The last protagonist of the American election campaign, a few hours before the end, is a squirrel, as Culture Wars, Davide Piacenza’s newsletter, explains well. His name is Peanut The Squirrel and he is a social media star. Or at least, it was: the state Department of Environmental Conservation ordered its euthanization because its owner did not have legal permits to keep it indoors and the animal was at risk of transmitting disease.

A circumstance that mobilized the social machine of the Republicans, led by Elon Musk on that social network, now a megaphone of Trumpian propaganda, which was once called Twitter. “Biden kills pets”, “Puppies are with Donald Trump”: these are just some of the memes and contents that have appeared online, the latest idea to occupy the public debate a few hours before the elections.

The first completely digital election campaign

Final moments of a completely online electoral campaign, not only in terms of means of disseminating messages but also the actual starting point and destination of programs and ways of seeing the world. On the one hand Donald Trump, Elon Musk and young white males, what some call the manosphere; on the other Kamala Harris, the brat summer, young women, minorities, the aesthetics of TikTok.

It was a truly algorithmic election campaign, perhaps the first entirely born of the way tech companies organize information for us. It was, for example, the campaign of the X algorithm (yes, what was once called Twitter) recalibrated in the direction of making the platform a space for Trumpist propaganda. Elon Musk’s posts always on home, no matter what happens. Something we had never seen so explicit, an interesting – and disturbing – reminder of the private nature of the platforms to which we entrust a substantial part of our lives.

But it was also the electoral campaign of content: of the constant search for the short video that could go viral, of the faces of Harris and Trump at McDonald’s. Of entertainment that becomes a starting point and destination: there is nothing else, there are no prospects, there is no tomorrow.

Social media as distorting mirrors of reality

It is a dead-end street, which makes everyone spectators, passive participants in a continuous game, which has the sole objective of capturing their attention. And that should make everyone reflect on the role we have entrusted to social media.

Recently, research came out online that will be published in the next issue of Current Opinion in Psychology, written by Claire E. Robertson, Kareena S. del Rosario, Jay J. Van Bavel of New York University. A study that defines social media as “deforming mirrors” of reality.

More than anything else, the researchers explain, platforms work on social norms, behaviors, attitudes and codes of conduct of more or less restricted groups of people.

Each of us establishes which social norms to follow starting from a process called ensemble encoding. That is, instead of remembering each detail individually, the brain creates a sort of “average” or “summary” of the similar information it observes.

It’s like when one looks at a crowd: we don’t remember every face in detail, but we can have a general idea of ​​what the group looks like (for example, whether it is composed of young or old people, whether smiles or serious expressions prevail). This process helps save mental energy and allows you to quickly grasp the essence of a set of things, such as the mood of a group or the dominant opinion in a discussion.

On social media, however, this same process can lead users to perceive a distorted “average norm”, because what we see, although masked as a neutral representation of reality, is only a portion of what is around us.

A portion, in reality, particularly characterized. According to the researchers, “social media is dominated by a small number of extremist people who publish only their most extreme opinions and do so in large quantities, while more moderate or neutral opinions are virtually invisible online.”

“Social media – the researchers write – are built to make extreme norms common, from unrealistic beauty standards to exaggerated success parameters, thus creating a false reality. These extreme norms can make people feel inadequate, and constant exposure to extremely shaped bodies on platforms like Instagram can contribute to poorer body perceptions and depression in teenage girls. As a result, this extreme and distorted content can spill over into the physical world.”

If we only see extreme opinions, content that tries to steal our attention in every way, we will tend to think that those opinions are more common than they actually are. That the world, in other words, is truly its digital representation.

At root, there is the very way social media is built and evolved. From tools for managing one’s social relationships, they have increasingly become entertainment platforms, in which each user speaks not only – and not so much – to his friends but to a potentially infinite audience. And in which what counts are the contents, the ability to entertain. Yet, despite this evolution, the illusion of reality remains: what we see online seems more authentic, truer, unmediated.

Thus reality vanishes. Or rather, it is replaced by its representation.