Intractable Issues in the U.S. and the Role of Media/Social Media

Preamble: I didn’t quite anticipate what I discovered when I began the research on this blog. My eyes were opened as I explored the darker corners of the Internet, imageboards and the on-line chats I bumped into and some of the books, articles and websites on conspiracy theories, extremist groups and characters that populate them. (There are a lot of aggrieved, aggressive, and misinformed people lurking out there.) I also thought I knew the media business but that too, surprised me. 

So I made a decision to try and collate some of what I gathered and keep this in the form of a separate document. You can read the blog, hopefully succinct and separate enough, but I recommend that you browse the incredible array of groups, media companies, social media sites, and research and writings about the business, in the separate document I have labelled Attachments to Blog on Intractable Issues. I also included a brief list of reference books. The gestalt makes quite a story. (It also made for quite a learning experience.) 

One member of my book club said that I should put a label on this attachment “Warning: the contents of this document could be injurious to your health”!

I originally started this blog trying to answer the question why 64 per cent of Republican voters continue to believe that Trump won the 2020 election (from a recent Pew Research poll, pre-impeachment trial), and 74 per cent want him to stay active in politics (from a recent CNBC poll). 

After a lot of thought, it became apparent that this wasn’t the correct question. While this question is important and I hope this blog helps answer it, the fact that people even have this belief is a symptom, not a cause. The reality is that the US is facing some powerful forces that are undermining its very existence and the media is playing a formidable role in the equation. If identifying those forces and parsing the role the media play can lead to resolution, then maybe THAT’s worth writing about.

First of all, what are those forces? They include both some intractable issues and worrying changes in values. In addition there are enormous political divisions that separate the country into two parts. Throw in some very influential forces in the guise of dangerous extremist groups and add a proliferation of conspiracy theories. Combine these with the evolution of traditional media, then the cable news and social media revolution; throw in an abuse of screens, the power of confirmation bias, some basic communications and literacy challenges plus just plain political apathy, and you get a toxic mix.

1 There are some intractable issues affecting US society.

• Ingrained, long festering racism. A residual racism festers in America that began in the very early years of the country’s existence. From the days of slavery (even various founding fathers, including Washington, Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson – who segregated the federal government), Reconstruction, Jim Crowe, the KKK, George Wallace, Charlottesville in 2017, Black Lives Matter clashes, and even a presence in law enforcement and the military (a 2019 poll reported by the Military Times found that in 36% of active-duty soldiers, evidence was found of “white supremacist and racist ideologies”), a steady litany of encounters has occurred with a common theme. White supremacy has been and remains  America’s curse.
  
  Racism also includes issues with respect to Native Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans. It decidedly continues to plague the Jewish community. Domestic fascism has been around for years so why has it taken, as historian Daniel Panneton said in the Globe & Mail on January 27, “an attempted coup for elected officials and mainstream media outlets to listen? How could a society, that holds the Holocaust up as our dominant moral metaphor, the ultimate symbol of evil, fail to recognize that the US was losing its democratic status?”

• An obsession with the military and guns prevails. The history of the US is laden with a war/military focus: from early dealings with First Nations; to the armed citizen-soldier ethos where service in the militia, including providing one’s own weapon, was mandatory for all men; to the frontier tradition and the cowboy archetype of individualist hero; to the devastating Civil War; to the controversial Vietnam War; to the Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction fiasco; to the reality that in its long 245-year history the nation has enjoyed only 16 years of peace; to the fact that the current military budget consumes 3.4 percent of the GDP (or $732 billion vs the next largest, China, at $261 billion). It seems likely that foreign misadventure will continue as a national creed. This military mentality – and skillset, I submit, is ingrained in the actions of many males in the country today.
  
  Add to this the Second Amendment, which has become an obsession with much of the population; this “right” to bear arms infiltrates the culture. The statistics are astounding regarding the number of guns per person and as a direct result the number of deaths due to guns. That some politicians want the right to bring a gun into the government building where they develop public policy screams of idiocy, of absurdity, not to mention being frightening.

• Powerful role of religious faith plus strong support for pro-life and traditional sexual mores. Religion plays a very important role within a huge portion of the US population, and it drives these issues. Puritans, Quakers, Catholics, Anglicans (including the Great Awakening that swept the colonies in the 1730s and 1740s) emerged from early years of refuge from Europe in a search for religious freedom, resulting today in America having the largest Christian population in the world. There is an acceptance that this population tends to more conservative views on certain issues. Evangelical churches represent 26% of the population. Three quarters of the population believe in heaven, 72% in angels and, astoundingly, fully 40% are Creationists. Yes, read that again; two fifths of Americans don’t believe in Darwin! In particular, it leads to a resistance to anything smacking of liberal positions on abortion and the LGBTQ+ community. 
  
  It also leads to a certain Biblical rigidity. Religious groups were active in the attack on the Capitol. (See Attachment #1 for a description of Jerico March.) Reports describe a group standing on the rostrum where the president of the Senate presides paused to pray “in Christ’s holy name.” Men raised their arms in the air and thanked God for allowing them “to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists and the globalists, that this is our nation, not theirs.” They thanked God “for allowing the United States of America to be reborn.” 
  
