November 2022. The technological arms race now means that disinformation can be mass-produced for very little cost. Deep fakes mean you can’t trust your eyes and ears, and now LLM (large language model) chatbots mean you can’t even trust that the person you’re talking to is human. The enshittification of the internet, when low-quality content is estimated at 57.1% as of January 2024, is in full swing, and its casualty is trust.

Seven layers of manipulation

The insidious manipulation that has turned social media into a behavior modification system is compounded in seven ways that threaten individual agency as Americans go to the polls.

First, there’s the design and structure of incentives for social media. That led to the second: an outrage economy that fuels real-world violence. Emotional contagion heightens the online spread of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Third, add the information warfare by illiberal nations targeting Americans, including Russia, China, and Iran, further heightened by both Ukraine and Gaza and American actions in both.

Now add the fourth layer: years of meta-narratives and algorithms polarizing the public sphere on a key fracture line in America: the Middle East, Israel, and Palestine — and how that is changing public opinion. For the first time ever in 2023, Democrats sympathized more with Palestine than with Israel (49% vs 38%).

The fifth layer came after the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, when information operations turned into information warfare for Israel, Hamas, and Palestine. In March 2024, a majority of Americans said they disapproved of Israeli actions in Gaza.

The sixth layer comes from the emotional impact of these factors on the American Jewish community, besieged with increased levels of antisemitism and paranoia, even as Islamophobia and censorship of pro-Palestinian views increased online and in the real world. Both communities began intensive brigading measures on social media, further increasing the chilling effect on speech.

Finally, supercharge with the seventh layer of elections, with politicians and interest groups exploiting these gaping, open wounds. At Columbia University, for example, Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes appeared on campus on April 24, followed a day later by a “United for Israel” march led by Christian Nationalist and right-wing figures with extremist ties. Brands and public figures are attacked, both for taking a side and not taking a side.

Meanwhile, generational divides within the Democratic party over the Israel-Hamas conflict are deepening amid Republican attempts to exploit pro-Palestinian protests for political gain. Our findings show abortion and immigration dovetailing into the cascading failures of the Middle East, bringing other fracture lines like race and gender into the political race.

Less News, More Manipulation

In addition to these factors, there are major changes implemented by Big Tech that will mean less news in social media feeds and more toxic sludge. First, Facebook, the world’s largest distributor of news, began choking the news on feeds as early as 2018 — with reports of a decline in Facebook referral traffic of up to 87% in a little over a year. In January 2024, news distribution fell off a cliff, with news organizations reporting drops of at least 50% to 85% of referral traffic between August 2022 and August 2023.

That’s followed by Google’s use of generative AI in search. First dubbed Search Generative Experience (SGE), it was rolled out on beta in May 2023 to 125 countries. A year later, Google’s AI search is now the norm, and it’s expected to take out 30% to 75% of referral traffic to news and other websites.

These changes mean digital journalism faces an existential crisis. This means that Americans will have fewer facts to go by, less news on their social media feeds, and more outrage, fear, and hate. – Rappler.com

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This story was originally published on Rappler on October 14, 2024. It was made in collaboration with The Nerve, a data forensics company that enables changemakers to navigate real-world trends and issues through narrative and network investigations. Taking the best of human and machine, we enable partners to unlock powerful insights that shape informed decisions. Composed of a team of data scientists, strategists, award-winning storytellers, and designers, the company is on a mission to deliver data with real-world impact.