Editor’s letter

The presidential election four years ago was a Facebook free-forall, a veritable festival of manipulation and disinformation with no fact-checking and no guardrails. Not only critics but the social media companies themselves said “Never again.” You can argue about whether this time Facebook and its peers did enough to combat disinformation. But they did do a lot (see Technology). And yet days after the election, with 64 percent of Republicans still convinced, with no evidence, that the election results can’t be trusted, why don’t things feel any better? I would posit that’s because social media was never the essence of the problem. Demagogues and conspiracy mongers are always proficient in the cutting-edge media of their time—broadsheets, radio, television, now Facebook. What they do is amplify social breakdown, using any means at hand. People turn to lies when they feel dislocated, isolated, and mistrustful, and those who seek power by corroding faith in institutions play on that, whatever the medium.

What keeps democracy going are the norms created by shared facts. There were people who wished that we could restore these norms by fixing social media. We’ve found that’s not enough. But I remain optimistic. Reporting on business news over the years, I gained some familiarity with the stock market. Markets develop bubbles in which irrational ideas take hold. These can last much longer than you’d expect; as one adage in finance has it, “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” In this election cycle, we’ve seen a bubble in destructive ideas. Who would have believed that the currency of QAnon would rise as high as it has? Invariably, though, bubbles do burst—often at the point at which things seem to reach a new plateau of insanity. I have a surprising amount of hope that we are at that kind of stage now, with a bubble in destructive ideas, cynically circulated, bursting— and that we have stayed solvent enough that we have the social capital to rebuild.

Managing editor