  Many direct questions must be asked of the Christian right. To start, are people who are more evangelical more inclined to beliefs without evidence? Tell me about how your moral values countenance someone like Trump?
  
  To acknowledge, there are other seemingly intractable issues facing the US today (health care and the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the environment, the huge and growing financial gap between the affluent and those at the bottom, building/repairing infrastructure, immigration, trade relations, education, gender politics, etc.) but the above three issues contain the foundation of major dissent within the US social system, including also the next point.

2. A deterioration in basic values seems to be occurring. 

Personal freedom and self-interest:  As David Brooks, a US conservative commentator, has observed (and who I quoted in my Oct 30 blog on the US election) Americans have moved from being, yes, clearly individualistic, but sharing common ideas and values, to the point now where their values have eroded and are being replaced by a value system that puts personal freedom and self-interest above every other value.

Financial obsession: There also appears to an almost obsessive drive for wealth and the accompanying trappings in an increasing segment of the population. Wall Street trader Sam Polk in a New York Times op-ed described the principle of social comparison. We constantly compare what we have to what other people have. Polk admitted he was never happy no matter how much he earned; there was always someone who earned more. Wealth addiction is relatively new. Michael Lewis, in his book Liar’s Poker, wrote that traders once believed they were performing a social function. They funded important projects and made sure money travelled to where it could be more useful – but that illusion is now gone.

Trumpism and lack of moral compass vs the rule of law: On the subject of values, one cannot ignore the ugly reality of current US politics. The Republican Party appears to have lost its moral compass. Most Republican leaders seem to have concluded that convicting Trump in the Senate would do more harm to their personal political fortunes than sparing him. I watched the full Senate impeachment proceedings Feb 9 to 13 and attempted to listen as a juror, objectively. In my opinion, the Senate did not do its democratic duty and convict Trump for inciting an insurrection by encouraging his supporters to storm the US Capitol. Choosing Trumpism over the rule of law is contemptible, if not shameful; the converse shows courage and a solid value system plus the realization the nation needs to be protected from future Trump-likes. 

The only hope (again in my own value system) is that, in their attempts to retain power, they will lose it further. The American people might see through the chicanery and Trump fawning and say I’m abandoning you unless you recalibrate and return even perhaps to what George Bush said in his acceptance speech 20 years ago. Bush used the term “compassionate conservatism” and said “I will not attack a part of this country because I want to lead the whole of it”. Trump and the bulk of the GOP have done nothing but the opposite in the past four years. 

3. The country is being divided into two irreconcilable Americas.

The divide is enormous in this US society of parallel universes: Democrats vs Republicans; Biden vs Trumpism;  careful constraints vs unfettered free speech; limits on behaviour vs freedom from government control – from anything; democracy vs hypocricy; value of government and taxation vs distrust; selective immigration vs walled borders; diversity and inclusion vs retrenchment; cosmopolitan vs rural; professional and long-tenured diplomats vs crony plants; leadership on the world stage vs contempt for international institutions.

It appears that a sizeable portion of the US population have a tenuous grip on reality. As Andrew Coyne, not mincing his words, said in the January 6 Globe & Mail, “They can be persuaded of literally anything, such is their adulation of Mr. Trump and mistrust of almost anything else. Whether this is something social media has cultivated… or merely revealed, is an open question. But it is an undemocratic truth.”  The culture that has consumed the GOP is “the open advocacy of utter and unmitigated nutjobbery – the stuff of the QAnon cult and other loons – that is the hallmark of the modern Republican Party.”

When you have newly elected Republican congresswoman (from a deep-red corner of Georgia) Marjorie Taylor Greene repeating and promoting QAnon theories and phrases, praising the mythical Q as a “patriot” and supporting conspiracies such as that the 9-11 attacks were “done by our own” government and that “none of the school shootings were real or done by the ones who were supposedly arrested for them”, you have a problem. While she has recanted some of her positions, she laughs at the Democrats who voted to boot her off her committee appointments in the House on Feb. 4, noting quite presciently tweeting “what a bunch of morons the Democrats (+1) are for giving someone like me free time”). She remains a toxic example of the gulf that exists within the country.

Trump’s tenure was the continuation of a trend. The country was seriously divided before he arrived. He said in a 2017 press conference: “I didn’t come along and divide this country. The country was seriously divided before I got here.” (Probably the smartest thing he has ever said.)

A prosperous and democratic America will depend on the issues I will deal with next – the handling of extremism, those related conspiracy theories and the role of the media.

4. There is a wide range of, and increase in, extremist groups in the US. 

Americans are actively courting conspiracies and violent, radical ideologies in order to make sense of a world they don’t trust. This is particularly so on the right side of the political spectrum. This has been growing in the US for years. In this “post-truth era” the very notion of truth is under siege while conspiratorial world views ensnare and radicalize unprepared minds. Professional trolls, true believers and political opportunists have sowed conspiratorial lies, creating intricate and dangerous alternate realities.

