AI, Social Media, and the Politics of Anti-technology

The growth of new technology, in particular new communication technology, has raised questions about technology’s role in society. Critics argue that it has increased hate speech, polarized the electorate, reduced deliberation, and coarsened the discourse. Others have emphasized the democratizing potential of tools facilitating collective action and the potential for new exchange of ideas. To better understand citizens’ general orientation toward technology, we develop a new anti-technology scale and test it on two diverse samples of Americans. Our scale measures three distinct areas of anti-technology attitudes: 1) attitudes toward social media, 2) attitudes toward artificial intelligence, and 3) concerns about modernity. We show that these areas form a general, latent anti-technology orientation. We then show that this general anti-tech orientation predicts attitudes toward technology policies and support for contentious actions against tech companies. Finally, we use a pairwise comparison experiment to understand which pro- and anti-AI arguments are most persuasive.