The Social Media Bubbles Are Not Converting People Into True Voters

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Research found that fewer than half of americans visited a fake news web site in the weeks before the 20 sixteenth election. Trump supporters were more than twice as likely as hiliary clinton supporters to visit untrustworthy sihts. Other research found that conservatives were more exposed to conspiracy theories and fake news and were more likely to believe them.

Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.

In episode 190, Michael Shermer speaks with Jonathan Rauch as he reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge” — our social system for turning disagreement into truth. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.