One good reason would be that, like with the printing press, the patterns of adoption of contemporary new communication technologies are heterogeneous. Florence kept up a manuscript literary culture while Venice took the lead with printing in the late 15th & early 16th centuries, for instance. Florentines bought print material but their social structure did not change so much. (For this case study I'm particularly indebted to The Bookseller of Florence, a wonderful focused history.)
Scandinavian society appears to have taken a more conservative approach to the new comms-tech (at least in decisive norm-defining classes) and its social structure has apparently not changed quite like US social structure has changed.
In Western Europe social media censorship is far more heavy-handed than it is in the US.
And Western Europe entered the social media age with a much more authoritarian media environment. The US already had a partially democratizing media environment because of talk radio.
Is societal trust the key factor to exacerbating or mitigating the epistemic harms of social media? I feel like you’ve hinted at this before. How clear cut do you think it is?
I think educational polarization plays a pretty big role, but I agree with your overall point.
There are now a lot of people reporting and commenting on events who would not have qualified for jobs in the traditional media, or been interested in them, for better and worse.
On top of that, there's a vast audience that doesn't like to read much, or even watch news on television, but does like the new media forms, which often blend entertainment with news - even more than legacy pioneers like John Stewart or Rush Limbaugh.
There are definitely unfair and arbitrary barriers to getting jobs in traditional media, but I think the producer-side changes are bigger than just that.
Off the top of my head: people can report on things that weren't interesting or acceptable to traditional media editors, or profitable enough for the publisher. They can report without any credentials or anything resembling conventional standards. Reporters and pundits can work part-time from a tiny outpost in the middle of nowhere. All for better or worse (and in many cases, much better.)
Regarding - "Nevertheless, I have updated my views a little bit in the direction of greater concern about misinformation and the information environment." - perhaps Rational Persuasion is not utterly, completely, totally, 100% useless :-).
All the same, the amount of effort required seems really disheartening, especially given how very effective professional liars are overall.
At the risk of being tedious, I'm going to pound the table again: An anti-vaccine lunatic is Secretary Of Health. Almost every single Republican Senator confirmed him. Even the relatively sane right-wing commentators on this blog, who are at the outermost perimeter of that whole fetid fever-swamp of insanity, are apparently not much troubled by this. This is a blazing signal, a empirical reality-check, that Something Is Very Wrong. Any beautiful theory that misinformation is badly defined or overestimated, should confront that ugly fact.
I am glad to see you come around to the point of view that misinformation is a significant problem on social media. You are correct that it is not one false statement or another, it’s the hallucinated mirror world some individuals inhabit. People who become seduced by these alternate realities are susceptible to extremist acts, such as Jan 20, or some of the more extreme BLM movement acts like the TAZ in Portland.
There is a historical precedent, most notably the wave of assassinations around the beginning of the 20th century. It had much more severe consequences - WWI for example - than today. So as you correctly state, this might just be a new medium for what human beings would tend to do anyway.
The main difference today is that these cultlike movements can spring up quickly and reach a large audience before a response can be marshaled. This provides real problems for governments and other defenders of the status quo. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
As for X, you can have it. I took the time I used to spend doomscrolling and decided to put it in more useful ways. I just finished War and Peace, which turns out to be an excellent antidote to MAGA madness. I know a well curated feed on X can be invaluable, especially if you a local political activist like me. But more than anything, Musk and his platform do not deserve my time and attention. It’s important for each in our own small way to remove power from people like Musk.
Substack is a much better use of my limited attention. I would have never discovered the extremely high quality and thoughtful discourse here if I was still wasting time on Twitter. My mental health and well being are improved as well.
I think the discussion on the problem of misinformation on social media is misguided for the following reasons:
1) I find MSM pretty full of misinformation these days too. If you just take the very latest event of the attack on Iran, western MSM reporting is partisan to the degree that much of it qualifies in my mind as misinformation in conjunction with suppression of dissenting opinion
2) Social media is used by serious and ethical journalists (and others), MSM aligned commentators reflecting the MSM narratives, commenters with dissenting view of varying degrees of "reasonableness" and also plenty of dross, opinionated and abusive debate. In other words it provides a better spread of views than MSM though you have to filter out the rubbish.
The idea that people live in their own echo chambers is a broad generalisation that is not universally applicable nor do I see any evidence that social media is any worse that alternatives.
Whether someone lives in their own echo chambers or not is a function of their upbringing, their general outlook and the degree to which they have been taught to be skeptical, mistrusting of authority etc.
