For sure some non digital media examples on the left too but nothing even close to that scale.

I do agree social media plays a big role in spreading alternate reality craziness on both sides, but political polarization won't go anywhere imho.

I'm spending a lot more of my time looking at community behaviors online, moderation and moderation evolution, and any papers which cover this area.

This stuff is virulent.

I think we might be headed into a dead cat bounce period in the near future - a lot of people have become aware of this now, and the idea is obviously disseminating a lot more.

(3-4 years ago, I never saw this idea summarized and shared in a single piece, vs multiple times in the last 3 months.)

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The fundamental motor, the gameplay loop which drives this is the degradation and competition in the media sector.

Competition for ads, consolidation, along with management targets would force magazines/papers to move towards language which would grab a larger audience and more attention.

And then you have the partisan right wing groups, created because they kept saying that the entire media is a liberal conspiracy.

The discussions on HN dont go deep enough to look at the antecedents of the current imbroglio.

Human brains are weak to a variety of manipulations. Media manipulations are one of the oldest, and have been going on for ever.

The 24/7 news cycle preceded the net and created the exact same issues.

Right now what we have added is mobile internet which means people can access the material all the time, and we've added algorithmic creation of inciteful content.

We've gone to the industrial complex era of outrage creation.

“Classic Media” today, is busy pushing the narratives of whacky billionaires/corporations as a general undercurrent.

1) Work in the office is better than remote.

2) National healthcare can’t work in the US, only in every other industrialized nation.

3) wealthy people are geniuses & you should read the books they read and listen to them about everything.

4) progressives are evil, conservatives are evil.

5) Ignore the military industrial complex, keep feeding the military budget.

6) homelessness can’t be solved.

7) Support the Troops! But once they are veterans ignore them to the bureaucracy of the hellhole of veterans affairs.

8) Authoritarianism in government is alarming but there is nothing to be done.

The last one, I'd argue isn't new but the internet's ability to provide direct-from-the-source accounts of events and access to opposition sources allows the media to be fact checked in real time (or at least to notice incongruities with other stories). I'd be surprised if the situation is at all new. In fact, I'd argue that the media are the root cause of the previous three phenomenon you describe.

Fake news, bots and manipulation by foreign governments are things I see all sides complain about on a daily basis.

It is possible that social media has intensified this problem. Perhaps more cranks can crank harder together now than before or perhaps not. But "just look at all the people on Facebook" isn't material comparative evidence.

In other words, no, what you claim doesn't seem axiomatic at all.

The internet is destroying existing power structures, and giving control to alternative media sources/platforms/whatever that people are starting to trust more than the 'mainstream' ones.

So all the hand wringing and fake news paranoia and what not feels like a desparate, last ditch attempt by those who did well before to try and cram the internet/social media genie back into the bottle before they're made irrelevant.

Does this potentially lead to authoritarianism and what not? Possibly, but the answer isn't to try and shut down freedom of speeech/independent media/any thought outside of an ever narrowing acceptable boundary, but to ask why these views are on the rise and deal with the real causes.

Echo chambers, doomscrolling, hype cycles, misinformation, AI/Photoshop fakes, state level disinformation warfare, propaganda, and good old advertising are simply overwhelming people.

The forthcoming fake flood of AI is the next possible breaking point.

I think some people are starting to reject media, and I think the drumbeat is increasing.

The snake is eating itself. What is most dangerous about the current situation is now how easy it is to pull the natural strings of the western world order. Democracy. The ballot referendum. How you "vote" with your dollar. All of these things could always have been tightly influenced and controlled, but this was done more or less through an indirect incentive structure that favored existing large investment.

Now, anything is able to use these social media tools to run around existing capital structure and get whatever message out to voters and consumers directly. What captures the consciousness now isn't necessarily a consensus of an economies major investors, but simply whatever is able to abuse the viral phenomenon the best at the time and in the context.

Coupled with the ease of generating high quality propaganda of any shape or form through various publicly released tools, we are in for interesting times, for sure.

It was a major concern during the Constitutional Convention that:

> In Massts. it had been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men.

What's different is we're coming out of a time when a very small class of people had near-total functional control (or so they thought) over mainstream media, so there were huge swaths of people they really had no experience of. Now these people are @ing them on Twitter. And seeing these people out there makes them very, very uncomfortable.

The arguments you're making are not new arguments. They're the exact same arguments made by authoritarian regimes for millenia. From the article:

> In a March meeting, Laura Dehmlow, an FBI official, warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government.

The problem is dissent. Much of the government is run and controlled by a class of people whose beliefs and values are becoming increasingly divorced from other segments of the population. And rather than re-adjusting their policies and goals in line with a democratic consensus, they want to stay their course and tighten control of speech and even thought in the name of social order and harmony. None of this is new at all.

200 years ago, everyone had about the same power to reach people. Oh, sure, it was easier the richer you were, but the difference was not dramatic and wealth inequality was not as dramatic a factor. Then in the 20th to early 21st centuries, broadcast television and media consolidation put a lot of one-way power into the hands of a very small set of hands. Now everyone is on the same playing field once again.