The list of those most visible includes an incredible array: Alt-right, QAnon, Proud Boys, The Base, Soldiers of Oden, KKK, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Blood & Honey/Combat 18, 4Chan, C4T, 1488, APART, Jerico March, the “boogaloo” movement, etc. It’s a terrifying and potentially explosive list – a mixture of racist, homophobic, males (generally) determined to keep America white, Christian and heterosexual. (I have identified a selection of these groups in Attachment #1: Extremist Groups.)

Combine this with the psychology of mob mentality and unfortunate things happen. What occurred, for example, at the Capitol had all the markings of old time lynching; a mixture of ordinary people mixed in with radicals. A noose was even brought and an actual gallows erected, perhaps symbolically – but ominously.

5. There exists a proliferation of conspiracy theories. 

This is influencing much of the debate around the world, but they particularly flourish in the US. (Attachment #2: Conspiracy Theories describes some of the more relevant ones with respect to what I am covering.) 

There is a long tradition of mass delusion in American culture – from the Salem witch trials through the “red scare” tyranny of senator Joe McCarthy.  As John Doyle the Globe & Mail television columnist said, “These delusions are often anchored in rumour and spite, but they are generally about maintaining or obtaining power. The reason conspiracy fiction has such a steadfast position in the US popular culture is that it is first cousin to the very real history of conspiracy and hysteria”. 

The resolution of one of them, white nationalism, is very important to the future of American democracy. I have opined on Trump’s attitudes in my previous Trump blogs, but it goes deeper and has to be resolved for a peaceful US future. Trump has given white supremacy a lot of oxygen. While it has been brewing in the Republican party for 20 years, Trump stoked it beginning with his Barack Obama-is-not-a-citizen lie. This kind of mentality is now out in the public square where everyone in America (and around the world) can examine it.

The white power movement in America wants a revolution. Its soldiers are not lone wolves but highly organized cadres motivated by a coherent and deeply troubling worldview made up of white supremacy, virulent anticommunism, and apocalyptic faith. This movement was consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s around a potent sense of betrayal in the Vietnam War and has been resurgent under President Trump. 

A recent book by Kathleen Belew (who has been interviewed frequently by CNN since Jan 6) titled Bringing the War Home, describes how a small group of veterans and active-duty military personnel and civilian supporters have returned to an America, ripped apart by a war they felt they were not allowed to win, and have concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. Belew describes how they unified people from a variety of militant groups, including Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads, radical tax protestors, and white separatists to form a new movement of loosely affiliated independent cells to avoid detection. She describes how the white power movement is operated with discipline and clarity, undertaking assassinations, armed robbery, counterfeiting, and weapons trafficking.

Tick off the other theories I have listed (in certainly an incomplete list), and you have to step back and search for cause and consequence; solutions may then emerge. Regarding cause, I submit the changing role of the media plays a critical role.

6. The traditional media role is politicizing, polarizing and consolidating. 

(See: Attachment #3: Media Choices, Changes and Customer Profile Over Time for a more detailed description of particularly customer behaviour over time.) 

Faith in institutions generally, has declined. To start, when talking about the public’s attitude towards the media it’s important to look broadly and realize that faith in institutions in general has radically declined. Support for Congress is in the single digits. About 80% of the public feel the government is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves. 

Pre 1960s, before television, newspapers dominated news distribution: When TV arrived in the 1950s, it started to bring news to the consumer faster and in a more visual style. Particularly influential were the small town papers,

Traditional media role in the 70s was conformist but evolving. Both how we get our news and what we get has dramatically changed.  Before the start of the Internet in 1991, the role of traditional media dominated. There were few TV networks and they mostly reported the same things, tending to be quite conformist, while generally searching for truth and in defence of justice and it only took up a small portion of our time. There was no talk radio or polarizing cable TV.

In the early days of mass media, the big press enterprises operated in artificially scarce markets. Limited number of Federal Communications Commission licenses for broadcasters and the gigantic expense of maintaining and building distribution networks meant most media outlets were only taking on a competitor or two. Big daily newspapers had gravy trains of captive local advertisers. Scarce ad time was expensive. Journalistic inoffensiveness was stressed. The phrase “objectivity” was a great protector for reporters. If you announced yourself as an ally of one party or another, you lost your credibility as a reporter.  “Balance” was a way for journalists to stay out of unspoken political alliances. 

Newspaper decline commenced in the 60s and 70s. Afternoon papers saw their circulations plunge and profits dry up. Television captured more and more of the advertising revenue that newspapers had relied on. They adapted: more stories were written with a feature-type approach that emphasized storytelling over breaking news, and papers were redesigned to be more visually appealing, with a greater emphasis on clean layouts and graphic design.

By the 1980s the media were largely catering to the financial interests of their owners and major advertising clients. As well, they were editorially distorting their reporting to favour government and corporate policies. This situation was described by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their book Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media. (The book introduced the idea of a propaganda model of consent and the concept of filters of editorial bias. These concepts are summarized in Attachment #4: Chomsky’s Propaganda Model of Consent.)

