#10: America is Back
Social media has been a gift and a curse to the American political world. Especially in the last 7 years.
The amount of misinformation has increased significantly throughout the last half decade, and so has the amount of people who are buying into it. 'Fake news is bad enough at face value, the fact that someone went out of their way to create and publish a fake story designed to misinform. It becomes even more of an issue when the majority begins to believe it, and prominent figures begin to push that misinformation even further.
There's been much commentary surrounding the indictment of former President Trump. In the last few weeks, a video of remarks made by Joe Biden in 2022 began to circulate (link). The video shows Biden stating to a group of world leaders that "America is back" and that an effort was being made to stop Trump from taking power. Donald Trump shared the video on right-wing media platform Truth Social, it was also shared by many of his cohorts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
The video without context, and the added context from Trump, leads the viewer to believe that Biden organized the indictments against Trump and is plotting to take him down. This is just simply not true. Websites like Twitter and Instagram show a warning when playing the video, which states that the video is missing context and should not be construed to believe he was speaking on something other than January 6th.
Misinformation such as this only increases the issue of intense polarization in our country. Rather than informing our citizens of what actually happened and what it means for them, our representatives and leadership would rather support the lies that back up their agenda and create more distance and division across the aisle.
I certainly agree that the amount of misinformation and conspiracy being spread on social media is a threat to democracy. By this, I mean that many citizens will continue to lose faith in the system and resort to extremist ideology or following demagogues who espouse populist views to profit off an unstable political climate. I frequently stress for all the people I know well to search for their information and education from a variety of sources that are widely considered reliable. Even if these sources are biased in some manner, keeping an open mind and remembering framing/sensationalized stories in the press are a great step towards proper media and political literacy. A functional issue in the spread of misinformation continues to be the algorithmic style of social media, so steps to keep check on unreliable sources online should be a large priority.
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