Democracy is Collapsing on Itself from a Massive Media Crisis
I’ve been struggling with the degree to which people absorb misinformation for a while. This year, it’s especially heated up because of how much total nonsense I see people — even very smart people — absorbing and accepting as true. I have also seen more and more people — including very smart people — completely ignoring what you can see with your own eyes and hear with your own ears.
That said, I didn’t start getting really alarmed about this phenomenon this year. I probably started getting really alarmed by it about 10 or 12 years ago. First of all, I recall that before I got into covering clean energy, I had heard commonly spread negative misinformation about wind turbines and solar panels. I learned that was total bunk, and it hit me how much campaigns to misinform people about clean energy were focused, broad, consistent, and effective. I also saw that on another level with climate science itself up to 15 years ago. However, even after all of that, I recall some writers we had on a sister site focusing on certain conspiracies. The issue, though, wasn’t their focus on those things — it was how much attention some of those topics got! And if you looked around and tracked down big referral sites for these, you got find a bevy of conspiracy theory stories. It shocked me, and scared me. As it turned out, and very aptly, my first article about Donald Trump running for president (in 2016) was titled “Could the US Really Elect a Conspiracy Theorist?” The answer, as we all know, was yes. And we can see where that got us on January 6, 2021. Even if you support Trump, you have to acknowledge that he loves to promote conspiracy theories: “global warming is a hoax,” “wind turbines cause cancer,” “I didn’t win the Emmy because of a conspiracy against me,” “Obama wasn’t born in America,” “Obama is a secret Muslim communist,” “they’re going to steal the election from me,” “they stole the election from me,” etc., etc.
But it’s not just Trump, and problems extending across all types of media have led us here. As I strolled around X this past week (something I hadn’t really been doing for a long time), I was struggling with a lot of extreme misinformation that had taken over some communities of people. I was thinking again: How is this happening? Why is this happening? There are several reasons, so let’s go down a list.
- There’s no built-in fact checking on social media. We used to get our information from large mass-media outlets that engaged in rigorous journalistic practices and fact checking. Sure, there could be bias based on what they dcided to focus on or omit, but for the most part, it was much more fact-based reporting and information sharing. In today’s social media age, what gets popular and spreads to millions of people doesn’t need to be true, it just needs to be catchy. In fact, shocking misinformation is very easy to spread.
- Social media creates countless hyper-emotional echo chambers. As a consequence of the above, there’s an enormous amount of false information spread on X, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, reddit, and elsewhere every day. That gets backed up by more misinformation and endless commentary as well. Large communities of people end up believing a package of misinformation that all weaves together logically, even if incorrectly. At that point, how is anyone going to convince you that you’re massively misinformed? Of course, algorithms on these social media networks feed you more stuff related to what you’ve already liked or seen, even if that means feeding you more and more related misinformation. As an obvious example, if you watch and like a video about the Earth being flat, you’re going to get fed more and more content like that supporting the (obviously false) theory that the world is actually flat. That may seem like a ridiculous example, but that’s what happens for many people every day on clean energy, electric vehicles, and politics.
- Traditional media is seen by fewer and fewer people, and highlight polarized and superficial discussions. Naturally, as more people have turned to social media for entertainment, information, and discussion, they’ve turned away from traditional old-school media. So, again, fewer people are seeing any traditional fact checking or corrections to the misinformation being spread online. Also, from losing viewers and their monopoly in this realm, these media companies have seemingly done more and more to feature shock, controversy, and superficial entertainment in order to compete. The result is that the traditional media is also more useless for cleaning up misinformation (which is not fun), so even if people tune in, they are not likely to get mistaken narratives debunked. Also, media is much more polarized, so if you don’t like what you’re hearing and don’t want to learn that what you thought was true is not in fact true, then you can navigate to another channel where you’ll get your worldview reinforced, even if you’re just getting further misled.
- Too much distraction, too much to do. On top of everything above, with all of the stuff in our lives today pulling on our attention, and with how much we work and spend time on errands and extracurricular activities, most of us are too busy and distracted to go do our civic duties and get to the bottom of things every day. When you are tired and get online, it’s so much easier to scroll the dopamine nets than learn about the boring facts of a matter.
At the end of the day, with all of this, stacked against us, we simply aren’t able to get on the same page with each other, we are frequently misinformed (or massively misinformed), and it’s harder and harder to not only discuss things with people not in our social network bubbles but even to understand what world they live in and where they are coming from. And this breaks down a core element of democracy — genuine discussion and debate based on a core shared set of facts.
How do we solve this?
Featured image by Brett Davis (CC BY-NC 2.0 license)
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