Alice Marwick Explores the Impact of Social Networking on Political Discourse

Air Dates: February 17-23, 2025 

There was a time in American public life when “the news” was a nightly ritual, a 30-minute glimpse into the wider-world, a way to stay informed.  But Dr. Alice E. Marwick says that world is long gone, washed away in recent years with failing traditional news outlets and the rise of social media influencers.  

Marwick is the director of research at Data & Society. She is a qualitative social scientist who researches the social, political, and cultural implications of popular social media technologies. Her most recent book, “The Private is Political: Networked Privacy on Social Media,” examines how the networked nature of online privacy disproportionately impacts members of marginalized communities. Marwick has several other publications in the realm of communications and mass media. She is currently writing her third book on online radicalization, supported by an Andrew Carnegie fellowship. Marwick was previously associate professor of communication and principal researcher and co-founder of the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina. She was also Microsoft visiting professor at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. 

On this episode of “Story in the Public Square,” Marwick discusses the impact that social networking has had on the public’s consumption of news and political discourse. “The overall political discussions that were going on were not in the mainstream media … they were on podcasts, social media, and all these partisan and fringe spaces,” she said. According to Marwick, this phenomenon contributes to pre-existing partisan issues. She said, “You’ve got a group of people who are mostly consuming political news as part of a newsfeed, whether that’s on TikTok or Facebook or Twitter, and then you have another group of people who really don’t pay attention to the news. It’s getting very difficult to find common ground.” 

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