Preserving Democracy: Pursuing a More Perfect Union

Both political violence and honestly misinformation were both much more common in the early decades of American democracy. We had yellow journalism, right? We had these, these newspapers that went out and absolutely slandered people from the other party and candidates from the other party. And then, we kind of went through this era of respectable journalism and giving equal time to both sides and having very few, relatively few sources of information and now we're kind of, I think back in the wild west of yellow journalism and polarized politics where the internet tells us whatever we want to read and partisan media tells us who we are. Partisan media is really efficient at telling people this is what you are as a Republican, this is what you are as a Democrat. This is us, this is them. So, I think conflict and upheaval and even violence, I think go hand in hand with a kind of lawless informational space where where people don't really know the same truth, right? They don't live under the same reality and so their conflicts can be much bigger because they can imagine all kinds of things about the other people. 15 years ago, one might have thought that social media would have a democratizing effect and a lot of people did think that but we have to remember how unrepresented the conversation on social media can be. So the vast majority of posts on Twitter are put up there by a tiny minority of people on Twitter. And so you can get a very misleading impression of what people are concerned about, what they're thinking, just by looking at that. And then there's this feedback effect where a lot of my fellow journalists spend too much time on Twitter and then they amplify that misleading picture of what the country is like to their readers and their viewers and it just becomes a kind of hall of mirrors. When the Obama campaign used these tools to such effect the Republican party definitely noticed and the kind of far right fringe definitely noticed as well. So there was an immediate sense that we have to catch up in this technological arms race. And there was also a sense among the white nationalist fringe that, again, this is a powerful moment for recruitment just like 9/11 when people felt like they had been breached by a foreign enemy. A lot of people felt with the first black president, Okay this is a really salient moment for white racial consciousness which is obviously a dangerous thing in America. So the white nationalist groups, I think, figured out right away that it's one thing to talk about race, it's one thing to say the Clintons or the Democrats are giving too many handouts to African Americans or you should worry about affirmative action but suddenly when you have a black president it's this very immediate stark visual reminder that your country is being taken from you. This was a kind of a messaging godsend for the white supremacist movement. This was in many ways the thing they had been fearing. Oh, I think social media is a huge problem. And it's a huge, it's like gasoline on the fire. And I think the big social media platforms need to help own this problem and need to help fix it. And they need to help fix it by dealing with the problem of disinformation that's spread on the platforms. And disinformation is intentional, misleading information. It's not mistakes and facts or things of that sort. It's really using information as a weapon. And that's what we see going on. I don't know if we are the most divided we've ever been as a nation. I think we are the most plugged in and attuned and able to listen to everyone's opinion about their political position and their thoughts and their fears. So I don't know if we are in an era of unusual divisiveness rather than an era of unusual noise about that divisiveness. And I think that increasingly what we have is an opportunity if we have these new channels to listen to each other, one would hope that we would have leadership that would say Why don't we use those channels to talk about the things that we want the most for ourselves? Why don't we use those channels to talk about our fears and how we wanna care for each other? But unfortunately, I think we have used technology as an opportunity to amplify and to threaten and to scare each other. And so what does this mean for us as people who want to see democracy come alive? I think that we have to really weigh the hard work of making democracy work in an age in which fear tactics and scare mongering and lying also are effective tools for mobilizing people.