The Democratization of Information Production is Killing Democracy

The way we receive information about our world is unlike any previous generations of humanity. Paradoxically, it's destroying democracy—and Trump's America is the main canary in the coal mine.

Image courtesy visuals from Unsplash.

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For the last two decades, the world has become steadily less democratic, with authoritarian populists ascendant. Electorates aren’t just rejecting politicians, but the system itself. Voters are handing power to despotic firebrands who openly vow to take a sledgehammer to the pillars of democratic governance—to purge civil servants and replace them with cronies, to politicize the rule of law by shielding their allies while prosecuting their enemies on bogus charges, to attack the press and erode the constraints on executive power.

Why is this happening so consistently, even in countries that previously were bastions of democratic good governance?

I: Bad People or Bad Information?

In the United States, voters express plenty of reasons to be angry: rising costs, surging immigration, poor public services, a maddening health care system, grotesque inequality, and unaccountable power centers that seem to be drifting further and further out of reach.

But a puzzle remains as to why roughly half the country’s voters believe that Donald Trump is fit to solve those problems—despite being a serial liar, convicted of 34 felonies, who tried to seize power illegally and has been found liable for sexual assault and banned from doing business in New York due to fraud. In his first nine days in office, his incompetence even shut down Medicaid, which provides health care for a fifth of the population.

Some observers may be tempted to write off half the country’s population as bigots, zealots, and authoritarians, for whom “the cruelty is the point.” We might call that the “Bad People” hypothesis—the notion that a depressingly large subsection of the population was happy to re-elect an authoritarian criminal while sacrificing democracy and decency, so long as the price of eggs goes down or the price of their stock portfolios goes up.

But that explanation, which undoubtedly applies to some of Trump’s base, isn’t just unsatisfying but implausible, in that it writes off seventy-seven million Americans as lost causes to be condemned.

A more likely, rival theory is the “Bad Information” hypothesis. The greatest irony of the 21st century is that global democracy is decaying partly because of the democratization of information production.

Through the long stretch of human history, there have been a series of information revolutions: the printing press, newspapers, the telegraph, the radio, and television. Each technological breakthrough shared a common feature: they expanded the number of people who could consume information, while keeping the production of information in the hands of a comparatively small number of people. Only the rich had printing presses; newspaper barons decided what was fit to print; television executives framed our world.

The internet—followed by the rise of social media and its constellation of information influencers—is the first and only technological revolution that fundamentally altered humanity’s relationship with information. For the first time, the world came to understand itself not through few-to-many communication but through many-to-many communication.

The barriers to information production crumbled; information borders disappeared. With an affordable device and an internet connection, anybody could hope to influence how people halfway around the world thought about global events—no training, experience, or allegiance to the truth required.

The initial reception of this profound shift was naïve. Surely the democratization of anything would bolster democracy. In 2009, with social media still in its relative infancy, a protest movement known as the Green Wave crested in Iran and was hailed as a “Twitter Revolution,” because young activists used the social media platform to organize and spread their message globally, evading government censors. Iran’s movement was crushed, but others sprang up around the Middle East, rekindling hope that social media would empower citizens and topple authoritarian governments that could no longer control information flows. In democracies, “citizen journalism” promised to disrupt the power of elite media institutions.

A decade and a half later, authoritarian regimes use the internet as a tool of control. The app formerly known as Twitter is in the hands of a conspiracy theory peddling billionaire who dabbles in Nazi salutes while amplifying bigots and zealots. And democracies are collapsing, as electorates are deluged with informational sludge—lies, half-truths, and conspiracy theories that foster mass delusion.

These shifts have given rise to an alarming paradox: more information is readily available than was previously imaginable in human history, and yet vast numbers of people now understand the world exclusively through what they see on the internet, a funhouse mirror that distorts all it reflects. And that paradox is killing democracy.

II: Three Machines for Impossible Beliefs

America’s Trump Era is the most advanced version of that paradox—in which the story of democratic decay can only be told by understanding broken information pipelines. In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the Queen boasts to Alice that “sometimes, I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Log on to X these days, and you’ll easily make it to seven before draining the coffee.

Democracy is sometimes defined as a system of government based on the “informed consent of the governed.” In other words, what makes democracies different from authoritarian regimes is that citizens can freely access accurate information about what the government is doing—and then decide whether to keep that government in power or kick it out of office.

