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Abstract: Recent years have seen a marked shift in global attitudes toward social media platforms. In 2011, Facebook was hailed as a platform that would bring democracy to the world, Google was breaking new ground in convenience and access to information, and the protests taking place in Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and many other countries were spurred in part by bloggers and social media commentators who used the platforms to galvanize people and encourage them to take to the streets. But, by 2017, we had learned that although the Internet transformed protest, it has not much improved democracy. Moreover, we learned again the lesson that the post-Cold War democracies had apparently forgotten: that misinformation and propaganda are powerful, and that repeating "big lies" can persuade susceptible people of nonsensical and dangerous ideas. This essay will examine the various sources and forms of disinformation that are most prevalent in today's political and media environment, the implications of this new reality on democracy, and the ways in which government can and must respond.
2016 was the year that public opinion turned against social media and big tech companies. In 2011, Facebook was hailed as a platform that would bring democracy to the world. We were grateful to Google. The protests in Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and many other countries were spurred in part by bloggers and social media commentators who used social media to galvanize people and encourage them to take to the streets.
By 2017, we had learned that although the Internet had transformed protest, it has not much improved democracy. Moreover, we learned again a lesson that the post-Cold War democracies had apparently forgotten: that misinformation and propaganda are powerful and that repeating "big lies" can persuade susceptible people of all kinds of nonsensical and dangerous ideas. This should not have been a surprise, but critic Norah Ephron once said that "people have a shocking capacity to be surprised by the same things over and over again." The question now is what to do. Regulation of social media platforms comes up repeatedly, but of what kind is less clear.
Of course, it was not all boundless optimism in 2011. Even before the Arab Spring, critics like Evgeny Morozov had warned that the Internet could...