A decade ago, the consensus was that the digital revolution would give effective voice to millions of previously unheard citizens. Now, in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, the consensus has shifted to anxiety that online behemoths like Twitter, Google, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook have created a crisis of knowledge — confounding what is true and what is untrue — eroding the foundations of democracy.
These worries have intensified in response to the violence of Jan. 6, and the widespread acceptance among Republican voters of the conspicuously false claim that Democrats stole the election. …
Insofar as these companies have transformed American politics, for a majority of the population it has been a slow, almost invisible process that has provoked little or no outcry. In a sense, this chain of events has resulted in the climate in which Donald Trump’s extraordinary false claims elicited no protest in half the country. Quite the opposite, in fact.
As long as truth can be disguised — and as citizens lose the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood — democracy will continue to weaken, ultimately becoming something altogether different from what we are accustomed to. CONTINUED
Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times
True. But haven’t we been here before? Pretty recently? The party papers of the 1800’s, Edgar Allen Poe and his possible death at the hands of poll fakers in Baltimore, dead people voting in Chicago in the 60’s. The key is how we respond, and my hope is that people will realize what fools they were to follow Trump and Q. Probably a dumb thought, but ’tis mine.