Democracy without Truth

 

From Ipsos Week in Review

Democracy without Truth

Pre-filtered Social Media, the Demise of Traditional Media, “Mandates” from God and Conspiracy Theories on Steroids

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

George Orwell in “1984”

If people are no longer able to differentiate between rumor and real on the biggest issues facing our nation, if their votes are based on “alternative facts,” how exactly are they able to cast a meaningful vote? We used to believe that the internet-driven information era would provide ultimate access to everyone to facts that once were relegated to libraries and newspapers. It was already bad enough when we transitioned from the “nightly network television news” to 24-7 cable news networks – unable to fill that vast expanse of time with hard news – they found a lucrative ratings-boosting opinion-bias format that made cable networks billions. Fox News was the biggest winner – it is easier to reach a monolith of conservates than the rainbow coalition of liberals – and many only looked to that network for all their news. But then…

Once the internet became the information superhighway, as native digital users (particularly the younger generations) found ways to filter news sources that contradicted their beliefs, they followed online content consistent with their values and filtered out contradictory platforms. So-called “mainstream media” was the go-to news source for the elderly and those with confirmed basic opinions. Today, a vast younger audience does not watch television, does not follow any particular iconic “newspaper” (even online versions) and is more likely to generate their opinions from TikTok, X, YouTube and selected podcasts.

One particular observer of this change is author Joyce Vance – an American lawyer, host of Sisters-in-Law on MSNBC, one of the first five U.S. attorneys, and the first female U.S. attorney, nominated by President Barack Obama – writing for her November 10th Civil Discourse Substack. Her take seems so Marshall “the medium is the message” McLuhanesque as she focuses on how the Trump sweep was based more on how people who voted generated their opinions than the underlying issues themselves:

“When the dust settles, I expect the people who assess elections will tell us disinformation was key in 2024. It wasn’t the economy, it was the disinformation about the economy. That disinformation successfully led voters across the country to believe they were worse off, despite October reporting in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere that we have the best economy in the world, a remarkable recovery from Covid.

“There was Trump’s persistent lying. There were the highly successful disinformation campaigns by hostile foreign entities. There were billionaire newspaper owners who withheld endorsements the editorial boards wanted to give to Harris, endorsements that would have focused on the strength of her economic policies and the importance of democracy issues. There was Elon Musk, who bought Twitter and converted it from the public square to a mouthpiece for Trump.

“There is data from a Reuters/Ipsos poll in October that shows just how damaging the information gap is. People who are in possession of truthful, accurate information voted overwhelmingly for Harris. In other words, if you believed violent crime in major American cities was at an all-time high—which is not true—you were far more likely to vote Republican. Voters who knew that inflation had declined over the last year and was close to historic averages were +53 Democratic votes. Perhaps most disturbingly, people who did not have truthful information about undocumented people crossing the southern border were more likely to vote Republican.”

Those working for Donald Trump who understood these informational changes may have indeed determined the outcome of the recent election. Social media mavens like Charlie “Turning Point” Kirk who embraced conservatives with strong evangelical leanings, Joe “The Experience” Rogan podcaster with his massive audience and Elon “I own X” Musk (the richest man in the world who contributed $119 million to Trump’s campaign) seemed to have more sway with voters than MSNBC, CNN and the New York Times combined. Vance continues:

“Anything that caught [“Trumps’s”] fancy, however absurd, was something he would repeat lies about long after the truth had been firmly established. Of course, he’s the man who has continued to lie about the 2020 election. Donald Trump established an alternate reality for his voters to live in and then bought real estate there. The problem is fairly obvious; the solution is going to be much more elusive.

“I have been thinking about this problem as much as anything since the election. History is full of examples of authoritarian governments that restricted access to information in order to control people. They burned books in Nazi Germany and suppressed dissenting authors like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in Soviet Russia. China uses a ‘Great Firewall’ to prevent access to the internet. The issue used to be access to information. But now, it seems that’s morphing in modern American society. We have plenty of access to information, so much information—online and on social media, often distorted by algorithms that are concerned with selling something or pushing something and not with accuracy—that it’s a flood. It requires education and discernment to separate fact from fiction, and often that's lacking. That’s the problem: educating people so they can make judgments about what’s true.” Filters that enhance biases and hide truth.

We can start with one-on-one conversations, but the problem is so much bigger than that. Our Founding Fathers promulgated the First Amendment under supposition that a free press and separation of church and state were essential to democracy. There was no pervasive, all-reaching internet without guardrails back then. Yet today, biased factions have weaponized that amendment, suggesting not only that it did not separate church and state, but that “truth filters” have no place in national discourse. Apparently, someone can yell “fire” in a crowded internet space… and that is just the way it goes. No harm, even if foul.

I’m Peter Dekom, and unless we learn how to differentiate fact from fiction, decreasingly likely in Trump’s second term, the First Amendment can indeed be used to decimate democracy in ways never intended by those Founding Fathers who drafted it.