Friday, November 04, 2016

How the Internet Is Loosening Our Grip on the Truth

Next week, if all goes well, someone will win the presidency. What happens after that is anyone’s guess. Will the losing side believe the results? Will the bulk of Americans recognize the legitimacy of the new president? And will we all be able to clean up the piles of lies, hoaxes and other dung that have been hurled so freely in this hyper-charged, fact-free election?

Much of that remains unclear, because the internet is distorting our collective grasp on the truth. Polls show that many of us have burrowed into our own echo chambers of information. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 81 percent of respondents said that partisans not only differed about policies, but also about “basic facts.”

For years, technologists and other utopians have argued that online news would be a boon to democracy. That has not been the case.

More than a decade ago, as a young reporter covering the intersection of technology and politics, I noticed the opposite. The internet was filled with 9/11 truthers, and partisans who believed against all evidence that George W. Bush stole the 2004 election from John Kerry, or that Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim. (He was born in Hawaii and is a practicing Christian.)

Read the rest here
HT: T-19

1 comment:

rabidgandhi said...

The Saddam Yellow Cake newspaper-- which lied shamelessly about NSA wiretapping, which promoted the ridiculous Kuwati incubator story, which hyped the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and which has repeated every silly conspiracy theory planted by the US government about its enemies-- finds people have a "distorted grasp on the truth". And irony dies a cold, cruel death.