The recent news about social media has focused on various countries’ efforts to legislatively prohibit social media use by youngsters. That’s a positive micro-turn, but not the macro-threat that is really undermining social cohesion and even democracy: the characteristics of social media themselves. Here’s the problem and the evidence, in Israel and the US.

As Israel heads into its (not so usually) quadrennial election campaign, internal divisions and nastiness are sharper than ever. Why? And what can be done about it?

Yes, Israeli politics has always been fraught with rancor – it’s enough to quote Ben-Gurion’s “policy” regarding who cannot be part of the first (and later) governing coalition(s): “Just not Herut [today’s Likud] or Maki [the Communists]” – and that lasted for close to thirty years until the Likud’s victory in 1977. Then in the 1980s and 1990s Israel was witness to two political murders: Emil Grunzweig at a peace rally (1983) and PM Yitzchak Rabin (1995).

However, the heat has been steadily rising, especially the breadth of the public’s vituperation. Nor is this a purely Israeli phenomenon; public opinion data show the same trend in the US (less so in Europe, but even there – exhibit #1: the rise of the extreme Right in France, Germany, England et al). The main (not the “only”) factor? Social media.

The evidence for this is abundant. Some examples: 1- By a huge margin (80%-14%), Israelis in the early 2020s felt that political divisiveness had grown over the past few years – precisely when social media had become almost universally employed by (almost) all sectors of Israeli society. 2- The University of Cambridge’s Political Psychology Lab found that divisions within the US population on social and political issues have increased by........

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