The Fabulist Age…

The true villains of modern history may be the social media overlords – Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, above all – who have stripped away any fetters on far-right lies and demagoguery.

Click link for Zeteo article

https://zeteo.com/p/the-internet-made-donald-trump?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Excerpted from article

Consider which ideas spread fastest online: not the ones that are most accurate, but the ones that receive the most attention.

This has turned large swaths of the internet into little more than a contest for liars. 

After all, online, who cares if claims are true or not, as long as people share them? The social and financial rewards of online attention are barely reduced when the underlying claim is false. Indeed, truth-tellers are at a massive disadvantage on the internet since they’re forced to compete with wild, hysterical, or completely manufactured material that has been engineered specifically to attract notice and be shared. Many people have persisted in publishing true facts anyway – but they often sink out of sight, occluded by the more viral claims of skilled fabulists.