This column was originally published by Sheila Kennedy on her blog, “A Jaundiced Look at the World We Live In.”
By Sheila Kennedy
July 16, 2025
I know I keep harping on the subject of our media environment, but as more research becomes available, I become more and more convinced that an enormous amount of political and voting behavior is the result of the fragmentation facilitated by the Internet–a fragmentation enabling people to occupy a chosen bubble of “news” that reinforces their ideological beliefs and prejudices.
The Washington Post recently ran a lengthy article that probed the much discussed rightward movement within minority communities.
That phenomenon in recent U.S. elections has mirrored voter movements elsewhere, and the research was an effort to determine whether those movements had causal commonalities. The scholarship cited was all interesting, and I encourage you to click through and read it in its entirely, but one conclusion stood out. The article noted that Trump’s inroads into the Black and Hispanic communities was tied to the nature of the media sources those voters consulted.
The declining influence of television news, for example, has been stark. As the article noted, Democrats have always done well with U.S. minorities who follow political news on television, and they still won 73 percent of those voters in 2024. But their support among those who didn’t follow the election on TV was only 46 percent.
“And, for perhaps the first time, the share of Americans following the presidential election on TV began to fall in 2024. It dropped from 85 percent to 81 percent. We don’t know what’s replacing it, though we do know that the share who got political news on TikTok soared from 22 percent in 2020 to 33 percent in 2024 — and that TikTok is the only medium through which U.S. minorities were more likely to follow politics compared with Whites.
“Similarly, a March poll from the Pew Research Center found that 30 percent of minority voters who supported Trump got at least some of their news from “The Joe Rogan Experience” — putting the Trump-endorsing podcast behind only Fox News in that group. (To be sure, other sources were also close enough to be within the margin of error, and Pew’s Elisa Shearer cautioned that our media choice can be an effect of our political views as much as it is a cause of them.)”
Minority neighborhoods traditionally tended to coalesce around a given candidate when residents of those neighborhoods got their news from similar, predominantly mainstream, sources. But as the media environment has balkanized, the electorate has split into smaller and less predictable units.
Over the last decades, as culture war has consumed American politics, minority voters who are culturally conservative but economically liberal —a cohort that includes many working-class minorities and immigrants — have begun to base their votes on cultural issues rather than economic ones. That trend has been supercharged by what the article called the “algorithm-driven fragment of the media,” the social media platforms
that turn cultural concerns into cultural outrage by constantly amplifying moral- or emotional-based messages, a practice that encourages user commitment to the platform. (Yes, follow the money…or in this case, the business model.)
As one scholar explained it,
“Social media can subtly shape people’s information diet because algorithms are attuned to what people are engaging with online…. “So if someone’s paying attention to content that leans a little more socially conservative, the algorithm will feed you more and more of that. And before you know it, you’re in an informational ecosystem that’s pretty different from what you’d see tuning into mainstream media.”
In other words, the dramatic changes we have experienced in our media environment have fostered ideological, educational and gender divides, splintering communities that were once defined first by racial or cultural identities.
I have no idea what can be done about the balkanization of the media. I am very afraid that we can’t put that genie back in the bottle – allowing government to determine the content of internet sites would be even more dangerous than today’s environment of propaganda and disinformation. Fact-checking sites are only useful for people who care about facts, and that is an unfortunately small percentage of the population.
Perhaps legislation dictating what algorithms can and cannot do would avoid violating the First Amendment, but from where this digital novice sits, it’s unclear how such a law would be framed or how it could be enforced.
We live in a world where people who desperately want to believe clearly untrue things – that climate change is a myth, that vaccines cause autism, that “chemtrails” are poisoning us, that “woke-ism” is the reason they missed out on that promotion–can find confirmation of those beliefs in the Internet’s growing never-never land.
Members of minority communities aren’t exempt.
Sheila Suess Kennedy is Emerita Professor of Law and Public Policy at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. As an attorney, she practiced real estate, administrative and business law in Indianapolis before becoming corporation counsel for the City of Indianapolis in 1977. In 1980, she was the Republican candidate for Indiana’s then 1th Congressional District and in 1992, she became executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana. She joined the faculty of the School of Public and Environment al Affairs in 1998.
The views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.
