Friday, February 07, 2020

McKay Coppins, a writer for The Atlantic, created a new Facebook account last November, "liked" Trump's Twitter feed and his reelection pages because,

I wanted to see it from the inside.

...
The story that unfurled in my Facebook feed over the next several weeks was, at times, disorienting...Wait, I caught myself wondering more than once, is that what happened today?
...
...I soon found myself reflexively questioning every headline.... In this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself...felt more and more difficult to locate. 

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.

...the wreckage it leaves behind could be irreparable.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-2020-disinformation-war/605530/