This bias was apparent in the print side of media. “Every newspaper is owned by someone or a group of ‘someones’ that have their own political and otherwise agendas,” says social media consultant Lon Safko, author of The Social Media Bible. Newspapers still represented an important source of in-depth news, analysis, and opinion.

The issue of whether news has monetary value emerged. Most newspapers, not wanting to be left behind, started websites in which they essentially gave away their most valuable commodity – their content – for free (whether this is fatally flawed strategy is an important question to raise). Furthermore, alternatives for key daily resources have emerged: websites like Craigslist began to eat away at classified ad revenue and stock market quotes are available in real time on the Internet.

In the 1990s: declining independent journalism and a shift to polarized programming. This phasing out of independent journalism has been replaced with deeply polarized programming on both sides of the political and cultural landscape. It started in the late 1980s with an explosion of conservative talk radio and Fox-style news products. Using points-of-view rather than “objectivity” as commercial strategies led to each consumer being provided an outlet to match his political belief. The Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to have balanced coverage, was eliminated in 1987.

Shift to 24-hour cable TV started to accentuate this polarization and politicization. The introduction by CNN as the first all-news 24-hour cable news television channel in the US in the late 1990s. Along with MSNBC, they took the liberal viewpoint. Fox News became more pointed, opinionated and nasty – and struck gold. They cornered the conservative point of view through shows such as the O’Reilly Factor, and Hannity and Colmes (they were like pro wrestling, where “liberal” Colman always got pinned!). Both sides sold anger by feeding audiences what they wanted to hear.

Breaking news, immediacy and visual impact became the norm. News became tailored to attract and keep specific audiences, to be deeply polarizing. Off-topic news, other angles and other voices didn’t make the cut – they risk alienating the precious audience. Partisan harangues are cloaked in journalism’s clothes.

(Also important is understanding the choices now available on cable news and other news media options. See Attachment #5: Cable News Choices; Other Media Options)

Fewer companies owned more media outlets; risk of lower standards. Over time the degree of media merging has increased (along with the number of media outlets). As a result, fewer companies now own more media outlets, increasing the concentration of ownership. In 1983, 90% of US media was controlled by 50 companies; as of 2017, just 6 companies. Less diversity meant less competition.

(In Canada a number of media corporate mergers and takeovers occurred. For example, in 1990, 17% of daily newspapers were independently owned; whereas in 2015, 1% were.)

Critical stories were avoided (there’s no percentage in doing big exposés against large, litigious companies). A reasonable criticism was they were limiting free speech. There has also been a merging of entertainment and news (sensationalism) at the expense of the coverage of serious issues.

The concentration of media ownership reduces diversity in TV and radio programming. As a majority of those in media are white, middle-class men, there is concern a bias exists toward the special interests of the owners, all resulting in a lack of ethnic and gender diversity. This can result in the reduction of different points of view as well as vocalization about different issues. Minorities and women also have less ownership of media (women and minorities each have less than 7 percent of TV and radio licenses).

Steady rise in digital sources of news provides great choice from around the world. When asked which of these platforms they prefer to get news on, roughly half of Americans say they prefer a digital platform – whether it is a news website (26%), search (12%), social media (11%) or podcasts (3%). About a third say they prefer television, and just 7% and 5% respectively say they prefer to get their news on the radio or via print. 

Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or their local city paper. News-aggregation sites such as Google News draw together sources from around the world.

Demographics influence consumption habits with youth adopting digital. Age is important here: younger Americans vary widely from their elders in news consumption habits: 

* younger age groups have almost fully turned to digital devices as a platform to access news. Ages 18 to 29, 71% get news from a digital device often; only 16% get their news often from TV

* ages 30 to 49, just a quarter say they get news on TV often; digital devices are the dominant choice for news for 67%

* ages 50 on up: about half or more of adults 50 and older are still turning to TV for news often (54% of those 50 to 64 and 68% for 65 and older); 64% get news at least sometimes from both television and digital devices

Demographics also influence on what device one obtains ones information. More than eight-in-ten US adults say they get news from a smartphone, computer or tablet “often” or “sometimes”.

(Journalist Matt Taibbi, has written a book that plots the radical changes in the media landscape over the past 30 years. It also helps explain the rise of Trumpism. Some of the key points he makes can be found in Attachment #6, Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another.)

By the early 2000s, TV stations learned to cover politics as they covered sports. 

The use of graphics, boxing  clichés, score keeping in debates and a winner-take-all vision of politics became common. By 2016 Matt Taibbi states that “we’d raised a generation of viewers who had no conception of politics as an activity that might or should involve compromise. Your team either won or lost.”

Over the past decade, the newspaper industry continued to erode while communities were losing dailies. A 2015 report from the Brookings Institution shows that the number of US newspapers per hundred million population fell from 1,200 (in 1945) to 400 in 2014. Over that same period, circulation per capita declined from 35 percent in the mid-1940s to under 15 percent. The number of newspaper journalists has decreased from 43,000 in 1978 to 33,000 in 2015. Newspapers are still being read, but at a diminished rate. Americans read 16 minutes per day and of that 12 minutes is taken reading newspapers. (15% read digital newspapers.) 