This conception of democracy requires two aspects of democratic governance to function in tandem if the system is to survive: government accountability and the availability of accurate information. When either feature—or the link between them—breaks down, democracy’s collapse becomes unavoidable.

Consider, for example, the following thought experiment. Imagine that North Korea—which has arguably the most closed-off, dictatorial government on the planet—magically became a democracy overnight. On the day of its transformation, it announced its intention to protect freedoms of speech and the press, and it organized a genuinely free and fair election, complete with a choice of different politicians. Would that election be reasonably considered democratic?

Certainly not. Even the unconstrained choice of voters cannot be considered truly free when for decades, those voters could only understand the world through fear, intimidation, and the brainwashing effect of uncontested propaganda. If given a free choice, some North Koreans would willingly re-elect Kim Jong-un, a murderous tyrant, simply because they believe his lies.

Whether information is tightly controlled by a dictator or distorted by tech billionaires and the clicks of conspiratorial crackpots, its quality determines the quality of a democracy. When bad information constructs a fake reality, voters will make choices based on lies, conspiracy theories, and mass delusions. If you break the information pipelines, democracy will break—and that is currently happening in the United States.

Last April, an NBC News poll showed an astonishing Trump/Biden preference divide based on information consumption habits. Among voters who reported that they read newspapers, 70 percent favored Biden, compared to just 21 percent for Trump. Meanwhile, Trump had a distinct edge among those who reported that they didn’t follow the news, with a 53 percent to 27 percent edge. That’s compelling evidence that informational divides are the hidden fissure in American politics. Given that democracy relies on a shared sense of reality to solve problems through compromise, the splintering of that shared reality is arguably the most serious overarching problem facing American democracy.

Trump put a finger on the issue with his famous quip that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away without losing his voters. No matter what Trump does, three layers of information dynamics shield him from democratic accountability.

First, there is what might be called The Fox News Problem, in which Trump’s worst actions are either ignored or barely covered, while comparatively minor transgressions from his opponents provoke endless commentary, anger, and disbelief from shocked talking heads. They attract viewers through endless outrage, while exploiting the psychological comforts of confirmation bias, in which viewers get their worst suspicions constantly reinforced. (While partisan cable news of all stripes leaves much to be desired, only Fox News has had to pay nearly a billion dollars in penalties for defamation after knowingly lying to its audience).

The shift to overtly partisan television news outlets—alongside the simultaneous decline of written news—means that voters who like Trump often don’t get exposed to information that will challenge their viewpoints. Clearly, that matters. When researchers conducted an experiment in which Fox News viewers temporarily switched to CNN, they shifted their viewpoints and were more open to rival arguments.

Second, there is The Social Media Problem, in which click-based algorithms amplify grifters, zealots, and extremists as tech companies cash in on our worst human impulses. A vast research literature shows how social media exposure worsens polarization, while also spreading false and misleading information that inevitably affects vote choice—and undercuts the link between political abuses and democratic accountability.

On the most powerful social media networks, Trump benefits from hordes of digital cheerleaders who defend even his most unacceptable conduct, creating a series of explanations and excuses for why every criticism of him is a lie concocted by his villainous political opponents. Social media is, to borrow the term from Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield, one giant “justification machine.” (In a previous edition, I explained how Musk built the world’s first perfect disinformation machine).

Elon Musk's Perfect Disinformation Machine

Third, and most troubling for democracy, there is the astonishing prevalence of The Conspiracy Theory Problem, particularly influential on the Trumpian right.

Conspiratorial beliefs are particularly insidious, because it is nearly impossible to use facts to convince true believers that their conspiratorial views are false. After all, if the deep state and the media are “in on it,” then of course they’d try to use their power against the few who know the “real truth.” Even when prophecies don’t come to pass, there’s always an excuse. This structure of information, impenetrable to logic, reason, or facts, is one reason why conspiracy theories are responsible for destroying an increasing number of family relationships.

In a recent YouGov survey, four in ten Americans agreed with the notion that “regardless of who is officially in charge of the government and other organizations, there is a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.”

But these views aren’t evenly split by political party; 60 percent of Republicans agreed with that statement, compared to 28 percent of Democrats. In the same survey, 28 percent of Republicans agreed with the notion that vaccines were being used to microchip the population, and 42 percent agreed with the false notion that “many top Democrats are involved in child sex-trafficking rings,” which is a central tenet of the bogus QAnon conspiracy theory.

In other surveys, QAnon has become as popular as other major religions. It is a major driver of MAGA politics—directly fueled by Trump himself—though most outside the Trumpian base are never exposed to its core delusions.

