Who Caused the Insurrection?
America has endured political demagogues before. Joe McCarthy and George Wallace come to mind. But America never had a violent insurrection on the Nation’s Capitol. We need to acknowledge that we are experiencing not just a political crisis, but a communication crisis. There is only one reason why 50 million American’s believed Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen. We have a media system that willingly promulgates falsehood in pursuit of profit.
Fox News, Newsmax and OAN are of course responsible. But the real blame must sit with Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. As Tim Berners-Lee wrote, “They learned that untruth was more clickable than truth.” Consider the fact that until this week Twitter, Facebook and YouTube allowed Q Anon to say to 100 million people that “there’s a liberal cabal of paedophiles based in Hollywood and Washington that seeks eternal life by harvesting children’s blood, and that Trump is secretly at war with them and will soon launch a crackdown that puts them into Guantanamo.” The eight people pictured above have been responible for the greatest mass delusion in history, and not one of them has suffered a moments sleep for what they did to our country and our democracy.
It doesn’t have to be this way. As the Washington Post reported,
Something surprising happened recently on Lou Dobbs’s top-rated show on the…
