I look for information underwritten by named and verified data sources. And this is becoming harder and harder.
LLM’s and Social Media will support your Opinion
It is fascinating how the world has changed but its not accidental. Literally no matter what you believe you can find information that will support and validate your opinion. This is not accidental it is in fact planned because it makes people disassociate from society.
Social media operates through engagement-driven algorithms. Content that aligns with a user’s prior views is more likely to be shown, shared, and emotionally reinforced, creating echo chambers and “propaganda bubbles” where alternative perspectives are filtered out or framed as hostile.
LLMs, by contrast, are not designed to advocate for a user’s position unless they have been programmed to project certian primary narratives, but they can appear to support it if:
The user frames prompts in a leading way.
The model is asked to argue from a specific ideological standpoint.
The user selectively accepts outputs that confirm their beliefs.
In that sense, both systems can contribute to confirmation bias:
Social media by optimising for attention and identity reinforcement.
LLMs by being highly responsive to the assumptions and framing embedded in the user’s prompt.
The critical difference is that social media structurally rewards polarisation, while an LLM, when used properly, can also be tasked to surface counterarguments, uncertainty, and multiple competing frames with equal rigor.
Finding your way back to Society
Finding your way back to society after being shaped by polarisation is essentially a process of cognitive deprogramming and social reintegration. It involves three parallel tracks: Epistemic, Emotional, and Relational.
1. Rebuilding Epistemic humility (how you know what you know) Polarisation trains the mind to treat narratives as identities rather than hypotheses. Recovery begins when you:
Replace certainty with probabilistic thinking.
Actively seek disconfirming evidence, not to “debunk the other side,” but to test your own mental model.
Learn to separate facts, interpretations, and moral judgments as distinct layers rather than a single fused belief.
Practically: regularly ask, “What would have to be true for the opposite position to be partly right?”
2. Detaching identity from ideology (who you are vs. what you believe) Polarisation works by binding political views to personal worth and group belonging. To reverse this:
Re-anchor your identity in roles that are non-ideological: parent, neighbour, professional, citizen, craftsperson, volunteer.
Expose yourself to mixed-view environments where cooperation is required for non-political goals (sports, community projects, disaster response, local boards).
This restores the pre-political social grammar: humans first, positions second.
3. Relearning dialogic trust (how you relate to others) Polarisation trains you to see disagreement as threat. Re-entry into society requires:
Practicing listening without preparing rebuttals.
Engaging in slow, face-to-face conversations where tone, vulnerability, and nuance are visible.
Learning to tolerate unresolved disagreement without moral condemnation.
The key psychological shift is from enemy narratives to tragic tradeoff narratives: Most political conflicts are not good vs. evil, but competing values that cannot be maximised simultaneously.
4. Algorithmic detox (what shapes your attention) Your information diet must be deliberately restructured:
Reduce high-arousal, outrage-optimised feeds.
Increase long-form, cross-ideological, and slow media.
Periodically consume sources that your prior tribe considered “untrustworthy,” not to adopt them, but to understand their internal logic.
5. Moral re-humanisation (how you see the other side) Polarization deforms moral perception by portraying out-groups as stupid, evil, or subhuman. Recovery involves:
Studying the historical and psychological roots of opposing worldviews.
Recognising that most people are motivated by protection, dignity, fairness, and belonging—even when their policy conclusions differ radically.
In short, returning to society means moving from:
Identity warfare ? pluralistic coexistence
Certainty ? calibrated doubt
Tribal loyalty ? civic responsibility
Narrative possession ? narrative literacy
It is not about becoming “centrist” or “neutral.” It is about regaining the capacity to live in a shared reality with people who interpret that reality differently, without requiring one side to be annihilated for the other to feel sane.
How did I know this was a problem?
When I was a teen my parents never discussed politics at home, not political parties nor policies. Later in life I found out that they had opposite political positions yet they made our home peaceful (for the most part) and without political bias. When I was 14 (in the 1980’s) I wanted to understand our would so once a week I would buy The Telegraph, The Times and the Guardian on the same day and read them though. What I often found was similar story subjects with different perspectives driven by political bias. Since I had no preference for any side I found this blatant manipulation to be both funny and sad.
The advert below by the Guardian Newspaper encapsulated my thinking even though they also clearly had their agenda I felt that it provide a great way to explain bias.
The Guardians 1986. Points of view. Advert.
Where do we go from Here?
The most important human capability is Critical Thinking, which has been dulled for the last decade by self-congratulation.
Critical thinking is not “being skeptical of others.” It is being systematically skeptical of your own certainty.
It is the capacity to say: “I may be wrong. What would the world look like if I am?”
Try it, you might be amazed by what you discover and it will explain why your relationships are in their current state.