Worse, the peddlers of unhinged conspiracy theories have moved from tinfoil-clad loners in basements to the halls of Congress. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), for example, has recently told his half a million followers on X that Patriotic Front—a fascist, antisemitic, white supremacist group—were likely just “Feds” in disguise.

Lee’s account, which regularly gets directly boosted by Elon Musk, routinely mainstreams these delusions to huge numbers of people, but barely gets covered by the press. (I have been unable to find any reporting in a major news outlet about these posts, which were made on January 25th).

Conspiracy theories are, unfortunately, particularly effective at severing the link between political abuses and accountability, because they provide a warped reality that flips facts upside down. If the right wing militias are actually secret FBI agents, as many falsely believe, then any law enforcement effort to crack down on violent, far-right hate groups isn’t just misguided, it becomes unjust for targeting the “wrong” people.

Trump benefits from all three informational shields: the Fox News problem (did it really happen if Hannity doesn’t cover it?); the Social Media justification machine problem (it wasn’t his fault); and the Conspiracy Theory problem (what seems to the uninitiated like bad behavior is actually part of a much bigger long-term secret plan to save America from a shadowy cabal).

This is one reason why Trump supporters and Trump opponents feel unable to chat to one another before the conversation falls apart in mutual frustration. They simply do not inhabit the same realities.

III: Capitalism and Information Production

The informational sludge that many voters are exposed to is made worse by shifts in modern media economics within a capitalist profit-seeking informational sphere.

In the past, for better or worse, most Americans disagreed about policy, but shared a conception of reality. That was because older generations mostly got their news from a few outlets that therefore had broad-based audiences.

The three national TV networks certainly had their biases and myopias, but they had strong incentives to appeal to viewers across the political spectrum, not exclusively to partisans. Similarly, because most American cities could only support one newspaper through advertising and subscriptions, the printed press also had an incentive to appeal across the political spectrum. These dynamics acted as centripetal forces, with the electorate consuming similar information, then debating what to do about it.

Today, none of those informational structures are intact. The airwaves media is fractured and fragmented, with the most successful outlets moving from news programming to opinionated firebrands with clear partisan slants. And as newspapers decline, a growing number of journalists are leaving formal press outlets and building their own direct information pipelines, be it on Substack, YouTube, TikTok, or other digital content platforms.

The problem is obvious: revenues for these outlets are often directly tied to confirmation bias, a problem known as audience capture. A right-wing YouTuber who criticizes Trump for anything knows that doing so will lead to an instant exodus of viewers and money.

We are lurching toward an informational landscape dominated by self-selection bias, where those who produce exciting lies or loyal deflections are directly rewarded by clicks and cash. Again, it is, paradoxically, the democratization of information production that is draining the lifeblood of democracy: a well-informed citizenry.

There are other models of information production, though none are viable in the United States currently. For example, the BBC—which is criticized by all sides in British politics—provides a rival model for news production. It is funded by the government but editorially independent. And most crucially, nearly 7 in 10 Britons receives at least some of their information about politics from BBC News.

In other words, while Britain is not immune to misinformation, because of at least one common informational pipeline, politicians and voters broadly agree on what is happening, even if they fervently disagree on what to do about it. A shared sense of reality therefore remains far more alive and well in the United Kingdom than in the United States. This, perhaps, is one reason why Britain was most recently ranked as the second least authoritarian populist country in Europe.

Modern humans consume information in a way that is unlike any of our ancestors. Many of the political upheavals of the last two decades can be attributed to political systems breaking apart as informational channels to voters splinter.

The United States is therefore a canary in the global democratic coal mine, an indication of how broken informational pipelines can undercut political accountability and absolve even the most egregious abuses. As “legacy media” becomes the punching bag for both left and right—certainly with plenty of reasonable critiques—voters across the world must grapple with what is surging to replace declining traditional informational institutions.

So far, the record is both clear and depressing: the unprecedented democratization of information production has only been good news for liars, conspiracists, and disinformation agents—and above all, for one in particular, who now lives in the White House.

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Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. This edition was free for everyone, but to support my work and gain access to more than 175 articles from the archive, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Your support makes my writing possible. You can also support my work by buying a copy of FLUKE. If you’re interested in a taste of the book, I’ve released the full first chapter here and I was recently interviewed about the ideas in FLUKE for the popular Hidden Brain podcast.