From the clean-girl aesthetic to the hype-beast trope, members of Gen Z are constantly curating and committing to their online personas. Yet, for individuals who choose a route of the extreme political persona, the real-world consequences of a chronic online presence can be dire.
Gen Z has grown up with the social media algorithm and have experienced the dopamine hit that results from likes, comments and positive direct messages that validate their online persona. A positive response validates individuals, making them addicted to the peer endorsement they get when others engage with their content, and in this case, agree with their political stances.
“You have been trained in a way that my generation, which is our older millennial and young Gen X, was not trained – to assume that you’re always on and that you’re always performing for an audience that expects that of you,” said Christopher Finlay, Ph.D., associate professor of communication studies who specializes in digital media cultures, global media industries and political communication.
For Gen Z, defined as people born after 1997, social media politics has transformed from an outlet for productive discourse to a performance with the goal of increasing social currency. Finlay believes that individuals entrenched in social media politics are merely performing as opposed to attempting to consume news beyond the surface level.
“[The thought process is] about, ‘Is this something that I can afford to comment on?’ ‘Afford to be silent on?’ And if I do comment, how do I do it so that I am going to be more popular? Then there’s the element of, ‘Oh, wow, this really got my heart pumping […] but I seem to lack the wherewithal to go off the app and actually explore it.’ I’m actually becoming increasingly cynical about it,” said Finlay.
Gen Z’s lack of ambition to engage with political issues offline can have dire consequences when faced with gray areas and opposing viewpoints that challenge the initial inclinations of their political persona.
“There’s no space for learning and self-correction because once you have performed, the performance is set in stone. So there is an assumption that you better get that performance just right, right away,” said Finlay.
Younger generations are conditioned by algorithms that seeks to drive revenue by increasing the amount of time consumers stay on the social media app. For this reason, social media feeds are customized to feed individuals information that makes them comfortable, because discomfort makes consumers log off the app. While social media is a new outlet for this phenomenon, these consumption habits are not unique to Gen Z. Older generations are influenced by a similar media structure that thrives on viewership: broadcast news. News outlets, like Fox News and CNN, feed consumers partisan stories that align with their political views because it makes them tune in day after day.
For this reason, both parties have trouble understanding and confronting views that do not reinforce their pre-existing beliefs.
“Fox News viewers [are] kind of in shock when they find out once in a while that Donald Trump has 91 [felony charges]. Fox News doesn’t tell us this. But the Fox News effect is a social media effect, it’s the same concept,” said Finlay.
Since individuals are not accustomed to experiencing information that doesn’t flatter their preconceived notion of fact, they take opposition personally, leading to politically charged, real-world consequences.
“The performative stuff is annoying — it’s destructive for discourse, it’s destructive for democracy and that is very significant. But it is leading to real-world violence and the real-world persecution of individuals who’ve been framed as the ‘other.’ In other words, the ones that never show up in your feed, because you so believed in the performance,” said Finlay.
Finlay, along with other experts, believes that the capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 was a violent real-world manifestation of social media performance. The conspiracy that the 2020 presidential election was stolen was repeated relentlessly in the news by right-wing outlets like Fox News. This performance was not without consequence. Individuals became so emboldened by their belief in this conspiracy that they stormed the Capitol, invading the Senate chamber to demand a vote recount.
He also pointed out that history continues to repeat itself today with antisemitism on university campuses in light of the Israel-Hamas conflict. Patrick Dai, a 21-year-old Cornell University student, was arrested on Oct. 31 on a federal criminal complaint, charging him with posting threats to kill or injure Jewish students using interstate communications. On the Cornell section of an online forum, Dai called “for the deaths of Jewish people,” and threatened that he was “gonna shoot up 104 west.” 104 West serves as Cornell’s kosher and multicultural dining room, located next to the Center for Jewish Living building on campus. According to the United States Attorney’s Office, “Dai allegedly threatened to ‘stab’ and ‘slit the throat’ of any Jewish males he sees on campus, to rape and throw off a cliff any Jewish females and to behead any Jewish babies.”
Finlay finds that a lot of the antisemitic rhetoric emerging as a result of the Israel-Hamas conflict is due to the pressure to post the “correct” social justice statement before fully comprehending the issue. He believes that it would have been much more instructive for Gen Z to have “taken a breath,” and to have taken time to research the issue before rushing to post.
“In some instances, silence can be violence, do not get me wrong. But in other instances, silence is the most responsible thing you can do,” said Finlay.
Only a year out from the 2024 presidential race, Finlay fears that this same online approach to politics will carry into the coming election. More specifically, he speculates there could be a push by “very strong adversaries” manipulating social media to not vote. He worries about the possibility of a “No Vote November,” specifically targeting Gen Z voters.
“[Social media is] encouraging the logic that going out in the streets to protest for social justice is more important than going to the ballot box. But at the end of the day, your vote matters 10,000 times more than any number of marches you go on. Because [with] your vote, people are required to pay attention [whereas] people can just tune you out when you’re yelling in the streets,” said Finlay.