i’m sorry, no, political parties are not victims insofar as they were unaware of those dynamics. political parties aim to amass power and if that requires becoming more extreme, so be it, in the logic of the party in-group, no matter how they lament outwardly.
social media does distort towards the extremes but that’s marginal, only flattening the distribution of opinions, not fundamentally changing the distribution’s shape. the real problem is the mediopolitical machine amplifying certain of those opinions and ignoring others in service of its own pursuit of power.
It's social media, optimising for "engagement". The most engaging content is not the normal, run-of-the-mill commentary from normal people with normal opinions. It's the far-out nut-job stuff that makes you mad. So that's what get prioritised in your feed.
I signed off of Twitter and was able to completely ignore it while being publicly abused on it. I've recently uninstalled Facebook and my rage at the culture wars has subsided noticeably. Now it's just Imgur and HN that spark this. I'm working on getting off here too (unsuccessfully).
The vast majority of people (I think, I have no proof) are not zealots for the cause (any cause). But the self-censorship effect of our society-wide Purity Spiral[1] means that we never hear from them. We hear the worst, most deranged, opinions out there first because human psychology isn't suited to this kind of situation.
I think the answer is to stop optimising for engagement, because we can't hack human psychology.
[0] I can't find it now, but there is a blog post out there explaining how politicians are getting hurt by the increasing extremism. The need to be more extreme than your rivals in your gerrymandered district where any sign of "weakness" or ambiguity can be taken advantage of on social media isn't good for politicians either.
[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Purity%20Spi...