It didn't start after Trump's election. It started with the "cancel culture" thing a couple of years before that and pressure on companies to participate in the war on crimethink.

I tend to think that it contributed to Trump's election, because it has the effect of creating massive polarization.

You can't segregate sites by viewpoint and thought filter everything in favor of one side or the other and expect it not to devolve into extremist conflict.

But the people doing this didn't want to admit that they caused the problem to begin with, so instead they double down.

The modern polarization of the media began in the 1990s with Newt Gingrich...with help from his patron Rupert Murdoch, an ultra-conservative Australian who owned television stations, tabloids, and newspapers in the US, Australia, and the UK.

Before them, politics was still very cutthroat but not polarized along party lines.

True - but something happened in the 2010's when Big Tech started taking sides in a way it hadn't before. I cannot picture Google doing this when it was still Google.

> The modern polarization of the media began in the 1990s with Newt Gingrich...with help from his patron Rupert Murdoch, an ultra-conservative Australian who owned television stations, tabloids, and newspapers in the US, Australia, and the UK.

That was certainly a thing that happened, but as far as I know Rupert Murdoch never got Gore Vidal blacklisted by book publishers or whatever.

It's one thing to say your piece, something else to stop the other guy saying theirs.

This- among side the cable news cycle effect were the genesis of today’s virus.

Have to say — Murdoch has been remarkably influential as a massive negative impact on humanity

I could say the same about disney, their ownership of certain networks and their ability to influence politica to single handledly redefine trademark laws on behalf of the US government

Talk about impact.

Truth is in the eye of the beholder

It seems very similar to McCarthyism and the anti-communist messages from the late '40s and early '50s like the "loyalty review boards", just with wider media available in the modern world. McCarthyism also adopted similar conspiracy theories concerning vaccinations, mental health care, and fluoridation.

There were sweeping purges on Twitter after the elections. The official story was that these were 'bots' or 'trolls', but lots of good accounts got permanently deleted. It happened two or three times as I recall. You'd wake up and see that your follower count had mysteriously plunged overnight indicating another crop of bannings.