Our Media Platforms are Failing in the Fight Against Fascism
Media institutions are supposed to get better over time at identifying and protecting against disinformation. Our prevailing media institutions are actually getting worse.
By Ryan McGreal.
571 words. Approximately a 1 to 3 minute read.
Posted October 11, 2024 in Blog.
I have a pet theory that fascism rears up every time there is a transformational new communications medium and the fascists are able to exploit the lack of filters and protections in the new medium. Over time, as people and systems adapt, the fascist impulse gets downregulated again.
But this time, for various reasons, the systems that operate our new communications media are actually doing progressively less to filter, downregulate and protect against fascism, not more, as they mature. This is both fascinating and terrifying.
On Facebook, they decided to take the easy way out and deprioritize or outright block all news reporting indiscriminately, instead of trying to filter the reliable news from the propaganda and disinformation. The result is that an entire cohort of social media consumers get almost no news whatsoever now.
Xitter, um, decided to go a different route. That site actively incentivizes the worst kinds of disinformation and even pays propagandists to spread it through revenue sharing. And its owner is out there every day promoting and boosting insane fascist conspiracy theories.
(And not for nothing, but he has also spent tens of millions of dollars funding a Super PAC that supports Republican campaigns and especially the Republican presidential candidate.)
Media sharing sites like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok have opaque algorithms that promote content based not on accuracy but on emotional intensity and similarity to previously viewed content. This has the effect of serving as an intake funnel into increasing radicalization.
The legacy news media are struggling to compete for attention with these new media platforms, and tend to lean into their own forms of sensationalism to try and remain relevant. In addition, squeezed for revenue, these companies are cannibalizing themselves, which further reduces their quality and reliability and make them a target of claims that the news media can’t be trusted.
To the extent that democracy requires a reasonably literate, well informed electorate, this media landscape is very bad news.
In the past, the mainstream media were a primary line of defence against rising fascist sentiment. The fascists themselves understand this, which is why they attack the legitimacy of the media so relentlessly and invest so heavily in creating their own parallel networks.
Essentially, today’s major media networks are all either: (a) recoiling from their responsibility to be a bulwark against disinformation; (b) losing the capacity to serve this role; or else (c) actively working to promote the disinformation and propaganda they are supposed to be guarding against.
It’s bad. Really bad.
In a not-crazy media environment, it would be unimaginable for the election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump to be a statistical tie. In a not-crazy media environment, Trump would never have gotten within several miles of the nomination for one of the two major national political parties.
But that’s not the media environment we live in.
No matter who wins in November, a huge share of Americans inhabit a funhouse mirror view of the world. Bringing them back into some kind of shared understanding of reality is going to be a huge challenge under any media context, but probably impossible if the media platforms refuse to help.
I would like to end on a hopeful note, and it is this: we are not the first generation to face this challenge, and we can learn from how previous generations responded to it. Our media environment is new, but the basic task remains: to figure out how as a society we can agree on what is real.