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Scapegoating the Algorithm
America’s epistemic challenges run deeper than social media.
In the most extreme form of this narrative, such platforms are depicted as technological wrecking balls responsible for shattering the norms and institutions that kept citizens tethered to a shared reality, creating an informational Wild West dominated by viral falsehoods, bias-confirming echo chambers, and know-nothing punditry. Summarizing a large body of empirical literature, a research team led by Ceren Budak documents “a pattern of low exposure to false and inflammatory content [online] that is concentrated among a narrow fringe with strong motivations to seek out such information.” As social scientist Sacha Altay observes, people do not passively fall into rabbit holes; they “jump in and dig.” Although Big Tech deserves scrutiny for its potential role in accelerating harmful trends and enabling radicalization and extremist coordination, treating social media as the primary culprit risks misdiagnosing — and so failing to address — the leading causes of America’s fractured and frequently dysfunctional information environment.
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