Those screeching for controls on social media in my opinion are analogous to the elites in control at the time the printing press was invented and the Reformation (e.g. Catholic Church) where they put people to death for having the audacity of producing alternative versions of the Bible other than officially sanctioned by the Church.
We know who won that information war and anyone trying to put the lid on the Internet will too find themselves dinosaurs of history.
>the wave of assassinations around the beginning of the 20th century
I was just reading a book about this recently, on a recommendation from family: Infernal Machine, about the beginnings of the FBI and the early anarchists. Really excellent book and important subject today, by an author in the thick of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Johnson_(author)
War and Peace is certainly a good antidote, but it's difficult medicine to prescribe to hotheads! Dostoevsky's Demons is the Russian classic that I recommend to people who are in the throes of the fever, and then War and Peace after the fever breaks.
Maybe balm is a better word than antidote. Trump and Musk were driving me mad and so I stopped reading the news and read Tolstoy instead and I am now in a much better place. What next though? Voltaire? Rosseau? The Classics? Suggestions are appreciated.
First could just be more Tolstoy, if you haven't finished it all – Hadji Murat, Anna Karenina, the short stories, almost all of it is very good. The next classic fiction I might recommend is Eliot's Middlemarch, which has had a new wave of popularity on Substack recently and has a good broad social sweep.
I also often like to go to concrete history. For countering Musk and Trump as distractions specifically, I might recommend either Allgor's Parlor Politics (great history of society women of early Washington DC who did much to moderate the wilder antics of presidents of their day) or O'Brien's The Second Most Powerful Man in the World (about FDR's discreetly influential and admirable right hand man from the Navy).
In philosophy, Isaiah Berlin's Three Critics of the Enlightenment might be an interesting alternative to Voltaire or Rousseau.
I find this to be a brilliant approach, essentially sharing your own evolving Overton window with regards to media practices. It grants space for the reader to calibrate to alternatives without all the sweaty, rhetorical pressure of standard "content." Bravo.
Fascinating and instructive, as I have come to expect from your writing. This was truly striking: “In many ways, the influence of social media within the US places it closer to Latin America—in Brazil it’s 35%—and many countries in Africa than to Northern and Western Europe.” I hope more analysis might be forthcoming from Reuters, or whatever outlets study these things, about why that might be. Of course, I also wondered whether Substack is considered in examining social media—though I suppose, even if considered, it’s a tiny percentage.
As I live in New York City, I wonder, too, about what impact social media may have had on the troublesome results of the Democratic mayoral race. This is pure speculation, but social media does seem to have the capability to be a powerful organizing tool. And when, as in a local Democratic primary, the activist base of the electorate can have outsized impact, it does seem there is a potential in such instances to make for a very toxic stew.
I appreciate, as always, your thoughtfulness in examining such issues and your ongoing reassessment based on additional information. You not only provide cogent analysis, but also model critical thinking at its very best.
Thanks Susan. Yes, the closeness to Latin America is especially interesting. I'd like to dig more into that in the future. And that's interesting about the New York mayoral race. Definitely agree social media is very powerful as an organising tool.
The US is ranked much closer to e.g. Argentina and Peru, than e.g. to Germany and France. I keep having to disclaim that I don't think of myself as much of a leftist, but this is just stuff of "reality has a liberal bias". That is, the classic explanation is that in high-inequality societies, the ruling class doesn't want an informed educated populace, and hence will not devote resources to that end. It's bread and circuses instead. Please note, anti-knock-down-weakman, this isn't at all to assert that all social media is an opiate of the masses. The point is more that lying in the service of wealth is funded, while public institutions are attacked and defunded (e.g. see the Republican hatred for National Public Radio, which is not new).
Thank you for sharing the Reuters report. A couple of thoughts on your re-assessments.
1. I am resistant to the alarmist narratives about the new media environment b/c it is better for "me" as a relatively sophisticated consumer of news and culture. I remember the old days when I used to listen to a lot of NPR and PBS b/c they offered something that was a little bit different from the blandness of the three US networks and MSM. Now, I have so much variety from SubStack and podcasts that there is too much to consume. (I do worry that we'll have less local reporting with the decline of city newspaper monopolies, but even with that, I have options. There are at least two substacks in my neighborhood now written by guys who sit in at local city council meetings and write about local politicians.) The media easily available to me now is so much richer in political and philosophical perspectives that I don't want anyone trying to monitor or control it to protect me misinformation. I don't need that kind of protection.
So, am I being selfish if I say that I am OK with letting other people listen to Carlson or Owens (who do not interest me) if that's the price that I have to pay for enjoying a more interesting media environment?
