“There are many ways of putting together multiple people's beliefs or reasons for their beliefs to come to a sort of collective or group perspective…Votes, polls, town halls, and markets all give us some evidence about what's true, but these institutions also have features that can distort or obscure the truth.”

An MIT study showed that false information reached viewers up to six times faster than the truth.

Algorithmic commerce is replacing vetted or peer-reviewed sources and institutions as sources of truth. For example, 59% of women say they are “regularly” getting news from Instagram.

“Social media is an incredibly important aspect of the way in which young people are exposed to information. I also know that the spread of ideas and awareness related to identity/mental health/lived experience has fundamentally shaped the consciousness of growing up. And there's no question of the role that social media and algorithms have played in affecting this most recent election when we look at the voting outcomes of young men, which brings in the impact of misinformation and the rising manosphere sentiments that are the polarized opposite of ends of a spectrum—a return to that binary.”

“There are certainly robust patterns of partisanship in the media. Yet they are not universal, and even from partisan sources, we can still get trustworthy information on a wide variety of topics. Some news is certainly false or misleading, as explained by partisan and narrative lean and by the existence of fake news and misinformation, but the extent of these problems is easily overstated.”

Political psychologists and communication scholars have joined with journalists to express worry that Americans are more likely than before to reject documented facts that challenge their partisan beliefs and to accept misinformation that flatters their predetermined biases, undermining their ability to act as the well-informed citizens that a healthy democracy requires.

Participants pointed to the rise of younger conspiracy theorists, fueled by misinformation and disinformation within social media ecosystems: “There is an overall move away from publications that previous generations would believe are arbiters of truth. Conspiracy theorists are getting younger, and they're on TikTok.”

“A lot of what we may perceive as a hard ideological view, including problematic views on issues like race and border policy, may in part be motivated by a very different set of sociological and institutional judgements about how the world works. For some, it is an ideological commitment to views that may be antithetical to an inclusive, egalitarian democracy; but for others, it may not be ideological all the way down.”

“Mis- and disinformation has reached a level of national crisis; coalitions have formed on the political right due to mis- and disinformation. Conversely, the challenge for the political Left is how to construct democracy as a community.”