A crucial source of the information needed to navigate the travails of daily life is being lost. In many cases dailies are the only local organization working to hold government, businesses and powerful individuals accountable. While there is a burgeoning nonprofit journalism movement that do courageous accountability journalism and deserve philanthropic support, it’s small in numbers.

While attempting to adapt. Well over half of all daily U.S. newspapers have already established Internet versions. A number of corporate consolidations have occurred.

Post the 2016 election, trust in media at historic low; television viewers believed less, but watched more. Trump played on that theme cleverly. Plus he would point out the media as being the villains, the elites, the “stenographers for the bad guys” as one commentator put it – essentially as another big institution that can’t be trusted. The modern news consumer now tunes into news that confirms his prejudices about whatever/whoever the villain of the day happens to be. However trust in traditional media is less than 50%, a historic low. The whole process has also led to binge watching and outlet addiction.

While there are great debates regarding viewer stats, Fox News seems to be the top-rated cable network in 2020, averaging 2.7 million viewers, primetime. CNN sits at 2.4 million. For the 25 to 54 demographic Fox and CNN are tied at around 725,000 and MSNBC at 414,000.

Fox News did not get behind Trump’s lie that there has been voter fraud, and that Biden is therefore not legitimate. It is ironic that it was Fox that sealed Trump’s fate by being the first to project that Biden had won Arizona on election night. The call devastated Trump’s plan to discredit the election, because Fox couldn’t as easily be dismissed as a purveyor of “fake news.” 

Addition of farther right, right-wing cable choices. Seeing the above as a betrayal, Trump and his allies have turned to other sources of information willing to spread the message they want to hear, furthering the narrative about him not being directly responsible for the mob attack on the Capitol. Those addicts of outrage are being fed even more outrageous options on the ultra conservative fringe news outlets such Newsmax TV, an outlet that’s been operating on the fringe since 1998 and One America News Network (OANN) where viewers saw a lengthy documentary-style segment called “Trump: Legacy of a Patriot” instead of Biden’s inauguration. Trump has recently praised both outlets while criticizing Fox and other networks.

Then we can go to even harder right wing websites that trumpet ideologically driven news. For example Breitbart News (some of its content has been called misogynist, xenophobic, and racist), Infowars, The Gateway Pundit, etc. which all promote conspiracy theories, and the like. 

7. Unconstrained growth and influence of social media.

From a standing start in 1991, development of the Internet has been rapid. It’s hard to believe that in 1991, less than 30 years ago, the World Wide Web opened to the public. We’ve a language that allows networking with other computers (HTML); unique addresses and connection links (URLs); browsers (that let us view web pages in our computers (Safari, Google Chrome, etc.); a software system designed to carry out web searches systematically resulting in a list of results (SERPs); aided by a data transfer protocol (http). A clever little mouse helps us. This is all handled through a free world wide system that manages standards, the World Wide Web (WWW). (Attachment #7: World Wide Web History highlights the key stages in this revolution.)

Leading to an explosion of social media in the early 21st century. It has been less than twenty years that the Internet has spawned the extraordinary phenomena of social media. What this has produced is nothing short of revolutionary. It has all happened quickly, which has made it difficult to both assess and then control the consequences. 

More and more people (particularly younger people) are increasingly obtaining their news from websites and apps, and via search engines and social media.

Key factors and consequences in what has been created:

• Enormous choice of platforms exists; freedom of expression is in theory more democratic. No longer, now, is freedom of the press limited to those who own one. The vast range of platforms covers a wide swath of interests and needs. The company names are now part of our day-to-day lexicon: Facebook (they have over two billion monthly active users, for goodness sake!), Messenger, Google, Twitter, You Tube, WhatsApp, Instagram, and so on. 

(Attachment #8: Major Social Media Platforms lists the major platforms and some of their characteristics.)

• Instant migration of ideas/information occurs geographically and demographically. Pre social media, ideas were slow to migrate; now it’s instant everywhere, everyone.

• This almost unlimited freedom of social media speech has some dark sides. Everyone can say whatever they want, to anyone. Some of what appears is simply inaccurate. What is being passed off as “news” on social media is often times misinformation or outright propaganda. Bias that might not exist in the actual pages of newspapers has a way of showing up on social media.
  
  The Internet, and social media in particular, seemed to promise a golden age of free speech, but it hasn’t turned out quite so gloriously. Andrew Coyne in the January 16 Globe & Mail astutely described what has been going on. His analysis went like this: The sort of mass delusion that has occurred in the US was inevitable. The very absence of the traditional constraints, the ones that social media “freed us from” did us in. It was supposed to be that truth and falsehood contend together in the marketplace of ideas, with a rational and informed public separating the one from the other. It required a common set of facts and some measure of good faith among the protagonists and some respect for independent public expertise, and qualified gatekeepers such as traditional media, various opinion leaders, etc. 
  