2. I think your key insight still is that the misinformation chicken littles are complaining about symptoms rather than the causes (educational polarization) of our problems in the US. The misinformation based solutions that are proposed are like scratching the rash when you have poison oak. It might feel good for a few seconds, but it won't cure us and will just makes things worse.
If this is intended to be a sober, measured look at how social media and influencers have maybe slightly started to maybe just slightly effect things, but no big deal, no reason to freak out yet...it didn't work. ☺️ I almost wonder if your placid attitude is meant to paint a contrast to this data and alarm the reader even more, because this looks like a disaster to me. Though I can't tell if maybe what underlies your calmness is that you think most Americans are already so baseline dumb and uninformed that it doesn't particularly matter what their media diet is? Nothing will penetrate anyway?
I always enjoy your content; it's refreshing to read rational analysis from a center-left perspective - there aren't too many pundits (or many psuedo-pundirs, for that matter) remaining that haven't jettisoned the center bit in favor of fully embracing the delusional and unscientific cause celebres the far left degenerates have embraced this week.
I do take issue with the assignment of resentment from the right re the experts. Most on the us, at least those I know personally (as well as the various writers and bloggers that comprise my daily social media diet) do not feel any such emotion about them. If anything, most of us view them with contempt.
See who I follow if you really want well thought-out discussion from left to center-right. I read Free Press and The Bulwark as well, though they produce far too much content to bother trying to keep up with it all. Of note would be Noah Smith, Matt Yglesias, and Derek Thompson. If you are willing to consider a leftie who decidedly not a kook, read BIG by Matt Stoller who is doing some of the most important political work of our time on monopolies and anti-trust. Even some populist conservatives are starting to notice his work on how monopolies and capitalism are an unhealthy mix.
If you have reational, well reasoned conservatives, drop them here and I will take a look. I admire the Duty, Honor, Country branch of conservatism very much.
Just be aware that Noah Smith frequently mis-cites his sources, gets called on it in the comments, and ignores or belittles the people pointing it out. I used to be a subscriber and unsubbed despite being interested in some of the topics he covered, because his behavior in this regard was so consistently poor. I wouldn't rate anything he writes as reliable.
He is only an expert in economics. Everything else he writes about is his opinion of which he has a remarkable lack of humility, especially give his age. I had thought he was in his 20s or 30s by the way her writes but after I met him, he is starting to grey and probably in his mid-40s.
He called me an idiot on Twitter but to be fair I called him a warmonger first. :)
For better or worse he is one of our pro-growth liberal public intellectuals.
Thanks for this great piece. I have lots of thoughts, but I’ll confine myself to 2 points.
1. I may have missed it, but you didn’t mention the shocking decline in the objectivity and expertise of “legacy media” over the last 2 decades. These are mostly left wing – The NY Times, The DC Post, the Atlantic, PBS, CNN, MSNBC. This is the big reason why I read far less news than I used to. The only source I even remotely trust is the Financial Times. CNBC is bad too. They have a few smart announcers, but I know enough about the banking industry to know that 90% of what they say is dead wrong. I assume their understanding of other topics is no better.
2. You mentioned demons a couple of times, but you never explicitly mention the role of evangelical religion in all of this. I believe that extreme evangelical superstition breeds individuals that are drawn to irrational ideas and not equipped to exercise critical thought. Since they already know the truth, there is no need for them to look for it, let alone question their beliefs. That might mean ostracism from the tribe. The evangelical preachers who they worship (idolatry on steroids) are such transparent shysters that these sheep were easy pickin’s for Trump. That’s more than a third of the country.
You underestimate how much TV news is actually genuinely fake, or consists of absurd and unfounded opinions. Here's an example of how that assumption can go wrong. If you look at the UK, in the last election one of their oldest and most mainstream TV channels ran a very interesting report. It used footage from an undercover TV crew to reveal that Nigel Farage (an opposition politician) was out on the streets canvassing for his Reform party with a racist supporter. They showed this guy going on a racist diatribe on camera in a broad northern English accent. Farage immediately stated he didn't really know the guy, who'd turned up to a local campaign office just days earlier, and he'd had no warning of the guy's views.
Very likely, right? If you're the sort of person who trusts legacy media, this is the sort of report you'd find very convincing.
And yet the report was entirely manufactured fake news. The TV channel in question is well known for being controlled by the left, and people on social media were immediately suspicious of how perfectly the guy's diatribe fit the left's stereotypes of the right. He sounded like an actor pretending to be the left's idea of conservative, not an actual conservative. So those people checked, and what do you know - the guy turned out to be an actor! He even had a website where he stated in a posh southern accent that one of his acting skills was "rough speaking", by which he meant the fake regional northern accent he'd been using the entire time he'd been with Farage.
