After four fractious years of politicisation and polarisation, however, it will take more than official pledges to address the degradation of public discourse… The next administration will do better in this fight only if it pushes for new governmental structures and legislation.
Read Here | Foreign Affairs
“What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.”
Disinformation is harmful on and offline. The people who spread disinformation have various motives. They might use it to seek attention, promote an ideology, sway an opinion, or receive financial gain.1 The issue of financial motivation is particularly problematic when it comes to programmatic advertising…Those who seek to disinform have taken advantage of an increasingly connected world to push online narratives that sow division and spark conflict.
Freedom of speech, increasingly accepted of late as a general good, becomes problematic when coupled with deception, anonymity and the power of vast wealth to magnify some voices 1,000-fold over others. And for many spreaders of disinformation, getting a reader/viewer/voter actually to believe your untruths is not the only measure of success. Simply confusing them, encouraging them to doubt opposition truths, is just as good.
