THE INTERNET INEVITABLY LEADS TO INFORMATION BRAIN ROT! (UNLESS YOU'RE A DEMOCRAT)

In The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield argue that the GOP's ability to rewrite the history of January 6 is all the internet's fault:

... misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine. A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away, and the incentives of the modern attention economy—people are rewarded with engagement and greater influence the more their audience responds to what they’re saying—means that there will always be a rush to provide one....

The justification machine ... has made the process of erasing cognitive dissonance far more efficient. Our current, fractured media ecosystem works far faster and with less friction than past iterations, providing on-demand evidence for consumers....

Warzel and Caulfield are right to argue that false assertions spread fast on the internet. But they write as if the internet inevitably destroys people's abilities to process information that's contrary to what they believe (or want to believe).

Yes, many of the messages that were spreading on the internet in the wake of January 6 argued that left-wing or government saboteurs were responsible for the violence, and that Trump supporters were entirely innocent. But as I noted yesterday, the internet had plenty of help. Fox News and other elements of the right-wing media were also spreading these messages, as were Republican politicians and influencers. They've never stopped spreading these messages -- on the air and, in the case of GOP officeholders, in official proceedings of Congress.

Wurzel and Caulfield's article appears under the headline "The Internet Is Worse Than a Brainwashing Machine." The suggestion is that the online world has a unique ability to rot brains, and resistance is futile. But if that's the case, why doesn't it work that way on the Democratic side? Recall, for instance, that in the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, a story spread that Elon Musk had used his Starlink internet service provider to manipulate the vote count and give Donald Trump a victory. If internet-based falsehoods that confirm partisans' prior beliefs inevitably supplant reality in the minds of those partisans, why don't the majority of Democrats now believe this falsehood?

The majority of Democrats don't believe this narrative because the media outlets we like didn't embrace it. Neither did the Democratic politicians we vote for.

Wurzel and Caulfield's effort to bothsides this comes up embarrassingly short. Here's how they argue that the internet eats the brains of Democrats as well as Republicans:

During this past election season, for example, anti-Trump influencers and liberal-leaning cable news stations frequently highlighted the stream of Trump supporters leaving his rallies early—implying that support for Trump was waning. This wasn’t true, but such videos helped Democratic audiences stay cocooned in a world where Trump was unpopular and destined to lose.

How is that comparable to believing that all the violence in the Capitol on January 6 was the work of Antifa and the FBI? Some people actually did leave Trump rallies early. Many polls showed Kamala Harris leading Trump. Those two facts helped give many of us a false sense of confidence. But what percentage of Democrats concluded that a Trump victory was utterly impossible? And what percentage still believe that Trump couldn't possibly have received enough legitimate votes to win, which is what most Republicans continue to believe about Joe Biden in 2020?

Wurzel and Caulfield write:

A culture where every event—every human success or tragedy—becomes little more than evidence to score political points is a nihilistic one. It is a culture where you never have to change your mind or even confront uncomfortable information.

Republicans appear to live in a culture like that, but Democrats don't. Democrats are urged to change our minds all the time. We're regularly told that we need to change our minds about bail reform, about student loan forgiveness, about compassionate treatment of immigrants and homeless people, about COVID school shutdowns, about providing care for trans youths and letting trans girls play on school teams. We're told that our values are elitist. We're told that our unwillingness to embrace right-wingers is arrogance, even though many of those same right-wingers openly declare that they hate and want us executed or imprisoned. Maybe we're never required to change our minds, but we're told that we're terrible people if we don't.

The misinformation internet is not an all-powerful brain-deadening machine. Many people still look to other information sources for confirmation of what the misinformation internet tells us. When Democrats do that, we get the truth or something relatively close to it, even if it's not what we want to hear. Republicans mostly get exactly what they want to hear.