an informational landscape dominated by self-selection bias, where those who produce exciting lies or loyal deflections are directly rewarded by clicks and cash.

These shifts have given rise to an alarming paradox: more information is readily available than was previously imaginable in human history, and yet vast numbers of people now understand the world exclusively through what they see on the internet, a funhouse mirror that distorts all it reflects. And that paradox is killing democracy.

The internet—followed by the rise of social media and its constellation of information influencers—is the first and only technological revolution that fundamentally altered humanity’s relationship with information. For the first time, the world came to understand itself not through few-to-many communication but through many-to-many communication.

T... See more