What do we do about information polarization in the internet age?

[Tamas]

I'm not convinced it's a significant problem. In the 80s people were reading newspapers they agreed with and stayed away from the ones they disagreed with.

Yeah, this.

[Jacob]

I think the fundamental difference is the collapse in trust towards the mainstream media. So it isn't just that people are clannish and prefer an echo chamber it's that there's a growing tendency to preferring an echo chamber of actual bullshit and misinformation. There's more alternative facts than actual alternative opinions. You used to actively have to seek out the sort of conspiracy theories and nonsense that I see on people's Facebook now it's all there and perceived as more credible than the media.

I think it's a sort of post-modern media and it seems a risk to me because I think it's the sort of atmosphere encouraged by post-modern authoritarians like Putin and Erdogan. They're not pushing some absurd Pravda-ish line, they're wanting a post-truth media. It's what Russia Today does so brilliantly.

While I don't disagree with the prevalence of "alternative facts" vs "alternative opinions" I don't know if there's been a big change in the distribution. Sure, we're more aware of the global spread of alternative facts and fringe nutters can connect more easily to one another, but Pravda was Pravda before the internet and idiosyncratic Hindu or Shinto nationalist views of history (to pick a few examples) have been around prior as well.

I'm not convinced that we are actually immune to Trump, Le Pen, Corbyn, Sanders. They may not be the guys who actually win out of this but, the next round might be. I'm not convinced that the West is immune to this strand of politics.

I don't think we're immune to populism at all; to think so is pure hubris IMO. The post-WWII boom and social contract may have been a phase where we were less receptive to such trends but that's likely the result of a limited and exceptional set of circumstances - a combination of material prosperity and a reaction to the excesses of Hitler's Germany - than some sort of new era. Human nature has not particularly changed, and the dynamics of politics are not fundamentally different.

Sure, though it is striking that Mossack Fonseca didn't go on Wikileaks (who had a big hissy fit about it) but to an investigative journalism project bankrolled by paper's around the world to avoid the sort of fuckups that have happened with Wikileaks.

For sure. My point here was that robust investigative journalism still happens. I think, too, that significant investigative journalism has always been a challenge to carry out.

It's maybe a British bias - or coming from Liverpool in the 80s - but I've always thought corruption was most likely to happen at the most incomprehensible/unreported bits of government. So in the UK I think chances are that sort of stuff is likely to happen at local government or at EU level. I wonder about the effect of the decline of local media on local government, especially in the one party areas.

I lived in Tower Hamlets which is one of the poorest boroughs in London. The mayor was massively corrupt and actually removed for electoral fraud at the start of his second term. But there basically wasn't a local media to follow this. The national media were occasionally interested but only to the extent that there was an Islamist angle, which there vaguely was, but most of the corruption was old-school machine, patronage politics. The only reporting I remember of it was of one blogger who used to be a journalist at the local paper because lot's of it was attending council meetings and looking at budget proposals. I don't think every area can depend on having a dedicate local government blogger and I worry what can be got away with without that and without a local press.

I agree with your assessment of the nature and venues of corruption, but I'm not sure the decline of local journalism spells the end of bringing it to light. You mention the dedicated local blogger as the inheritor of that legacy, which I think is right. What I'm not sure about is why you think the dedicated local blogger is going to be much less effective than the dedicated local journalist at bringing things to light. In both cases you need someone to care first (not all local journalists do), you need an audience that cares (which follow similar dynamics in both cases IMO), and you need a venue for exposing the corruption (which exist in both cases).

I mean, maybe you're right but I'm not sure. Why are you so certain that the journalist with the local politics beat is more effective than the dedicated blogger or other activist with a social media presence?