  However the revolution has had some profound impacts. It has allowed, as Coyne said, anyone to broadcast “whatever they want to the entire world, instantaneously, anonymously and at zero cost, without mediation, moderation or editing of any kind. As a result social media have drowned the public in a flood of lies, bigotry and other lunatic nonsense, available at a glance, at all times, and wherever they happen to be.”

• Social media has become quite monopolistic. Even though there is a range of choices, there are a few dominant platforms. There is less of a competitive check on capricious or arbitrary decisions about what is admissible to the public domain.

• News consumers who rely upon social media are less knowledgable and less engaged than those who use other news sources. They pay less attention to news, have lower levels of knowledge about current events and politics, are younger and have a lower level of education. (See Attachment #9:  Social Media Consumer, Recent Research for a summary of recent studies by the Pew Research Centre, Journalism and Media.)

• People get caught up in surfing or scrolling through bad news on these sites (doomscrolling or doomsurfing), even though that news is saddening, disheartening, or depressing.

• Social media platforms are surveillance empires that profile consumers to sell ads. Platforms make money by using vast amounts of data about users to determine how to target content designed to influence our behaviour (to sell ads), and how to hold our attention (so we see more ads).

• The social media companies redistribute information with little editing and regard for facts. Facebook, Google, You Tube, Twitter, Fitbit, etc. (and now ominously and with some restraints, Parler) gather and control unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and have uncountable power that accrues with that knowledge. They have declared their right to know our lives. Anything that allows them to connect more people more often is “de facto” good. This comes with consequences. Dr. Zuboff, a Harvard Business School prof, said in an article in The New York Times on January 29, “A democratic surveillance society is an existential and political impossibility. We may have democracy, or we may have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.” 
  
  As Noam Chomsky said in an interview with Matt Taibbi, “Where does Facebook get its news. They don’t have reporters. They’re getting it from the New York Times and…just putting it out in trivialized form, so that people with a ten-year old mind can handle it. It’s a very dangerous thing. They’re not doing any of the things that the media do. They don’t frame things. They don’t select. They don’t investigate…they just collect information and hand it over to kids to look at.”
  
  Dr. Zuboff said that to understand the economics of what he calls “epistemic chaos”, it’s important to know that “surveillance capitalism’s operations have no formal interest in facts. All data is welcomed as equivalent, though not all of it is equal.” Then when “an amoral Trump became president demanding the right to lie at scale…destructive economics merged with political appeasement, and everything became infinitely worse.”
  
  Applying that to the dramatic example of COVID-19 information, a number of studies have demonstrated that there has been a serious spread of disinformation through social media. An August Avaaz study exposed 82 websites spreading Covid misinformation, reaching a peak of nearly half a billion Facebook views in April. A report from the National Center for Disaster Preparedness estimated that at least 130,000 of the 217,000 deaths (at that point) could have been avoided, citing as key reasons ”the lack of mask mandate” and “misleading the public”.

• There exists an unjust division of the advertising pie. It costs real money to report the news. Facts have to be checked, resources deployed and papers printed or production arranged. However the American owned global tech giants (Google, Facebook, etc.) refuse to pay a fair price for content. In Canada for instance, these giants drain off more than 80% of all digital advertising revenue. Other content situations don’t work that way, e.g. for movie, TV and music content. 
  
  One consequence has been that many local newspapers have been closed across the country, journalists have lost their jobs, and communities have lost their voices. What is needed, for example in the newspaper business, is a fair price to be negotiated for use of the content. A campaign in Canada coordinated by News Media Canada, the group that represents almost all news organizations in the country, has been lobbying for government to examine Australia’s solution. They created a law that forces fair payment for news content.

• There are limited controls and no overseers on what appears: The debate is growing whether private companies should (or can) control public speech. Besides limited controls on what appears; those controls that do exist, remain in the hands of private corporations subject to influences of advertisers and economics.
  
  There are many that feel what is missing are gatekeepers, people with stakes in the game and reputations to uphold. The gatekeepers are needed to ensure that marginal views are pushed to the margins. What is needed is some way to enforce contracts. As Coyne said, “civil discourse cannot long be sustained if we are forever litigating basic facts such as whether Trump lost the election or whether, for goodness sake, the world is ruled by a cabal of pedophilic Satanists.” 
  
  Tom Rachman said in an Opinion piece in the January 23 Globe & Mail, “I wonder how much they really control any more. A half-billion tweets come out daily. It’s folly to imagine moderators sifting through those, evaluating which are hate speech, which are sarcasm. Supposedly, the answer is to use artificial intelligence. But this would mean training machines on the principles of verbal harm, balance and wit. Humans have yet to agree on any of these.” 
  
  A key problem is the sheer scale of it all. Facebook handles more than 100 billion transactions per day. Platforms use either vast teams of content moderators, or highly imperfect artificial intelligence.

• Little consistency regarding content control exists amongst various platforms. Does there exist the concept of “clean” news, as in “clean” air? Every social-media platform has largely ad-hoc content moderation policies and systems, applying them differently to each of their billions of global users. Take Facebook: it’s far from obvious how Trump’s posts were worse than the previous ones. On the other hand, Parler, has become home to some of the more toxic elements of US politics, including the organizers of the Stop the Steal conspiracy theory and the violent insurrection at the Capitol. In response, Google and Apple have banned new Parler downloads from their app stores and Amazon AWS kicked Parler off their servers entirely. Gab is another similar platform.
  
