The Atlantic

The Age of Misinformation

Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft must recognize a special responsibility for the parts of their services that host or inform public discourse.
Source: Noah Berger / Reuters / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

There are two big problems with America’s news and information landscape: concentration of media, and new ways for the powerful to game it.

First, we increasingly turn to only a few aggregators like Facebook and Twitter to find out what’s going on the world, which makes their decisions about what to show us impossibly fraught. Those aggregators draw—opaquely while consistently—from largely undifferentiated sources to figure out what to show

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Atlantic

The Atlantic6 min read
Florida’s Experiment With Measles
The state of Florida is trying out a new approach to measles control: No one will be forced to not get sick. Joseph Ladapo, the state’s top health official, announced this week that the six cases of the disease reported among students at an elementar
The Atlantic6 min read
There’s Only One Way to Fix Air Pollution Now
It feels like a sin against the sanctitude of being alive to put a dollar value on one year of a human life. A year spent living instead of dead is obviously priceless, beyond the measure of something so unprofound as money. But it gets a price tag i
The Atlantic8 min readAmerican Government
The Most Consequential Recent First Lady
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. The most consequential first lady of modern times was Melania Trump. I know, I know. We are supposed to believe it was Hillary Clinton, with her unbaked cookies

Related Books & Audiobooks