Polarization was lower when TV political coverage was regulated. Regulation of media can work. The thing is, TV wasn't algo driven. Facebook is a WMD for misinformation, it's just devastatingly effective, capable of toppling (or raising) governments and should have special rules.
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> Polarization was lower when TV political coverage was regulated.
No, it wasn't.
Partisan polarization may have been, but only because the divide between the major parties didn't capture the major salient ideological divisions in the country, so that the polarization that existed didn't align with partisan identity.
This had nothing to do with TV regulation (and, indeed, predates TV), and everything to do with the long period of partisan realignment between the New Deal and the mid-1990s.
Not to mention, the cold war, the external threat, which was widely accepted. Once the wall fell, that unifying factor disappeared.
There is a direct contradiction to this in recent history. The Iraq War started before Facebook was a thing. The false story about WMDs as pretense to the war was widely circulated by traditional media. 15,000 US soliders and 500,000 Iraqis were killed. The most comparable thing attributed to Facebook is the Myanmar coup where around 800 people were killed.
>"Polarization was lower when TV political coverage was regulated."
Cynically speaking, if you are able to control the narrative it stands to reason that there would be less polarization simply because you are manipulating what the public is being told.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum...." ― Noam Chomsky, The Common Good
I think it still works quite well. On the contrary, polarization was boosted when platforms started to appoint favorites and actively promoted and disincentivised certain content. Made people angrier of course because they were treated unfairly.
So if we see regulation, especially content regulation, polarization is likely to increase as long as not every dissident gets banned.
We also spent trillions on endless wars, sacrificed our own to the tens of thousands, and others to the millions.
These wars stopped with social media. They can't possibly happen if everybody has a voice and can call BS when they see it.
If you start to regulate media this way, you will destroy this and we will tumble head-in to yet another war.
We literally just ended our last war just over a month ago - I think it's a bit too early to celebrate how much of a peace loving society we have become. The war contractors were milking Afganistan for decades and haven't needed a new target - let's see if we can go for a year at peace before we declare pacifism achieved.
We haven't declared any wars in the past five years either.
Administrations used to hiding bad failures can no longer do so.
You can't have another Nayirah testimony if everybody is gonna point out what a lie it all is online.