The freedom of the press has been seen as necessary to protect democracy from the trappings of injustice and dictatorship. An independent press that exposes truth and forces transparency against power to ensure that corruption cannot persist.
Within weeks of the 2024 election, the Washington Post [1] and LA Times [2] suppressed the opinions and endorsements of their own writers. The Washington Post writers created their own opinion of the decision [3].
Democracy doesn't die in darkness when there are people willing to fight for it.
Democracy dies in silence. It dies when no one speaks up, when no one fights for their freedoms.
The only way to get noticed is to make more extremist statements.
Talking about good policy decisions that can save social security in 8 years is boring. Talking about the latest scandal or problem and who to blame is good TV
Social media has changed how we perceive and distribute news.
Social media profit motive is tied to engagement, regardless of its factual integrity.
This means that news and information must become more shocking or rely on emotions in order to keep people engaged.
People can be grouped into echo chambers and then fed items that increase engagement. The effect is that communities grow further apart and are told what to believe in. Instead of getting news from traditional sources, the news is delivered by family and friends, lending a personal credibility to information and making it harder to discern from misinformation.
On video and forum platforms, suggestion algorithms are designed send you more and more controversial content to keep you engaged. This leads to viewers clicking on a catchy video, and then being recommend 5 or 10 more similar videos of varying levels of extremism. Each video can lead to more videos of varying topics and extremism, but matching ideologies. Spend too much time at this without actively searching for alternative views and these platforms will give you the impression that these opinions and views have a larger representation in the real world than they actually do.
In addition, there is little to no perspectives on many of the people that are presenting their views. The same expert can present their findings in video after video as they make the rounds on YouTube, and this can lead to people thinking that this expert is at the top of their field. But in keeping with the how social media operates, there is just as much of a chance that the expert is on the fringe and that the views being presented are not accepted in their field. The popularity of their work may simply be a function of unfamiliarity and being adept at social media. How often is the alternative or competing opinion given? If there is one, is the person presenting just as charismatic as the expert that is being promoted?
These trappings make social media an force multiplier that, if used incorrectly, can drastically mislead the people and cause damage to our Democracy.
There are FCC regulations that prevent any one company from owning all of the television and newspaper outlets. The rules are designed to prevent any single entity from taking over all of the airwaves and newspapers and dictating what people could see, hear and read.
However, the rules surrounding these FCC regulations have been continually relaxed. In 1985, a single company could own only 25% of a given market. That percentage is now 45% after changes were made in 2003. [1] This has led to independent stations and newspapers being eaten through mergers with the large corporations. This had led to fewer viewpoints available for everyone, and has concentrated control and power of media moguls. In one example, in 2018, the Sinclair Broadcast group had several local news outlets reading the same promotional script that sounded like pro-Trump propaganda. [2]
Unlike with traditional print media, the Internet is always on and always providing more and more content on everything you can imagine.
The problem is, rules and recommendations regarding the usage of the Internet were late to be established. No one really knew what kind of long term consequences there would be to long term use to the screen and to the Internet. Only recently has there been an increasing amount of evidence of a connection between screen time and childhood development. During the teenager years, the Internet can multiply feelings of isolation and bullying, which has shown to have devastating consequences in schools.
And for adults, the Internet can be a place that can convince anyone of anything if they let it. It can be an echo chamber that leads to extremism far faster than at any other point in history.
In isolation, polling is a powerful tool for political campaigns. It allows candidates to take snapshots on their approval, issues, and any other things. It allows candidates to predict results among a wider audience than individually reaching out to people.
The prevalence and sophistication of polling can also provide data before an election to provide an estimate on what the result is likely to be. This can provide a measure of security against significant voter fraud as any election result can be compared against recent events and recent polling to determine why voting results turned out the way they did.
The media has fallen in love with polling as it provides a quick update on the score and allows for all sorts of analysis after the fact. This has led to pollsters gaining power as publicity can lead to a better reputation and more contracts to conduct polls.
With the increase in the importance of polls in a campaign and increase in sophistication of polling, there have also been attempts to manipulate polls to generate a narrative.
Different polling agencies have different methodologies towards creating their poll, and not all polling agencies are equal.
There can be differences in how questions and answers are worded, who is being selected to take the poll, and other adjustments to account for statistical sampling error. As a result, polls have a consistency
Because of the ease in understanding polling data, and its use by news organizations to generate headlines, polls have become more and more important in the election cycle. As a result, they are becoming targets of manipulation.
Ideally, the group conducting a poll is attempting to eliminate all bias in order to get an accurate result from a population for its questions. However, there is no enforcement mechanism highlighting good pollsters from bad ones. Instead there are some analysts who attempt to account for biases in their analysis, which can add an additional layer of manipulation if not done correctly.
In one example, there are reports during the 2024 election of Rasmussen reports of directly collaborating with the GOP despite declaring on their site to be non-partisan [1] [2].
Back in 2022, there was significant expectations that a "Red Wave" was going to create a Republican majority in the Senate and House of Representatives, along with wins in state governments as well. This assumption was based on historical trends of mid-term elections going against the sitting president's party. However, these assumptions were reinforced by a glut of polls from what ended up being conservative leaning pollsters showing a Republican landslide was imminent. [3]
Polling aggregators have attempted to take as many polls as possible and generate a single narrative of where any given election stands and where things are going. Sophisticated versions also attempt to filter out various events that could be influencing individual polls such as bias, convention bumps, debate results, and other effects.
The problem is, time is being spent by political parties to artificially move these aggregators and send a message on how the election is going.
One such strategy is to flood the aggregator with several different polls with similar affiliations. This generates a narrative that "all" of the polls are leaning one way, hoping to influence donations and voters engagement levels with the state of the race.
In addition to a flood of individual polls going one way, poll aggregators that try and account for this can be moved as well. Any model created is based on prior election and polling results. However, new strategies in polling can can break or overwhelm these models to produce an "altered" result.
The accuracy of polls and polling aggregators can be seen in previous attempts to predict elections. One such aggregator, FiveThirtyEight, analyzed their results against the perceived "Red Wave" that was supposed to hit the 2022 election.[1] In their results, you can see how different poll aggregators had different results that would have come down to how each model made adjustments to the same polls of the cycle.