Epistemic Toxicity
Wade Lee Hudson
In “Disinfo Wars,” Fareed Zakaria’s commentary on “The Day the Internet Came for Them” by Nina Jankowicz, Zakaria writes:
Internet politics and its distortions were at least partly to blame for last week’s violence at the Capitol, Wilson Center fellow and disinformation watcher Nina Jankowicz argues at Foreign Affairs, pointing to an epistemic toxicity that has stewed in plain sight.
Social-media platforms’ related-content algorithms “prioritize engagement over truth, meaning that a search for natural health remedies, for instance, could lead users in only a few clicks to far more dangerous content,” Jankowicz writes. In that environment, false beliefs—like President Trump’s stolen-election conspiracy theory, the faux-factual premise of the Capitol attack—can gain more traction.
“The United States has finally been shocked into understanding that the information people consume online has real-world consequences for public health, public safety, and democracy,” Jankowicz writes. “Americans should remember that activists from countries as disparate as Myanmar and Ukraine have made this argument for years. … And should lawmakers ever again be tempted to argue that social media platforms ought to be no-holds-barred free-speech zones, they would do well to recall the fear and the heartbreak of January 6: the day the Internet came for them.”
These reflections highlight the need for new structures and mechanisms to help develop greater conssensus concerning what is true.