- Both political violence and honestly misinformation

were both much more common in the early decades

of American democracy.

We had yellow journalism, right?

We had these, these newspapers that went out

and absolutely slandered people from the other party

and candidates from the other party.

And then, we kind of went through this era

of respectable journalism and giving equal time

to both sides and having very few, relatively few

sources of information and now we're kind of,

I think back in the wild west of yellow journalism

and polarized politics where the internet tells us

whatever we want to read and partisan media tells us

who we are.

Partisan media is really efficient at telling people

this is what you are as a Republican,

this is what you are as a Democrat.

This is us, this is them.

So, I think conflict and upheaval and even violence,

I think go hand in hand with a kind of lawless

informational space where where people don't really know

the same truth, right?

They don't live under the same reality

and so their conflicts can be much bigger

because they can imagine all kinds of things

about the other people.

- 15 years ago, one might have thought that social media

would have a democratizing effect

and a lot of people did think that

but we have to remember how unrepresented

the conversation on social media can be.

So the vast majority of posts on Twitter

are put up there by a tiny minority of people on Twitter.

And so you can get a very misleading impression

of what people are concerned about,

what they're thinking, just by looking at that.

And then there's this feedback effect

where a lot of my fellow journalists spend too much time

on Twitter and then they amplify that misleading picture

of what the country is like to their readers

and their viewers and it just becomes

a kind of hall of mirrors.

- When the Obama campaign used these tools to such effect

the Republican party definitely noticed

and the kind of far right fringe definitely noticed as well.

So there was an immediate sense that

we have to catch up in this technological arms race.

And there was also a sense

among the white nationalist fringe that,

again, this is a powerful moment for recruitment

just like 9/11 when people felt like

they had been breached by a foreign enemy.

A lot of people felt with the first black president,

Okay this is a really salient moment

for white racial consciousness

which is obviously a dangerous thing in America.

So the white nationalist groups, I think,

figured out right away that it's one thing

to talk about race, it's one thing to say the Clintons

or the Democrats are giving too many handouts

to African Americans or you should worry

about affirmative action

but suddenly when you have a black president

it's this very immediate stark visual reminder

that your country is being taken from you.

This was a kind of a messaging godsend

for the white supremacist movement.

This was in many ways the thing they had been fearing.

- Oh, I think social media is a huge problem.

And it's a huge, it's like gasoline on the fire.

And I think the big social media platforms

need to help own this problem and need to help fix it.

And they need to help fix it by dealing with the problem

of disinformation that's spread on the platforms.

And disinformation is intentional, misleading information.

It's not mistakes and facts or things of that sort.

It's really using information as a weapon.

And that's what we see going on.

- I don't know if we are the most divided

we've ever been as a nation.

I think we are the most plugged in

and attuned and able to listen to everyone's opinion

about their political position

and their thoughts and their fears.

So I don't know if we are in an era of unusual divisiveness

rather than an era of unusual noise about that divisiveness.

And I think that increasingly what we have

is an opportunity if we have these new channels

to listen to each other, one would hope

that we would have leadership that would say

Why don't we use those channels to talk about the things

that we want the most for ourselves?

Why don't we use those channels to talk about our fears

and how we wanna care for each other?

But unfortunately, I think we have used technology

as an opportunity to amplify and to threaten

and to scare each other.

And so what does this mean for us as people

who want to see democracy come alive?

I think that we have to really weigh the hard work

of making democracy work in an age in which fear tactics

and scare mongering and lying

also are effective tools for mobilizing people.