Many disturbing statistics came to mind when I watched Trustworthy: All Voices Heard, a new documentary about how distrust in the media, exacerbated by rampant misinformation and disinformation on social media, can erode our faith in democracy:

More than two-thirds of all Americans see a serious threat to our democracy.

Half of all Americans think civil war will break out in the United States in the coming years.

And no surprise that two-thirds of Americans feel exhausted by the news they’re getting today.

We are 100% the Divided States of America, says Kevin Geffers Sr., a Texas painter interviewed by

Stephany

Zamora, a new filmmaker so upset by the events of January 6 that she loaded a bus with her crew and traveled more than 5,000 miles across the country to interview journalists, media experts and citizens. Was it possible, she asked, for people on opposite sides of the political spectrum to find common ground when we can’t agree on what’s true?

The American people are confused and frustrated, former Fox News anchor Laurie Dhue tells the filmmaker.

Not knowing the truth is terribly difficult for our democracy, it terrifies me immensely, says Columbia University journalism professor and historian Andie Tucher.

We also ran into MIT management professor Sinan Aral, who wrote The Hype Machine, a 2020 book about the dangers and promises of social media.

in his book

Aral, who has been studying social networks for 20 years, made three predictions

in the book: t

that fake news would catalyze political violence, that anti-vaxx misinformation could disrupt vaccine rollouts, and that social media had the power to influence stock markets. Everything of

threes

came out, and it didn’t take long.

The January 6 riot was a direct result of the ghastly lie that the Democrats stole the 2020 election from former President Trump.

A major in January 2021

vaccine vaccination

Efforts at Dodger Stadium were interrupted when anti-vaxx protesters shut it down for nearly an hour.

Also in January 2021, a Reddit-driven effort to revive the stock price of struggling video game retailer GameStop resulted in the stock rising 1000% in two weeks.

Social media is rewriting humanity’s central nervous system by algorithmically connecting, informing, exhorting, persuading, mobilizing and yes, entertaining us, Aral writes in a new foreword

to “The Hype Machine.”

It has been doing so for years, with clear, measurable and profound implications for our democracies, our economies and our public health. And it’s time we wake up to these realities.

Where, oh, where’s Walter Cronkite when you need him?

I’m kidding.

Trustworthy as Uncle Walter was, he represents a world long gone. That was a world where Americans got their news from the three major television networks, AM radio, and their local newspapers. There was no cable news, no Google, no Facebook, no TikTok, no Twitter

/X

. No podcasts. There was no online Russian interference in our presidential elections, no deep fakes, no AI.

But even before all those digital distractions and trickery, I dare say we’ve always been a divided country. Division is, in a sense, the essence of democracy.

But what has become so disturbing at this point is the cynical and widespread manipulation of those divisions using outright lies. The very truth, which we used to be able to agree on, has been undermined.

From 2016 to 2021, according to the nun

–

partisan Pew Research Center, the percentage of Americans who have a lot or some faith in national news fell from 76% to 58%.

Most of the decline, Pew reports, has come from Republicans or those leaning Republican.

Big surprise there. fear.

Trump was elected in 2016 and started (or rather, continued) spouting lies at the speed of a

running f

Irish pants. He popularized the phrase fake news to describe any information with which he disagreed. Years earlier, he spread racist lies about former President Obama’s hometown. Once in office, his first major official was about the size of his inauguration crowd. He lied about global climate change and called it a Chinese hoax. He lied about the danger of the coronavirus and undermined his administration’s health experts. His most caustic lie was that he won the 2020 presidential election, something he and his allies repeated so often that a shocking proportion of Republicans actually believe it, and hundreds

his supporters them

acted on it on January 6, 2021.

Of course, social media has played a huge part in spreading Trump’s falsehoods and inciting his believers. (And yes, of course the Democrats lie, but not on a scale comparable to the GOP under Trump.)

We’ve known for a long time, as Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute tells Zamora

in the documentary,

that Facebook put a disproportionate emphasis on anger in its algorithm. As a result, stories that made you angry were more likely to appear on your Facebook feed.”

And we know that anger breeds political commitment. We see successful anger-driven engagement at every political level, from conservative outrage over who uses which toilets to liberal outrage over abortion bans.

Anger in itself is not a problem. Anger drove the

C

angry

right

eight movement, the Black Lives Matter movement. Anger drove the Vietnam-era anti-war movement. Anger drove the second wave of feminism and #MeToo. Justified anger is a good thing.

The problem with our present moment is not that we are more divided than ever;

it’s not that we get angry about important things.

It’s that so much of our division stems from lies that spread unchecked on social media.

A poignant moment from “Trustworthy” has stayed with me. MSNBC journalist Ali Velshi says he really thought so

the

advent of social media would mean no one would be able to lie anymore because they would never get away with it.

“Trustworthy” notes that there are many efforts to increase social media literacy and improve critical thinking skills in hopes of reducing polarization. YouTube, Facebook et al have been taking baby steps to curb the spread of disinformation, especially important now that the 2024 presidential campaign is in full swing and the Republican frontrunner is quintupling with its 2020 lies.

CNN announced it would stop overhyping stories as “breaking news.” A company called Ground News collects news from a variety of sources labeled “left,” “right,” and “center.” Poynter founded the Teen Fact-Checking Network, a virtual newsroom of middle and high school students who use social media to debunk viral misinformation.

“Critical thinking,” Paula Madison, former executive director of NBCUniversal, tells Zamora. “Without it, you’re a sheep.”

@robinkabcarian