[WaPo] You can have democracy or social media. Maybe not both.

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https://wapo.st/41T7Tgz

You can have democracy or social media. Maybe not both.
I used to be a cautious optimist, but the internet has changed our politics for the worse.
Opinion
Matt Bai
September 17, 2025 at 6:30 a.m. EDT
Today at 6:30 a.m. EDT

In trying to make sense of the current political moment, I like to imagine what historians might say a century from now, with the distance and dispassion that today’s historians may bring to the First World War or the Great Depression.

It’s guesswork, of course, but lately I’ve been coming around to one conclusion that may seem obvious decades from now: that America can have social media, or we can have a healthy democracy, but it might have been foolish to think we could have both for long.

I know I probably sound like the oldsters who used to say that television was reducing us all to zombies or that “Halo” would turn our kids into delinquents. But I’m not that old, and I come to this reluctantly and with no small amount of shame. In the early days of social media, I was a cautious optimist, espousing the enormous potential of limitless connection and advancing the dubious idea that it wouldn’t change the essential nature of our politics.

I was inspired by the idea that someone living a solitary existence might instantly find a whole new community of people all over the world who shared a singular, arcane interest — scrapbooking, Civil War history, “Words With Friends.” Why should anyone ever feel lonely again? Why couldn’t people adopt their own communities at the click of a mouse, rather than remaining bound by the constraints of geography?

I bought the romantic notion, too, that what we originally called the blogosphere, despite its often rancorous tone and shaky grasp of facts, might become the ennobling town square of the 21st century — a replacement for the civic clubs and citizen debates that had all but disappeared during the waning days of the broadcast era.

In 2006 (and in a subsequent book), I wrote admiringly about something called Netroots Nation, a gathering of leftist bloggers who then came together for an in-person convention, commanding the attendance of leading politicians. It was Gina Cooper, a Netroots organizer who became a friend, who first reserved my Twitter/X handle for me, because I wouldn’t do it myself. “You’re going to want this,” she promised. “You’re going to need it.”

Gina was right — for a while, anyway. For years, I tried posting and jousting on Twitter. I wrote a newsletter for Facebook’s short-lived Bulletin platform, and I dabbled in Instagram and TikTok. But I’ve gradually withdrawn from all of it, my optimism turning to disappointment and then despondence. I now regard these apps like little digital Ouija boards; just tapping them on my phone risks opening a portal to dark spirits and twisted voices, even if they’re as phony as a boardwalk fortune teller.

Rarely has the corrosion of social media been so plainly exposed as it has been since last week, after the horrific killing of Charlie Kirk. First came the prurient images of a man’s dying moment, a kind of Zapruder GIF spreading at the speed of sound. Then the usual performative posts, issued as if we were all awaiting the poster’s personal statement on the tragedy, devoid of substance and intended mainly to convey moral superiority. These were followed by President Donald Trump himself (on his very own social media platform) vowing to take vengeance on his political opponents. And finally the self-righteous stomping of contrarian views, resulting in damaged careers, because there’s no point having an online mob if you can’t give it someone to trample.

I find myself asking: What went wrong? How could so many of us have been so wrong about where these platforms would take us?

I can think of three answers, none of them entirely original. First, we thought the companies who owned these platforms would care about the country and their impact on it. They don’t. They actively promote conflict and conspiracy and anesthetizing nonsense — because those things promote engagement, and engagement equals money. (There’s also the unusual case of Elon Musk, owner of X, who seems to care most about promoting his own reactionary worldview over everyone else’s.)

Second, citizens haven’t gotten more sophisticated over time about distinguishing fact from fiction, which a lot of us believed would happen, inevitably, as the technology went mainstream. The truth is out there, but it’s often discomfiting and nuanced and hard to find, and not nearly as satisfying as believing whatever you want and mocking those who don’t.

And third, it turns out that the country wasn’t clamoring for a new civic space to debate the pressing issues of the day; we just sort of made that up, because it sounded good to political writers. What Americans seem to prefer — or at least the subset of them who live on social media — is a private square of people who already agree with them. The most successful of these preachers we call “influencers,” which basically means they get paid to manipulate you, and somehow, you listen to them anyway.

The cultural critic Marshall McLuhan memorably wrote that the “medium is the message,” meaning that the primary form of communication at any given moment will change the way a society thinks and interacts, no matter the content. Every news and entertainment medium that has dominated American society — the newspaper, the radio, the television — has affected what we believe about ourselves, each in its own way.

And so what’s become of our social media in the past two decades isn’t merely about what happens online; it’s about rewriting the American story. It’s affected the way we talk to each other, IRL. We inch toward actual civil war, egged on by a showman, because we’ve grown accustomed to the idea that the enemy tweets among us. The medium is the message — and the message is fracture.

I’d like to be hopeful about all of this, in at least an echo of the way that I was 20 years ago. I’d like to think that younger generations of Americans will come to view the technology with more skepticism than those of us who were credulous adults at the Big Bang of social media. I’d like to think there’s a charismatic leader out there — probably more celebrity than politician — whose instinct will be to commandeer and calm this raging cacophony, rather than inflame it for personal affirmation.

It’s not out of the question that historians a century from now might look back and say that while the first few decades of social media marked a steep descent into near catastrophe, the country found its footing and persevered. Assuming, that is, we have any historians left.

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