Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen
Three massive, concurrent tectonic shifts are reordering in dramatic ways how America and the world will get, and consume, information in the years ahead:Trust in traditional media is vanishing.
Where people are getting information instead has shattered into dozens of ecosystems.
The world's most powerful social platforms — X, Facebook, Instagram — no longer police speech or information.
Why it matters: In this new information world order, the people with the largest platforms and followings hold more power than ever in shaping reality. That's a seismic shift in how realities are formed in real time.
Meta's decision to dial back fact-checking, announced Tuesday, captures the sea change.A few short years ago, Twitter (before it was X), Facebook and Instagram had robust teams monitoring news and information — and pulling down posts that were hateful or deemed fake or misinformation. On top of that, news organizations had more credibility than today — allowing them both to expose misinformation, and also help correct it for the public.
Now, the platforms' fact-checking teams have been dismantled, and traditional media is more delegitimized with a lot of consumers.
While that was happening, the common window through which most Americans learned about the country and the world — TV, newspapers, radio — was shattered into dozens of shards of glass, based on consumer's personal preferences.So as President-elect Trump — a huge beneficiary of this new reality — takes office, the way we get informed has been upended in ways most have not fully reckoned with.
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