There is no political winning, at any time in the future, unless the structural issue with information and news ecosystems is dealt with. The best evidence I have seen, shows that news consumption on the right in America is sealed, and has no traffic with the center or left.
There is no future for ANY liberal democracy, if there is no fair debate between its citizenry. We aren’t even fighting for the table stakes of informed citizenry, but we are talking about the scraps of not debating fantasy.
This isn’t even about misinformation; the total consumption of misinformation as a portion of total content can only shift so much, given the number of hours in a day. It’s not the production of more misinformation which matters - it is the championing of misinformation by leaders that makes it a ‘fact’.
This then decides the talking points for debates. The side which has to do research that requires interrogating reality - slower, probabilistic, uncertain processes - is inefficient when competing with a party that can create facts.
The reason that the Stanford Internet Observatory and other content moderation arms are being targeted, is because for all their warts and issues, these teams were trying to ensure a fair market place of ideas, and as a result ended up slowing the spread of narratives on the right. Or potential new recruits.
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