Add my "what went wrong" take to the pile [View all]

[EarlG]

Although you might find this one a bit different than the others.

In my opinion, this election established that the truth is now fully optional, and the voting public is mostly trapped inside algorithmic information bubbles. They don't know who to trust, so they find news sources that align with their existing prejudices, and then believe those sources to the exclusion of everything else.

In the years leading up to this past election, millions of online Americans were algorithmically microtargeted and bombarded with messages that were directly attuned to their specific fears. This messaging could be subtle or highly explicit -- whatever the algorithms understood would work best. Much of the time this manifested as fear of "the other" (immigrants, trans people, etc.) People absorbed the message that Donald Trump would "solve" these "problems," and they tuned out any information that made them uncomfortable with re-electing him.

There's a reason why some people who voted for Trump said they thought he would preserve a woman's right to choose. There's a reason why many of the same people who voted for a constitutional right to an abortion in Florida immediately turned around and voted for the person who overturned Roe vs. Wade. There's also a reason why Elon Musk bought Twitter and doesn't care how much money he lost.

The polls shifted around some when we introduced a new candidate, because it temporarily broke through the information bubbles. But overall, trends have been flat for a long time -- leading up to this election, people's opinions were already baked in, and that is because people no longer expose themselves to information that might counter what they already believe.

We're all sitting around talking about which demographic group did what and whether or not some change would have made a difference over the past few months, but I think that's missing the point to a large degree. Traditional campaigning is still important, but this election may show that it is no longer enough, on its own, to overcome misinformation peddled on an industrial scale.

We do not currently, and we likely will not ever, have the infrastructure to combat this.

So now what? I'm not sure. But it seems that what does break through people's information bubbles is some kind of massive change, a big shocking event -- like the election that just happened, for example. It may give us a chance to reset the playing field.

Even though he was elected, Trump is still not popular, and depending on what happens next, it's possible that buyer's remorse might set in for quite a lot of people (I base this on what happened in Britain after people realized what voting for Brexit actually meant). If that happens, we need to help hammer home that message and bake it in before the mid-terms.