Here we have a mainstream, respected TV channel whose journalists are conspiring with an actor to do a hit job on a politician. So that channel was incredibly embarrased, investigated, found the perps in their news crews, fired them and then sued them for reputational damage whilst implementing procedures to ensure such election interference could never happen again. Right? LOL, of course not. They announced they had absolute confidence in their staff and any allegations were a conspiracy theory.
How often do they do this? How many people inside TV news crews know about this? Judging from how few shits they gave about being discovered and how sloppy the job was, they likely do this a lot and know they will be protected by their allies in other institutions even if found out. During COVID it was sometimes noticed that news reports would often appear at exactly the right time to support public health authorities current message, and these often presented apparently "random" members of the public who were discovered to be actors. Nothing could be conclusively proven until the Farage incident, but they look rather different now.
The moral of this story is that the people who got their news from social media ended up miles ahead of the people watching TV news from mainstream institutions. So relax! Rogan has nothing on those guys.
Under what pretext can we treat what an independent social media user, such as Owens or Tucker, puts out in their personal account as different than one person with a similarly large following talk about astrology or zoroastrianism? Should social media platforms regulate and control what independent users produce, how they decide what information is dangerous and should be limited? And is politics really an area in which misinformation should be handled by the government? Apart from a bottom up response by rebuilding trust in intitutions and credentialed journalism with better and more education, how can we adress these problems and inflict costs to bad actors without being hypocritically focused on a small piece in an ocean of unreliable and unverified information
I struggle with this because of the diversity within each media platform. I guess I use X as a new source, but it's a short list of created people with specific interests. I follow Jason Furman a Harvard Economist for example, as good or better than a Wall Street Journal article. I watch Perun's YouTube channel for military news and defense economics. I have no idea where I'd find anything remotely comparable in Mainstream media.
The curation of media matters. Dumb people watch dumb television and curate dumb social media. The key differences really seem to be centralization and control of narrative. CNBC has a control over the narrative that is much messier on Reddit. This is quite mixed as the markets are more downstream of both CNBC and Reddit.
On a related note, if I follow the blog of a current, former, retired, etc. legacy media author, am I really getting my news from social media? What about if the writer Is a high profile academic who sometimes writes for legacy media but mostly writes a blog?
I'm not sure there is a way to separate these sources that is meaningful.
Sorry, I have a question. Do you think that social media has had a major (and perhaps lasting) impact on our cognitive (and social) faculties. People just don't seem to think or behave the way they used to. The only high school teacher I know is retiring this year, and what she says about her students -- especially attention spans -- is scary.
Hi Dan, excellent C-Span interview with Jonathan Turley on freedom of speech. Turley contrasts the Lockean view of society he associates with the first amendment, with the Hobbesian view he associates with those who regard the first amendment with suspicion, including many if not most Europeans. This overlaps a great deal with the themes you have been writing on .
I don't listen to Candace Owens but the handful of clips I've seen of her are typically insightful refutations of liberal dogma and some of the highly visible people who spread it. Your reference to what Carlson said made it sound very likely metaphorical but it's hard to know without context. Anyway, it got me thinking that maybe your quote of Owens lacked context too.
On a similar note, I have listened to Stossel more than these others and I think he does a good job of pointing out absurdities and misinformation spread by people on the left. Robert Reich is one who quickly comes to mind. I've had more exposure to Reich than Owens or Carlson but he seems at least as bad. Reich's understanding of basic economics seems non-existent.
Rogan voices some odd opinions, vaccines come to mind, and has some guests that seem a little crazy but we shouldn't forget how adamant the left was that COVID didn't come from a lab (definitely possible), how they said the vaccine would literally stop it from spreading (slowed it a bit at best), and promoted and enacting mandates for children being vaccinated for COVID (that seems to have little or no benefit while creating some similarly small risks). Rogan also seems far more reflective and open minded than someone like Reich.
If I used the Facebook news feed to reach a legacy media story I'm not sure how I would answer the survey question. More importantly, I'm not sure the survey would get consistent results.
It isn't about political polarization or education polarization. It's an inevitable consequence of new communication technology.
The internet is shaking up modern America in the same way that the printing press shook up Early Modern Europe.
Maybe - but then why not Scandinavia, which also has the internet?
One good reason would be that, like with the printing press, the patterns of adoption of contemporary new communication technologies are heterogeneous. Florence kept up a manuscript literary culture while Venice took the lead with printing in the late 15th & early 16th centuries, for instance. Florentines bought print material but their social structure did not change so much. (For this case study I'm particularly indebted to The Bookseller of Florence, a wonderful focused history.)
