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I've been dismissing the Election Theft Hypothesis, but lately I've been thinking more about it...
What happens when Trump legitimately wins but your feed tells you, "he didn't really win. He's trying to steal it and you can't let this happen!" You will try to steal the election under the pretense that they're stealing it.
And what happens when Trump legitimately loses but your feed tells you, "he didn't really lose. They hate him so much that they're trying to steal it and you can't let that happen!" Under the pretense of self-defense you will actually be the attacker.
@JonHaidt doesn't think social media is compatible with Democracy and I tend to trust the guy. We can't live in different social worlds filled with our own flavor of misinformation and still expect elections to facilitate peaceful transfers of power...
Maybe we'll get lucky in 2020 but this seems like an inevitability. For several years now it's been happening with everything important..
Covid, BLM, and everything Trump does we've built and live in two separate fictions where falsehoods are okay as long as they're aimed in the right direction. We can't keep living like this.
Either people have got to become more skeptical because we learn to shame bullshit even when it's aimed at the enemy, or we need to deeply revise our feeds - let in more light and less heat.
And let me be clear, it's not just them. It's you and me. It's not just along a left-right political spectrum, it's across many different dimensions on many different issues.
On every corner of every side on every team, there is an ocean of nonsense surrounding it. It's up to you whether you're going to let your ideology make you a sucker, or if you're going to be a good skeptic, and reject that special flavor of bullshit that tastes so good to you.