  The director of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill, Taylor Owen, said in an Globe & Mail Opinion piece, “This de-platforming of a platform, however justified, demonstrates the consequences of market concentration: Companies that own the infrastructure can make unilateral decisions about the companies that use it, and in so doing radically shape the nature of political and economic activity.”

• Pressures are mounting for regulating and/or breaking up these platforms. With data traded for ad revenue, it’s becoming a type of new currency. One could ask too, whether or not these online services are really “free”. As lawyer Dany Assaf asked in a December 29 Globe & Mail article, ”Are increasing demands for our data (and the corollary of less privacy) really just the equivalent of modern-day price increases?” Internet-based services, advertising and information exchange are driving the thirst for more and more data. There is a strong argument being made that the relationship between data collection, control, and its distribution and sale should be the priority of modern competition law.

• Podcasts are an overlooked area of content control. Podcasts full of hatred and incitement to violence exist; they should not be treated any differently than any other content.

• Social media platforms are being used to trap dissidents in authoritarian societies. One final point about social media is an ironic one. At first these networks connected and empowered dissidents in authoritarian societies. But now they can trap them. Anyone with a smart phone or a laptop can be tracked using surveillance software and malware to monitor and harass. Some even have “backdoor access” to the platforms. China is believed to exercise control over WeChat, a lifeline for Chinese abroad. Social media can now be monitored to hear every unencrypted and possibly seditious word.

This is all exacerbated by the following.

8. A serious use and abuse of our screens exists.

40% of the population suffers from some form of Internet-based addiction. Beyond the Internet, 46% of people say they couldn’t bear to live without their smartphones. People are spending more time on their digital devices than sleeping. One recent survey found that kids spend an average of 5 to 7 hours in front of their screens each day. Average mobile usage (which includes both smartphones and tablets) has increased from 0.3 hours per day in 2008 to 3.3 hours a day in 2017. According to Nielsen’s latest Total Audience report, Americans aged 18 and older spend roughly ten and a half hours a day watching TV, listening to the radio or using their smartphones and other electronic devices. 

70% of office emails are read within six seconds of arriving; this is very disruptive as it takes up to 25 minutes to become immersed in an interrupted act.

This has been exacerbated by the pandemic. Researchers at the University of Western Ontario found that last spring elementary school-age children’s screen time more than doubled, from an average of 2.6 hours to 5.8 hours a day, not including time spent doing schoolwork. Only 39% of children and youth in Canada meet the national physical activity guidelines of 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity a day.

(To review some key stats on screen addiction see Attachment #10:  Addictive Technology: Internet/Cell/TV. They are rather alarming.)

9. The power of confirmation bias. 

This is essentially the search for things that support our beliefs and desires. Beliefs fulfill an emotional function; they give one a safer feeling and allow one to bond with others in special groups that “know the truth”.  Distrust of the regular media doesn’t help, so they turn to other sources, a friend say, who provides them a special website. This is compounded by the fact that there is so much misinformation out there that we can find support for virtually any belief, no matter how preposterous.

There may be a time when this bubble will burst, that moment of cognitive dissonance when the alternative reality that Trump supporters and conspiracy theory believers find out that what they believe has feet deep in clay. Will that be dangerous, or enlightening? 

10. Over simplification of content, mixed with a reduction in literacy, is reducing comprehension and communications skills.

Complex issues are being assessed and resolved with too little or too simplified information. Roughly six in 10 people acknowledge that they have done nothing more than read news headlines in the past week (and this is from a six year old Washington Post survey). The more complex an issue, the less likely it is to break through with a public that really consumes news via headlines and not much else. (This is why we receive very simple messaging – it is almost always the most effective.)

People are not really reading the full reports; the social media recap seems to be good enough. Almost three-quarters of users of Facebook use it as a way to get news (71% of Twitter and 62% of Reddit users).

There is research to indicate that texting is resulting in children being poorer communicators.

A compounding problem is one of reading literacy. According to a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, half of US adults can’t read a book written at the 8th-grade level. Reading in general is declining. Kids are abandoning books as they age. Only 63 percent of Americans say they’ve read a traditional print book in the past year. Other data sources have not shown a huge jump to digital books.

11. Apathy, or “how many citizens really give a shit”.

This can explain a lot. The number of people who actually voted in the 2020 election amounted to around 160 million voters. This amounts to around two thirds of the eligible voters of 239 million. This was higher than normal, likely due to the intense division and the “get out the voters” efforts by both parties.

This really means that, even with all of the hype, and media, including social media, a third of the country chose to ignore their right as a free citizen to exercise their franchise. That’s a lot of disinterested and uninvolved people.

Probably it really means that (sorry to all you political wonks) choice of who runs the country does not appear to affect a lot of people in any significant way. Day to day life (raising a family, working, leisure activities, living arrangements) all chug along just fine really without being bothered by what appears to be (as they see from their friends who are really wrapped up politically) a very bothersome activity. 

