By Sebastián Osorio Idárraga*
Polarization, an equivalent of evaluative concepts such as “radicalization” or “extremism”, is already a phenomenon that is advancing rapidly in the public debate and that, thanks to social networks, is affecting more and more people.
The Hidden Drug report, a study on the power of addiction to polarize public debate, published by Más Democracia and consulting firm Llorente y Cuenca, states that the level of polarization in Latin America has increased by 39% in the last five years.
For example, since the start of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, the level of engagement in this type of polarizing conversation through social networks has increased by at least 8% per year in Latin America and up to 15% in the United States.
“This phenomenon, on the other hand, has to do with the tendency for more and more people to consider that their moral judgments have the value of objective knowledge, which, therefore, cannot be subject to discussion,” said the authors of the study.
RANGE OF POLARIZATION IN LATIN AMERICA
To arrive at these results and measure polarization, the authors took into account the last five years of conversation in Latin America and the United States through social networks, processing more than 601 million messages on the platforms collected between September 1, 2017 and 31 August. , 2022.
Based on the results, experts emphasize that addiction to social networks and polarization reaches, in certain cases, the “range of drugs”, a drug that hides behind the apparent normality of the use of these digital platforms.
“The literature on this type of addiction refers to effects such as loss of control, absorption at the mental level or serious alteration of the person’s daily functioning”, according to Mariano Sigman, neuroscientist; Patricia Fernández, clinical psychologist at Ramón y Cajal Hospital; and Belén Carrasco, Senior Researcher and Associate Director of Eyes on Russia.
For Cristina Monge, president of Más Democracia, “a quality democracy requires having a safe public space for discussion. To the extent that polarization in political and media circles prevents it, they are compromising the quality of democracies to a degree that we cannot yet define.”
In Latin American countries, the most polarizing issues are abortion, freedom of expression, human rights, feminism and racism.
POLARIZATION IN BRAZIL
Freedom of expression and abortion are the most polarizing issues in Brazil, while the country has the highest rate of this phenomenon among the countries analyzed.
“Racism, although with a lower polarization than freedom of expression (-9%), is the territory that produces the most conversations.”
“Despite containing the world’s largest rainforest, climate change generates 80% less conversation volume in Brazil than in the global number of countries,” the report said.
The study also points out that in Brazil, freedom of expression, starting from a moderate position, is the territory that has had the most relative growth, being polarized 2.3 times more. Immigration, a low-volume polar territory, is the only regression in the analysis.
“It is difficult to measure the exact risk of an addiction; in some cases it is well known, but in others, such as polarization, no”.
“Great human tragedies and massacres come from moments of misunderstanding, from the irritation of this mechanism by which one group cannot understand the ideas of another.”
* Sebastián Osorio Idárraga is a social communicator and journalist. Former editor of Home in Semana Magazine. Former economic journalist at Dinero Magazine and the National Radio of Colombia. Podcaster.
With information from Bloomberg Línea
