The Gossip Trap

By portraying our opponents as beyond persuasion, social media sorts us into ever more hostile tribes, then rewards us, with likes and shares, for the most hyperbolic denunciations of the other side, fuelling a vicious cycle that makes sane debate impossible. We mustn’t let Silicon Valley off the hook, but we should be honest: much of the time... See more

We tend to think of what we see cascading across the network — the substance, the specific claims — as the problem. Much of it is old phenomena manifesting in new ways: rumors, harassment mobs, disinformation, propaganda. But it carries new consequences, in large part because of the size and speed of networks across which it moves. In the 1910s, a

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