Scandinavian society appears to have taken a more conservative approach to the new comms-tech (at least in decisive norm-defining classes) and its social structure has apparently not changed quite like US social structure has changed.
Yes good point (and interesting history I wasn't aware of)
In Western Europe social media censorship is far more heavy-handed than it is in the US.
And Western Europe entered the social media age with a much more authoritarian media environment. The US already had a partially democratizing media environment because of talk radio.
That's interesting. I don't think that's a decisive factor but I agree there is a difference there.
Also, Scandinavian countries are very small and highly homogeneous ethnically and culturally, although Muslim immigration is changing that.
Is societal trust the key factor to exacerbating or mitigating the epistemic harms of social media? I feel like you’ve hinted at this before. How clear cut do you think it is?
I think educational polarization plays a pretty big role, but I agree with your overall point.
There are now a lot of people reporting and commenting on events who would not have qualified for jobs in the traditional media, or been interested in them, for better and worse.
On top of that, there's a vast audience that doesn't like to read much, or even watch news on television, but does like the new media forms, which often blend entertainment with news - even more than legacy pioneers like John Stewart or Rush Limbaugh.
I agree with you about infotainment.
Although I wouldn't say "would not be qualified for" I would say "would not be nepotisticly selected for".
There are definitely unfair and arbitrary barriers to getting jobs in traditional media, but I think the producer-side changes are bigger than just that.
Off the top of my head: people can report on things that weren't interesting or acceptable to traditional media editors, or profitable enough for the publisher. They can report without any credentials or anything resembling conventional standards. Reporters and pundits can work part-time from a tiny outpost in the middle of nowhere. All for better or worse (and in many cases, much better.)
Regarding - "Nevertheless, I have updated my views a little bit in the direction of greater concern about misinformation and the information environment." - perhaps Rational Persuasion is not utterly, completely, totally, 100% useless :-).
All the same, the amount of effort required seems really disheartening, especially given how very effective professional liars are overall.
At the risk of being tedious, I'm going to pound the table again: An anti-vaccine lunatic is Secretary Of Health. Almost every single Republican Senator confirmed him. Even the relatively sane right-wing commentators on this blog, who are at the outermost perimeter of that whole fetid fever-swamp of insanity, are apparently not much troubled by this. This is a blazing signal, a empirical reality-check, that Something Is Very Wrong. Any beautiful theory that misinformation is badly defined or overestimated, should confront that ugly fact.
I am glad to see you come around to the point of view that misinformation is a significant problem on social media. You are correct that it is not one false statement or another, it’s the hallucinated mirror world some individuals inhabit. People who become seduced by these alternate realities are susceptible to extremist acts, such as Jan 20, or some of the more extreme BLM movement acts like the TAZ in Portland.
There is a historical precedent, most notably the wave of assassinations around the beginning of the 20th century. It had much more severe consequences - WWI for example - than today. So as you correctly state, this might just be a new medium for what human beings would tend to do anyway.
The main difference today is that these cultlike movements can spring up quickly and reach a large audience before a response can be marshaled. This provides real problems for governments and other defenders of the status quo. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
As for X, you can have it. I took the time I used to spend doomscrolling and decided to put it in more useful ways. I just finished War and Peace, which turns out to be an excellent antidote to MAGA madness. I know a well curated feed on X can be invaluable, especially if you a local political activist like me. But more than anything, Musk and his platform do not deserve my time and attention. It’s important for each in our own small way to remove power from people like Musk.
Substack is a much better use of my limited attention. I would have never discovered the extremely high quality and thoughtful discourse here if I was still wasting time on Twitter. My mental health and well being are improved as well.
All completely fair points! Thanks for the good comment
I think the discussion on the problem of misinformation on social media is misguided for the following reasons:
1) I find MSM pretty full of misinformation these days too. If you just take the very latest event of the attack on Iran, western MSM reporting is partisan to the degree that much of it qualifies in my mind as misinformation in conjunction with suppression of dissenting opinion
2) Social media is used by serious and ethical journalists (and others), MSM aligned commentators reflecting the MSM narratives, commenters with dissenting view of varying degrees of "reasonableness" and also plenty of dross, opinionated and abusive debate. In other words it provides a better spread of views than MSM though you have to filter out the rubbish.
The idea that people live in their own echo chambers is a broad generalisation that is not universally applicable nor do I see any evidence that social media is any worse that alternatives.
