A great description I believe gets to the heart of our current political crisis.
The internet can be understood as a kind of solvent of authority, and of the capacity of traditional institutions to sustain the trust that undergirds it. (Found at the link below)
Three good posts on misinformation
Casual information consumers become divided into two camps, the “do you own research” types who imagine, mistakenly, that they are capable of seeing through all this (and so succumb to their own confirmation bias), and those who more accurately understand that they cannot reliably distinguish truth from bullshit (and so opt out of democratic deliberation with a shrug, other than perhaps to vote for the candidates whose political party they distrust less).
Domestic Disinformation Is a Greater Menace Than Foreign Disinformation
Yes, disinformation comes from both the right and the left, but research shows that highly partisan conservatives are far more likely to share disinformation than partisan liberals. A 2018 study by Oxford University researchers divided Twitter users into 10 different groups, including Democrats, progressives, traditional Republicans, and Trump supporters. The Trump supporters, they found, shared more junk news than all the other groups combined. As Steve Bannon so eloquently put it, “Flood the zone with shit,” and Trump supporters, alt-right groups, 4chan, Gab, and sites like Infowars and Breitbart do just that, putting out a tidal wave of junk news to overwhelm the traditional stuff. Then, in the disinformation ecosystem, it is picked up on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter—and by your Uncle Milton who informs you that George Soros secretly hatched COVID-19.
The internet has been a marvelous invention in lots of ways, but it has also unleashed a tsunami of misinformation and destabilized political systems across the globe. Martin Gurri, a former media analyst at the CIA and the author of the 2014 book The Revolt of the Public, was way ahead of the curve on this problem.
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