When I ran for Congress in 2018, and voters raised fears about right-wing extremism, one of my go-to answers was: “If you want to stop fascism in America, make the trains run on time.” My point was that Donald Trump had played on working- and middle-class Americans’ legitimate frustration with government’s failure to deliver for them. We would beat him not with alarmist rhetoric but with results that restored confidence in the system on issues like jobs, health care costs, and, since I was running in New Jersey, roads and trains.
Two years later, a Democratic president and Congress won their chance to prove this theory right. They launched the massive project to fix America’s infrastructure that Trump had promised and forgotten, lowered prescription drug costs, expanded overtime pay, and sparked an amazing revival in American manufacturing, with the biggest job gains going to those communities that globalization had left behind—mostly in Republican states.
In short, Democrats did what they told working Americans they would do under the least “woke” nominee they could have chosen in 2020—and then got no political benefit. It’s not just that there were other problems they didn’t solve, like immigration, or that voters understandably blamed Joe Biden for inflation. It’s that tens of millions of Americans were convinced that the progress Biden did make never happened—that inflation was still rising, not falling; that crime was up, not down; that energy production had declined instead of hitting record highs; that today’s great jobs numbers are fake.
According to a Reuters poll conducted in October, voters who believed such demonstrable falsehoods overwhelmingly supported Trump. If the new president is smart enough to take credit for Biden’s economy in a few months instead of crashing it with tariffs, those same voters will probably believe he made America great again.
I don’t think the culprit is right-wing media—partisan news is nothing new—or that people are listening to podcasts over NPR. Nor do I think it’s “disinformation,” which is just a fancy word for the lies politicians and propagandists have always told. The problem is not disinformation itself but a revolution in how media reaches us.
Not long ago, Americans got their news from mostly the same sources, selected by journalists and subject-matter experts who tried, despite their normal human biases, to tell us what was important and true. We still argued like hell over politics but from roughly the same trusted facts.
Today, close to everything we learn about the world around us—whether the source is a scholarly article, a FOX news clip, or a political candidate’s speech—is selected for us by social media algorithms that Big Tech designed for the sole purpose of keeping us addicted to its platforms. Since we typically spend more time looking at content that reinforces our political passions and makes us angry and afraid, this is what the platforms serve us infinitely faster than any fact checker can counter. It’s those same recommendation algorithms that relentlessly seek out and push young white men to watch clips from “bro-casters” like Joe Rogan, giving them their influence. No non-incendiary liberal copycat would get the same boost.
As a result, our democracy has lost something essential to its survival—a commonly accepted arbiter of what is true and false. Lacking that, we believe what our own side tells us, which is increasingly all we hear anyway; famously, we live not just with competing arguments but in alternate realities. In such a world, anything is possible, from the mass denial of election results to condoning Matt Gaetz as Attorney General (both of which would have been unthinkable just 20 years ago).
Democrats have been slower to realize what is happening because Elon Musk’s X still sends us the same New York Times stories we once read in print and the illusion that others see what we see. And so, we shout, also on X, that if only the “media” wrote more about Trump’s sins, everything would change, as if mainstream news still directly reached the voters we need. We agonize about improving our message—as we should—but forget that the message won’t matter if the medium, which is social media, delivers it only to people who already agree.
Over the last four years, Biden anti-trust warriors took commendable steps to challenge tech company monopolies. But the Democratic Party’s greatest recent failure—and we should be embarrassed by this—is that when we had the presidency and a majority in Congress, we did not pick a serious fight with Big Tech’s corruption of our media and information environment. I was one of several House members then who tried to make social media companies liable for what their algorithms promote; our bills had many co-sponsors and paper support from the Biden administration, but none got so much as a hearing.
The hard truth is that many Democrats were more focused on chasing donors from Silicon Valley than on addressing the threat Big Tech posed to our democracy. And when the tech companies realized Congress wasn’t serious about regulation, they stopped taking even cosmetic steps to keep lies and hate from spreading and kids from being hurt.
Here’s something else Democrats missed—taking on Big Tech would be wildly popular, including with many people who disagree with the party on social and cultural issues. A recent PEW poll found that only 10 percent of Americans think social media benefits the country; big majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents say it’s harmful and that social media companies have too much political influence. There is a similar concern about artificial intelligence.
Remember, the same algorithmic information system that elevates lies over truth also senses when children hate their bodies and delivers them videos designed to make them feel worse; it detects when teens are depressed and sends them how-to guides on how to end their lives; it’s a big reason why so many Americans feel anxious and lonely today.
How hard would it be for Democrats to run against the tech billionaires who profit from our children’s anxieties and society’s divisions, especially when those billionaires are basically James Bond villains—whether Musk, with his dreams of “alpha males” ruling the world, or Mark Zuckerberg, who wants humanity to live in a weird “metaverse” he controls. The New Jersey voters I represented, whether liberal or conservative, want to live in a community with real people, not hooked up to devices that monitor their thoughts and manipulate their interactions. If they voted for Trump, it wasn’t to block bipartisan efforts to protect children online (as the Republican House is currently doing) or to lift all safeguards on AI (as Trump promised). These should be easy targets for Democrats trying to win back Trump supporters.
Meanwhile, Democrats running state governments can do what Washington won’t: pass laws strengthening privacy and protections for kids and creating new avenues for victims of social media and AI harm to sue. Such a campaign won’t restore an era when the paper boy delivered trusted news to our doorstep. But political and legal pressure can make tech better. Facebook, for example, once experimented with an algorithm that delivered content based on what users said was good for them and the world — in other words, based on their conscious feedback instead of subconscious impulses. It significantly reduced disinformation and upsetting content in the newsfeed and was rejected only because it slightly reduced the amount of time people spent on the platform. This should be the model reformers strive for.
Lies took over our politics because technology, not human nature, changed. By picking a fight with the corporations responsible, Democrats can align with every parent worried about what their kids see online and every person sick of the anger dividing our country. And when the next Democratic administration delivers economic gains, Americans might even give it credit.