Whether someone lives in their own echo chambers or not is a function of their upbringing, their general outlook and the degree to which they have been taught to be skeptical, mistrusting of authority etc.
Those screeching for controls on social media in my opinion are analogous to the elites in control at the time the printing press was invented and the Reformation (e.g. Catholic Church) where they put people to death for having the audacity of producing alternative versions of the Bible other than officially sanctioned by the Church.
We know who won that information war and anyone trying to put the lid on the Internet will too find themselves dinosaurs of history.
>the wave of assassinations around the beginning of the 20th century
I was just reading a book about this recently, on a recommendation from family: Infernal Machine, about the beginnings of the FBI and the early anarchists. Really excellent book and important subject today, by an author in the thick of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Johnson_(author)
War and Peace is certainly a good antidote, but it's difficult medicine to prescribe to hotheads! Dostoevsky's Demons is the Russian classic that I recommend to people who are in the throes of the fever, and then War and Peace after the fever breaks.
Maybe balm is a better word than antidote. Trump and Musk were driving me mad and so I stopped reading the news and read Tolstoy instead and I am now in a much better place. What next though? Voltaire? Rosseau? The Classics? Suggestions are appreciated.
First could just be more Tolstoy, if you haven't finished it all – Hadji Murat, Anna Karenina, the short stories, almost all of it is very good. The next classic fiction I might recommend is Eliot's Middlemarch, which has had a new wave of popularity on Substack recently and has a good broad social sweep.
I also often like to go to concrete history. For countering Musk and Trump as distractions specifically, I might recommend either Allgor's Parlor Politics (great history of society women of early Washington DC who did much to moderate the wilder antics of presidents of their day) or O'Brien's The Second Most Powerful Man in the World (about FDR's discreetly influential and admirable right hand man from the Navy).
In philosophy, Isaiah Berlin's Three Critics of the Enlightenment might be an interesting alternative to Voltaire or Rousseau.
I find this to be a brilliant approach, essentially sharing your own evolving Overton window with regards to media practices. It grants space for the reader to calibrate to alternatives without all the sweaty, rhetorical pressure of standard "content." Bravo.
Thanks!
Fascinating and instructive, as I have come to expect from your writing. This was truly striking: “In many ways, the influence of social media within the US places it closer to Latin America—in Brazil it’s 35%—and many countries in Africa than to Northern and Western Europe.” I hope more analysis might be forthcoming from Reuters, or whatever outlets study these things, about why that might be. Of course, I also wondered whether Substack is considered in examining social media—though I suppose, even if considered, it’s a tiny percentage.
As I live in New York City, I wonder, too, about what impact social media may have had on the troublesome results of the Democratic mayoral race. This is pure speculation, but social media does seem to have the capability to be a powerful organizing tool. And when, as in a local Democratic primary, the activist base of the electorate can have outsized impact, it does seem there is a potential in such instances to make for a very toxic stew.
I appreciate, as always, your thoughtfulness in examining such issues and your ongoing reassessment based on additional information. You not only provide cogent analysis, but also model critical thinking at its very best.
Thanks Susan. Yes, the closeness to Latin America is especially interesting. I'd like to dig more into that in the future. And that's interesting about the New York mayoral race. Definitely agree social media is very powerful as an organising tool.
Just look a chart of the Gini coefficient (wealth inequality) by country.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?most_recent_value_desc=true
The US is ranked much closer to e.g. Argentina and Peru, than e.g. to Germany and France. I keep having to disclaim that I don't think of myself as much of a leftist, but this is just stuff of "reality has a liberal bias". That is, the classic explanation is that in high-inequality societies, the ruling class doesn't want an informed educated populace, and hence will not devote resources to that end. It's bread and circuses instead. Please note, anti-knock-down-weakman, this isn't at all to assert that all social media is an opiate of the masses. The point is more that lying in the service of wealth is funded, while public institutions are attacked and defunded (e.g. see the Republican hatred for National Public Radio, which is not new).
Thank you for sharing the Reuters report. A couple of thoughts on your re-assessments.
1. I am resistant to the alarmist narratives about the new media environment b/c it is better for "me" as a relatively sophisticated consumer of news and culture. I remember the old days when I used to listen to a lot of NPR and PBS b/c they offered something that was a little bit different from the blandness of the three US networks and MSM. Now, I have so much variety from SubStack and podcasts that there is too much to consume. (I do worry that we'll have less local reporting with the decline of city newspaper monopolies, but even with that, I have options. There are at least two substacks in my neighborhood now written by guys who sit in at local city council meetings and write about local politicians.) The media easily available to me now is so much richer in political and philosophical perspectives that I don't want anyone trying to monitor or control it to protect me misinformation. I don't need that kind of protection.
