The first draws attention to the prevalence and dangers of false, misleading, and incendiary content in driving declining trust in institutions, attacks on democracy, conspiracy theorising, hateful ideas, and other troubling developments. According to this analysis, social media is distinct from legacy media in that it provides an ideal breeding ground for such misinformation, which allegedly spreads faster than accurate information online. By taking advantage of this fact, sinister foreign influence campaigns and domestic demagogues have managed to infect the masses with bad ideas, driving them to support dangerous politicians and policies. (View Highlight)
Fake news, desinformación
The second draws attention to one of the alleged features of social media platforms that greatly exacerbates this problem and creates new ones: their tendency to enclose users within information silos in which they are shielded from contrary perspectives, driving polarisation and radicalisation. Here, the core concern is that the engagement-maximising character of social media algorithms interacts with psychological factors like tribalism and confirmation bias to pull communities into comforting epistemic bubbles, exacerbating their “susceptibility” to congenial misinformation and driving them to develop beliefs increasingly unmoored from reality. (View Highlight)
Cámara de eco
it is puzzling that many of the same people who have spent nearly a decade worrying about online misinformation and echo chambers have responded to this development by abandoning X en masse to create their own progressive echo chamber on Bluesky. (View Highlight)
In the ideal situation, people participate in the public sphere by sincerely expressing their viewpoints to try to persuade those they disagree with, keeping an open mind that they might be mistaken—and being more persuasive precisely by projecting this openness. This is politics through rational persuasion, a precondition of which is that speech is directed at those who hold different views. It involves respecting one’s audience as fellow democratic citizens, from whom one might have something to learn. (View Highlight)
One alternative to this model maintains the focus on persuasion but abandons any concern with sincerity, truth-seeking, rational argument, or respect. It involves politics as propaganda. There is no better example of politics as propaganda than Elon Musk’s approach to political communication. It is evident to any moderately well-informed, fair-minded person of any political viewpoint that Musk’s only goal in posting or amplifying content is to spread whatever narrative he thinks would advance his interests. He exhibits a psychopathic disregard for ideals of honesty, rationality, evidence, or intellectual virtue. There is nothing particularly new about this style of politics (hence why the popular label “post”-truth is misleading), but it is real nonetheless. (View Highlight)
Another alternative maintains the focus on sincerity found in rational persuasion but abandons any concern with persuasion. Here, the goal of political communication is not to change an audience’s mind but to advertise the state of the communicator’s mind. It is politics as performance, treating political communication as a tool for signalling the communicator’s virtues, social identities, or loyalty to specific political factions and causes. (View Highlight)
once echo chambers arise, and politics becomes more about ingroup signalling than rational persuasion, the deep-seated human drive to manage our reputation and win esteem drives a cluster of dysfunctional group dynamics: people not only self-censor to avoid eliciting social disapproval but also participate in the enforcement of shared beliefs to signal their sincere commitment to such beliefs. Such cancel culture dynamics were ubiquitous on progressive-dominated Twitter before Elon Musk’s takeover. They made progressive politics seem puritanical and insufferable, hurt the public reputation of progressivism, and drove many extremely online progressive journalists and politicians to vastly overestimate how left-wing the general, mostly offline population was. (View Highlight)
Cancel culture dynamics