The Age of Information Tidal Waves

How context-free hyperbolic provocation now regularly washes over and deranges American minds online

Mass-murdering terrorist or morally justified freedom fighter? This image taken from a collection of videotapes obtained by CNN shows Osama bin Laden at a press conference on May 26, 1998 in Afghanistan. (Photo by CNN via Getty Images)

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Online digital networks are politically destabilizing, not primarily because they spread disinformation, but far more so because they spread one-sided, highly tendentious information that distorts our perception of reality.

I wrote about some examples a little over a week ago: Widely followed Twitter/X accounts that push out dozens of video clips a day from around the world of angry and sometimes violent anti-Israel protests and individuals tearing down posters of Israeli citizens kidnapped by Hamas, creating the impression of a world spinning out of control and dominated by an anti-Jewish left.

The effects of such viral information cascades are easy to capture in public-opinion polling. Earlier this week, the Pew Research Center published findings showing the share of Republicans willing to say that science has had a mostly positive effect on society has fallen 23 points, from 70 to 47 percent, since early 2019.

Over the course of the nearly five years since early 2019, the right-leaning media ecosystem has been dominated by stories of mistakes and misjudgments made by public-health authorities during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as sensational accounts of minors undergoing medically sanctioned gender transitions with insufficient caution. Were those stories false? Perhaps some of them were. Most, though, were probably accurate but framed tendentiously and treated by those promoting and reading them as revelatory about the state of science in general. The cumulative result has been the precipitous drop in positive attitudes toward science among Republicans picked up by Pew.

This shows, I think, how politically and culturally potent these viral information cascades can be.

Unfortunately, we have reason to believe such cascades are becoming much more potent over time—and that they will play a significant role in American politics between now and the presidential election next November.

The bin Laden Mass Conversion Event

Consider the story that broke on Twitter/X on Wednesday evening.