So, am I being selfish if I say that I am OK with letting other people listen to Carlson or Owens (who do not interest me) if that's the price that I have to pay for enjoying a more interesting media environment?
2. I think your key insight still is that the misinformation chicken littles are complaining about symptoms rather than the causes (educational polarization) of our problems in the US. The misinformation based solutions that are proposed are like scratching the rash when you have poison oak. It might feel good for a few seconds, but it won't cure us and will just makes things worse.
If this is intended to be a sober, measured look at how social media and influencers have maybe slightly started to maybe just slightly effect things, but no big deal, no reason to freak out yet...it didn't work. ☺️ I almost wonder if your placid attitude is meant to paint a contrast to this data and alarm the reader even more, because this looks like a disaster to me. Though I can't tell if maybe what underlies your calmness is that you think most Americans are already so baseline dumb and uninformed that it doesn't particularly matter what their media diet is? Nothing will penetrate anyway?
I always enjoy your content; it's refreshing to read rational analysis from a center-left perspective - there aren't too many pundits (or many psuedo-pundirs, for that matter) remaining that haven't jettisoned the center bit in favor of fully embracing the delusional and unscientific cause celebres the far left degenerates have embraced this week.
I do take issue with the assignment of resentment from the right re the experts. Most on the us, at least those I know personally (as well as the various writers and bloggers that comprise my daily social media diet) do not feel any such emotion about them. If anything, most of us view them with contempt.
See who I follow if you really want well thought-out discussion from left to center-right. I read Free Press and The Bulwark as well, though they produce far too much content to bother trying to keep up with it all. Of note would be Noah Smith, Matt Yglesias, and Derek Thompson. If you are willing to consider a leftie who decidedly not a kook, read BIG by Matt Stoller who is doing some of the most important political work of our time on monopolies and anti-trust. Even some populist conservatives are starting to notice his work on how monopolies and capitalism are an unhealthy mix.
If you have reational, well reasoned conservatives, drop them here and I will take a look. I admire the Duty, Honor, Country branch of conservatism very much.
Just be aware that Noah Smith frequently mis-cites his sources, gets called on it in the comments, and ignores or belittles the people pointing it out. I used to be a subscriber and unsubbed despite being interested in some of the topics he covered, because his behavior in this regard was so consistently poor. I wouldn't rate anything he writes as reliable.
He is only an expert in economics. Everything else he writes about is his opinion of which he has a remarkable lack of humility, especially give his age. I had thought he was in his 20s or 30s by the way her writes but after I met him, he is starting to grey and probably in his mid-40s.
He called me an idiot on Twitter but to be fair I called him a warmonger first. :)
For better or worse he is one of our pro-growth liberal public intellectuals.
Thanks for this great piece. I have lots of thoughts, but I’ll confine myself to 2 points.
1. I may have missed it, but you didn’t mention the shocking decline in the objectivity and expertise of “legacy media” over the last 2 decades. These are mostly left wing – The NY Times, The DC Post, the Atlantic, PBS, CNN, MSNBC. This is the big reason why I read far less news than I used to. The only source I even remotely trust is the Financial Times. CNBC is bad too. They have a few smart announcers, but I know enough about the banking industry to know that 90% of what they say is dead wrong. I assume their understanding of other topics is no better.
2. You mentioned demons a couple of times, but you never explicitly mention the role of evangelical religion in all of this. I believe that extreme evangelical superstition breeds individuals that are drawn to irrational ideas and not equipped to exercise critical thought. Since they already know the truth, there is no need for them to look for it, let alone question their beliefs. That might mean ostracism from the tribe. The evangelical preachers who they worship (idolatry on steroids) are such transparent shysters that these sheep were easy pickin’s for Trump. That’s more than a third of the country.
You underestimate how much TV news is actually genuinely fake, or consists of absurd and unfounded opinions. Here's an example of how that assumption can go wrong. If you look at the UK, in the last election one of their oldest and most mainstream TV channels ran a very interesting report. It used footage from an undercover TV crew to reveal that Nigel Farage (an opposition politician) was out on the streets canvassing for his Reform party with a racist supporter. They showed this guy going on a racist diatribe on camera in a broad northern English accent. Farage immediately stated he didn't really know the guy, who'd turned up to a local campaign office just days earlier, and he'd had no warning of the guy's views.
Very likely, right? If you're the sort of person who trusts legacy media, this is the sort of report you'd find very convincing.
