It's important to see the latest instances of America’s continuing train wreck from the passenger car, but I'm weary of hearing more lies, ignorance, dictatorial hostility, and programmed destruction of our democracy. I'm trying to find sources to help understand how this happened and continues happening day after day.
Why do over 40% of Americans approve of Trump's pathological behavior?
For me it's time to look into the social dynamics that have been injected into our otherwise civil and mildly liberal society to cause this steep decline. I found this study, which is longer than most (my) attention spans and focused mainly on how European democracies have been attacked with weaponized dis-information, but it applies here as well. I highly recommend at least reading the executive summary for a sense of how this is happening. We have to see what’s happening to address it effectively and virtually zero media anywhere on the political spectrum are looking beneath the latest atrocities to see how they are being manufactured and amplified into mainstream society.
INFORMATION DISORDER : Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making
"This report is an attempt to comprehensively examine information disorder and its related challenges, such as filter bubbles and echo chambers. While the historical impact of rumours and fabricated content have been well documented, we argue that contemporary social technology means that we are witnessing something new: information pollution at a global scale; a complex web of motivations for creating, disseminating and consuming these ‘polluted’ messages; a myriad of content types and techniques for amplifying content; innumerable platforms hosting and reproducing this content; and breakneck speeds of communication between trusted peers.
“The direct and indirect impacts of information pollution are difficult to quantify. We’re only at the earliest of stages of understanding their implications. Since the results of the ‘Brexit’ vote in the UK, Donald Trump’s victory in the US and Kenya’s recent decision to nullify its national election result, there has been much discussion of how information disorder is influencing democracies. More concerning, however, are the long-term implications of dis-information campaigns designed specifically to sow mistrust and confusion and to sharpen existing sociocultural divisions using nationalistic, ethnic, racial and religious tensions.”