The Effects of Twitter and Social Media on Political Polarization
If you’ve ever scrolled through Twitter during an election year, you’ve probably felt it, that intense, often hostile energy that seems to divide the internet into two camps. It’s not just your imagination. Social media, especially platforms like Twitter, has played a significant role in deepening political polarization in America. For my digital art history project, I decided to explore this through a timeline that visualizes key moments in modern political division, starting with the 2000 presidential election and ending in recent years.
I chose this topic because I wanted to understand how online platforms, which were originally designed to connect people, have increasingly become spaces that drive them apart. Timelines matter because they don’t just show what happened, they show when it happened, which helps us recognize patterns and turning points. In this post, I’ll walk you through how I built the timeline, what I learned from the process, and how using a visual tool changed the way I think about history and media.
Behind the Scenes: Building the Timeline
Choosing What Matters:
I included twelve events in my timeline. The process of selecting them wasn’t as straightforward as I expected. I didn’t just want to list major political events, I wanted to focus on moments where the political divide seemed to deepen, and Twitter or social media played a part. I started with the 2000 election (Bush v. Gore), which I see as the start of modern polarization. From there, I picked moments like Obama’s election, the rise of the Tea Party, Trump’s campaign and presidency, and the events of January 6th. Each event felt like a step deeper into political division, and choosing just eight meant leaving out a lot of others that were also important.
Overcoming Roadblocks:
The biggest challenge for me was figuring out how to actually use TimelineJS. I’d never worked with it before, and getting everything to look right, images, dates, formatting, was a bit of a headache. I ended up watching a bunch of YouTube videos and reading through guides before I got it working. It wasn’t exactly intuitive at first, but once I got the hang of the Google Sheets template, things started to click.
Bringing History to Life with Multimedia:
I wanted the visuals to do some of the storytelling. I used election maps, photos of political figures like Barack Obama and Donald Trump, and screenshots of viral tweets. These images helped show the emotional tone of each moment and made the timeline more than just a list of facts. Text can explain something, but a picture of a red vs. blue map, or a tweet that went viral, can show how people were feeling at the time. That emotional layer felt important.
Accuracy & Storytelling:
One of the trickier parts was deciding how to tell a story without slipping into bias. The timeline reflects my interpretation of events, but I tried to stick to facts and keep things balanced. Still, I noticed how easy it is to shape a narrative just by choosing what to include and how to phrase things. I also thought about what voices were missing, how certain communities or perspectives might not be captured in the mainstream sources I used.
The Tech Side:
TimelineJS was frustrating at first, but honestly, it grew on me. It forced me to think about history in a new way. I couldn’t just write a paper, I had to think about what people would see, in what order, and how each slide added to the overall arc. The design made me think more visually and strategically, which is different from how I usually approach school projects.
The Big Picture: How Timelines Shape History
Timelines are powerful because they suggest causality and progression. When you put events in a line, it naturally makes people think one thing led to another, even if the connection isn’t that direct. I noticed that some events seemed more important just because of where they landed on the timeline. For example, by placing the rise of social media between Obama’s election and Trump’s campaign, it almost tells a story by itself, without needing much extra explanation. But timelines also leave things out. They can’t capture nuance the way an essay or documentary might. You don’t get as much space to dig into context or conflicting viewpoints. That’s something I had to keep reminding myself, that this is one version of the story, not the whole story.
Final Thoughts: Lessons Learned
Making this timeline definitely shifted how I see the topic of polarization and social media. It made me think more critically about the power of platforms like Twitter, not just to reflect public opinion, but to shape it. It also gave me a new appreciation for digital tools in history education. In fact, I liked it enough that I’m planning to expand on this project for my final assignment. If I were to do it again, I’d probably spend more time upfront planning the visual flow, how one event leads into the next visually as well as thematically. And for anyone else using TimelineJS for the first time, be patient, watch tutorials, and don’t be afraid to experiment. one event leads into the next visually as well as thematically. And for anyone else using TimelineJS for the first time: be patient, watch tutorials, and don’t be afraid to experiment.