Death of an American Consensus
By Jacqueline Rose Huebner
Over the course of the past week, I found myself unusually anxious about our current political atmosphere, which was then compounded by the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. As such, the excerpt from Marantz’s Antisocial really resonated with me. His analysis of how America has devolved from a general consensus into a country of varying radical and divisive political factions had me taking a hard look at how social media has played a part in this evolution. Ultimately, I think it comes down to the point he made that the disrupters take a passive stance where the old gatekeepers of traditional media did not. It seems in contrast to my previous journal entry to now praise the news media for their filtering of information after being in such agreement with Saunders piece, but I think I can find truth in both.
Just today on the news, they played a story about a firefighter debunking a TikTok video that was gaining attention about how the fires along the West Coast were part of a larger conspiracy. The user provided evidence such as a map that showed the fires stopping along the Canadian border. This proved laughably ridiculous as the firefighter pointed out that the map shown was from a strictly US database. As much as traditional media may bend the truth to fit their political narrative, or exaggerate for the sake of the story, they could never get away with publishing a deepfake video as a real piece of media or sharing the pro-Nazi propaganda that seems to proliferate freely on social media. Even though news outlets have their faults, the good ones recognize the responsibility that comes with a national broadcast and large audience. Although there are still the cries of “fake news” and some pieces could certainly use a bit of fact-checking, the misinformation in news is nowhere near the scale that it is on social media.
Marantz, like several writers before, used the example of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, and it infuriates me to think of how passive Zuckerberg is in the face of his platform being such a breeding ground for misinformation and radical, violent ideas. He shrugs his responsibility in these matters, and other social media platforms follow suit, and we end up with a deepfake of Bill Gates trending on nearly everyone’s feed, a ludicrous article about how COVID-19 is a conspiracy by the government being shared hundreds of times, and radical racist trolls posting violent threats in the comments sections. Maybe this is extreme, but it seems that extreme is becoming the norm in America as platforms allow increasingly divisive, violent, and often false content to spread across their sites uninhibited, at a scale that no traditional media has ever offered before. I can acknowledge the argument for free speech that is used to protect the neo-Nazi and alt-right media, but I’m appalled that social media platforms can’t even commit to ridding their sites of misinformation and false media whose sole goal is to present their outrageous claims and ideas as fact in a quest to divide and conquer the mind of the American public. Often, one Google search immediately brings up a report from an actual news outlet clarifying that the content is false, but for users solely on Facebook who do not take the initiative to fact check, the damage is already done, and the post is well on its way to their hundred followers, who share it to their hundred followers, and so on and so forth. So, I write all this as a call to the moderators of social media platforms, demanding that something be done about the spread of misinformation on their sites that is largely responsible for the obliteration of the general American consensus.