This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Common global narratives about political polarization are skewed because of an overreliance on literature about the U.S., leaving governments unprepared to tackle the problem at home. In new research led by King's College London and published in Nature Communications, experts across the U.K., Europe, Asia, Australia and the U.S. point to how common narratives about polarization are overgeneralized and often based on evidence from the U.S. alone.
Academics warn that this risks applying U.S. solutions to non-U.S. problems and leaving local policymakers with unsuitable evidence to tackle the growing polarization challenges posed by social media and AI, with dangerous ramifications for democracy. In the context of AI and social media, these wrong assumptions can lead policymakers to make decisions that fail to address the true drivers of polarization. Max Falkenberg, AI+ senior fellow at King's College London and lead author of the paper, said, "Social science has an America problem.
The first Trump presidency and the role of social media in that election caused an explosion in polarization studies in the U.S. that the rest of the world has yet to catch up with. But norms established in the U.S., such as political antagonism being based on a one-dimensional left-right axis, don't necessarily fit with what's happening in other parts of the world. "Ensuring a global literature on political polarization must be a fundamental goal of the academic community.
There are legitimate concerns around AI being used as a tool to further polarize our societies, but understanding the polarizing role of AI will only be possible if the evidence is not solely U.S.-focused. If we fail to understand the nature of political disagreement, how can we hope to do better?" Acknowledging how U.S. political actors like Trump still influence domestic politics globally, Falkenberg and other critics point to how resolutions such as the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland and separatist disarmament in Spain complicate folk narratives of ever-increasing global polarization. They note that the imbalance of academic journals being either U.S.-based or entirely U.S.-focused has also affected the very definition of political polarization, shifting it away from a European and global context, with many U.S.-focused papers not even explicitly mentioning their subject.
Selecting "polarization" as its word of the year in 2024, Merriam-Webster defined it as "division into two sharply distinct opposites; especially: a state in which the opinions, beliefs, or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum but become concentrated at opposing extremes." While the definition may fit two-party political systems in the U.S., it is unclear whether the same conceptions of political animosity and grouping of parties occur in the multiparty democracies and political power-sharing arrangements seen in continental Europe. While current narratives suggest social media algorithms and misinformation are major causes of political polarization, this is heavily disputed and unlikely to be the case in a number of countries. For example, a study that deactivated Facebook in the U.S. reduced polarization, but when replicated in Bosnia-Herzegovina, researchers found the opposite occurred.
By supplying an alternative to individuals' lack of offline exposure to other ethnicities, Facebook helped promote political cohesion. This suggests that any move to regulate social media, and by extension the use of AI in recommendation algorithms, must be country-dependent rather than a singular universal rule informed by a U.S. context. Professor Andrea Baronchelli, professor of complexity science at City St George's University of London and the paper's senior author, said, "Polarization is not a single phenomenon with a universal set of causes or solutions.
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