This also helps explain to me the answer I keep reading about when reporters try and read the tea leaves of voter intentions. Many of them reply “fuck everything” or “I’ll vote for anyone who isn’t a politician” or “If I choose to vote, I’ll vote to upset the status quo” (perfect Trump voters BTW). The problem with this attitude is the reality that a democracy can be demolished by the hard core who are action-focussed: the average German citizen who sat back and let Hitler rant; the Russian and Chinese communist party members who caused untold death in the Gulags and the Great Leap Forwards; the Japanese who slaughtered in Asia in the early 1930s; the Khemer Rouge rule in Cambodia; Islamic militants that believe in beheadings, suicide attacks (9/11, ISIS, Rwanda, Serbia, Somalia, etc., etc.), and all the other examples of fanatics driving the system and rolling over the disinterested and uncommitted.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

12. What actions can be taken to change the above?

Regarding race: It would be presumptuous to make specific recommendations regarding an issue that has plagued the US for almost 245 years. One attempt might start with this fundamental: all humans are closely related. The April 2018 issue of National Geographic should be in every school for its issue on race. Two full pages make a dramatic point. On the left is a chimpanzee and on the right a young, white child. The headline reads “The DNA profiles of these two are nearly 99 percent the same”. The subtext says ”the genes of any two humans … are even more alike.” 

Genetic research over the past few decades has revealed this truth: all humans are closely related.. The science has also revealed another deep truth: “In a very real sense, all people alive today are Africans”. Our species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa. The genetics tell us that all non-Africans today are descended from a few thousand humans who left Africa maybe 60,000 years ago. It gets more complicated but this should be enough to begin an adult conversation on race. Many won’t like this reality, but everyone should acknowledge it.

So the starting point is education. Is there any reason why these facts can’t be in the teaching notes of every educator?

Regarding the military focus and gun obsession: some minor gun law changes are in the works at the state level (where this is controlled); other than that, does anyone really see America moving away from its might-is-right and Second Amendment fixation?

Regarding the great political divide: This two party system encourages great polarity. A third party may help provide some political nuance. The US winner-take-all system, not being proportional representation, accentuates the polarity. While support for a viable third party remains just above 60%, over the years third party attempts have failed, although some of their platforms have been adopted.

Regarding Trump himself: before the February 6th Senate verdict on Trump it was my opinion that he must be held accountable for the January 6 attacks on the seat of US government. I didn’t care if he got prevented from running for office again; I’d let the electorate judge that in the future. However even partial justice is better than none, and the 57 to 43 pro-impeachment vote, while not to the two-thirds required, is still censure. It will also be hard for him to shake off the condemnation he received from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who stated that Trump was “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events “ even though it smacked of terrible political fence-striding. 

But it’s the long term that’s important, for without accountability it will be harder to place what must become a necessary marker between a dark past and a better future. Can authentic healing begin without this happening?

Regarding the concerns surrounding the issue of conspiracy theories and extremists groups: To make me feel better I can quote Mathew Henry who said, “None so deaf as those that will not hear. None so blind as those that will not see.” 

There is also one common-sense rule for dealing with extreme positions – and that’s not arguing back. This only solidifies positions. Listening, while difficult, is generally more disarming. Rhetorical techniques of ad hominem or reification attacks and ad baculum threats of force, and careless hyperbole cut us out of the chance of living well with those who are different from us. Is this not again the role of education – critical thinking?

Regarding truth in media and the cable TV polarization: perhaps the Fairness Doctrine introduced many years ago but vetoed by Regan in 1987, when the Democrats attempted to codify the doctrine into federal law, should be dusted off and given fresh life and expanded beyond broadcast media. Will this be seen as violating First Amendment rights, and in particular protecting free speech and press?

Regarding the issue of the American owned global tech giants refusing to pay for content: a  fair price needs to be negotiated. Should this be the Australian solution that forces fair payment for news content or some other possibility?

Regarding controls over social media platforms: democratic governments must now lead difficult conversations: about what speech should be allowed online, about implementing accountability and transparency mechanisms for the data-driven economy, and about the necessity of competition in what has become an oligarchic industry. 

Some sort of regulating body or commission may be the best way through this. In Canada, government rules are coming that will require social media companies to take down illegal or hateful content. It will likely be done by creation of a federal regulator to oversee how platform companies moderate content on their sites. Also some sort of tribunal may be created to which Canadians can bring concerns over individual social-media posts.

The debate will engage both sides of the dilemma. A resolution needs to be found regarding who makes these freedom-of-speech calls, defining hate speech or the definition of misinformation. Should it be government regulation or the social-media platforms themselves?

So, I have very few solutions. Ah well. Voltaire said, “Judge a man by his questions, not by his answers”.

OK, I’m finished

One problem with writing today is attention span. Most people want their information in very short sound bites, usually summaries available on news aggregate sites. The fact that you have read this means that you have the interest and set aside the time to explore the issues I’ve been exploring. 

On this one, I would solicit suggestions for solutions, or anything else!