This is an important article in today’s New York Times. To summarize for anyone who doesn’t have electronic access to the Times, Julia Angwin, a contributing opinion writer, argues that the right used social media to help Trump win the election. It’s perhaps one reason the traditional “mainstream” media was so surprised by the election results. The Times and others (like MSNBC) were convinced that women, Black men and Hispanics would tilt the election in Kamala Harris’ direction. It obviously didn’t happen. There are three big takeaways:
1. The big tech companies that own the social media platforms were grossly irresponsible. They either didn’t seek to moderate or curate the content on their platforms (they actually cut back on the number of fairness and accuracy monitors). And in the case of Elon Musk, he actively used X, the former Twitter, to promote Trumpian policies. The idea that social media platforms have no responsibility to maintain some form of balance stems from the Communications Decency Act of 1996. We now can see clearly, that law should be amended, whenever sanity once again prevails. Major social media platforms need to be held to some level of decency, as are major broadcasters who are licensed by the FCC.
2. The legacy media has lost the war for the hearts and minds of the American people. This is bitter for me because I devoted 50 years of my life to United Press International, Business Week, U.S. News & World Report, the New York Times (as a freelance business columnist) and other outlets. It’s hugely ironic that the “mainstream media” lost the PR war for legitimacy among Americans. It hasn’t helped that we were not able to devise methods to make sure that the mainstream media outlets were owned by companies that had some shred of concern for the American democracy. In too many cases, it was all about profits. We had no system in place to test the intentions of the hedge fund and private equity bastards that chewed up the media. That crucial gap is one reason why the mainstream media lost so much credibility.
3. Because we lost control of our “information ecosystem,” we will never know how deeply the Russians were involved in this election cycle. In this situation, I don’t think the Chinese were the prime movers because they didn’t want a Trump win. The Russians were far more clever and strategic–and wanted a Trump victory because he is beholden to them for their investments in his real estate ventures and who knows what else. The Russians knew how to amplify bizarre right wing theories and introduce their own provocations into the social media landscape. We may never understand the full extent of Russia’s involvement because it was invisible–if a server farm in Romania was amplifying right-wing messaging and making it go viral, no one could ever prove that it was the Russians who did it.
Long story short, there is much work to be done if we ever wish to have confidence in our information ecosystem, and hence our democracy.
