Re:The Progressive Purge Begins: Tech’s stampede will lead t...
by nzmsv on Monday January 11, 2021 @05:19PM
(#25738277)
People tend to fall for conspiracy theories and charlatans when they are desperate. We call a large swath of the country "flyover states". These people feel like what they are doing is the only way to make themselves heard. We respond by doing more to silence them. This is not going to end well.
The media and political environment has not been serving its function of properly informing citizens so that they can make informed voting choices, and so you have people trying to overthrow the government based on lies.
Now, not everything people believed in the pre-internet media environment was factual either, but there was rough agreement as to consensus reality. Even in the last contested election, the 2000 one, people roughly agreed on the basic facts (butterfly ballots, hanging chads, etc), even if they didn't agree on what should be done about it.
I don't have a solution for this problem, but it is a very serious one.