And yet the report was entirely manufactured fake news. The TV channel in question is well known for being controlled by the left, and people on social media were immediately suspicious of how perfectly the guy's diatribe fit the left's stereotypes of the right. He sounded like an actor pretending to be the left's idea of conservative, not an actual conservative. So those people checked, and what do you know - the guy turned out to be an actor! He even had a website where he stated in a posh southern accent that one of his acting skills was "rough speaking", by which he meant the fake regional northern accent he'd been using the entire time he'd been with Farage.
Here we have a mainstream, respected TV channel whose journalists are conspiring with an actor to do a hit job on a politician. So that channel was incredibly embarrased, investigated, found the perps in their news crews, fired them and then sued them for reputational damage whilst implementing procedures to ensure such election interference could never happen again. Right? LOL, of course not. They announced they had absolute confidence in their staff and any allegations were a conspiracy theory.
How often do they do this? How many people inside TV news crews know about this? Judging from how few shits they gave about being discovered and how sloppy the job was, they likely do this a lot and know they will be protected by their allies in other institutions even if found out. During COVID it was sometimes noticed that news reports would often appear at exactly the right time to support public health authorities current message, and these often presented apparently "random" members of the public who were discovered to be actors. Nothing could be conclusively proven until the Farage incident, but they look rather different now.
The moral of this story is that the people who got their news from social media ended up miles ahead of the people watching TV news from mainstream institutions. So relax! Rogan has nothing on those guys.
Would you mind providing a source?
Under what pretext can we treat what an independent social media user, such as Owens or Tucker, puts out in their personal account as different than one person with a similarly large following talk about astrology or zoroastrianism? Should social media platforms regulate and control what independent users produce, how they decide what information is dangerous and should be limited? And is politics really an area in which misinformation should be handled by the government? Apart from a bottom up response by rebuilding trust in intitutions and credentialed journalism with better and more education, how can we adress these problems and inflict costs to bad actors without being hypocritically focused on a small piece in an ocean of unreliable and unverified information
That's a good point. The fault is not in our media, it is in ourselves.
I struggle with this because of the diversity within each media platform. I guess I use X as a new source, but it's a short list of created people with specific interests. I follow Jason Furman a Harvard Economist for example, as good or better than a Wall Street Journal article. I watch Perun's YouTube channel for military news and defense economics. I have no idea where I'd find anything remotely comparable in Mainstream media.
The curation of media matters. Dumb people watch dumb television and curate dumb social media. The key differences really seem to be centralization and control of narrative. CNBC has a control over the narrative that is much messier on Reddit. This is quite mixed as the markets are more downstream of both CNBC and Reddit.
Good point.
On a related note, if I follow the blog of a current, former, retired, etc. legacy media author, am I really getting my news from social media? What about if the writer Is a high profile academic who sometimes writes for legacy media but mostly writes a blog?
I'm not sure there is a way to separate these sources that is meaningful.
Sorry, I have a question. Do you think that social media has had a major (and perhaps lasting) impact on our cognitive (and social) faculties. People just don't seem to think or behave the way they used to. The only high school teacher I know is retiring this year, and what she says about her students -- especially attention spans -- is scary.
Hi Dan, excellent C-Span interview with Jonathan Turley on freedom of speech. Turley contrasts the Lockean view of society he associates with the first amendment, with the Hobbesian view he associates with those who regard the first amendment with suspicion, including many if not most Europeans. This overlaps a great deal with the themes you have been writing on .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RK7ZeWe3Xo
I don't listen to Candace Owens but the handful of clips I've seen of her are typically insightful refutations of liberal dogma and some of the highly visible people who spread it. Your reference to what Carlson said made it sound very likely metaphorical but it's hard to know without context. Anyway, it got me thinking that maybe your quote of Owens lacked context too.
On a similar note, I have listened to Stossel more than these others and I think he does a good job of pointing out absurdities and misinformation spread by people on the left. Robert Reich is one who quickly comes to mind. I've had more exposure to Reich than Owens or Carlson but he seems at least as bad. Reich's understanding of basic economics seems non-existent.
Rogan voices some odd opinions, vaccines come to mind, and has some guests that seem a little crazy but we shouldn't forget how adamant the left was that COVID didn't come from a lab (definitely possible), how they said the vaccine would literally stop it from spreading (slowed it a bit at best), and promoted and enacting mandates for children being vaccinated for COVID (that seems to have little or no benefit while creating some similarly small risks). Rogan also seems far more reflective and open minded than someone like Reich.
If I used the Facebook news feed to reach a legacy media story I'm not sure how I would answer the survey question. More importantly, I'm not sure the survey would get consistent results.