Imagine a world without social media. It shouldn’t be that hard; you only have to go back about a decade. The traditional antagonists–the NYT and the WSJ, Fox and MSNBC–still exist, but Facebook and Twitter don’t. Is America still as polarized as it is today? Is liberal democracy still under threat?
No, for two reasons:
- The cultural left that is so loathed and feared by the right expresses itself almost exclusively on social media. The right erroneously assumes that it speaks for the mainstream left, and overreacts by trying to maintain a monopoly of political power in an effort to save itself.
- Social media are experienced through phones, and thus are more pervasive than periodicals and TV. People who were fairly sane in the old regime are bombarded with the opinions of nut jobs, and start to accept their opinions. Even partisan gatekeepers lose their authority. Anarchy results.
The bottom line is that uncensored social media are incompatible with liberal democracy. The current situation is unsustainable.