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:
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.
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