You know that at WIRED, technology and innovation are kind of our thing. Pretty much every day since 1993, my WIRED colleagues past and present have come to work to tell you stories about how technology can make the world a better place, how it can enhance human ability in ways we still can’t quite imagine, and why all of these technological shifts aren’t necessarily as scary as they sometimes seem at first.
Today is not one of those days. Because tomorrow, we'll elect the leader of the free world, and well, we can't say that technology has exactly made it easy over these last truly grueling 19 months.
This election cycle has revealed the deep, dark underbelly of all that technological progress. It’s shown us---and not for the first time---how the same communication tools that can connect strangers in far-flung parts of the world can also be used to disseminate gas chamber memes and death threats. It’s shown us how the same platforms that put a world of facts and information at our fingertips can just as easily be used to undermine basic truths. It’s shown us that our most personal communications---so many of them digital---are exceptionally vulnerable to anyone with a vendetta and that the online masses, typically so precious about their own privacy, would be all too eager to see what we’ve got to hide. And we all have something to hide.
This election, we’ve seen so many unintended consequences of what can happen when we rely on this innovation. Since I started covering politics for WIRED, people have often asked me why a tech publication is writing about politics. It’s a fair question. But considering that email servers, Russian hackers, Twitter trolls, and WikiLeaks now have a prominent role in our electoral system, the more pertinent question seems to me: How could we not?
The trolls were around since long before Donald Trump, but boy, did Trump’s candidacy give them their day in the spotlight. Long confined to the fringe, this year, the trolls took center stage, unleashing a torrent of harassment on anyone who was not on the #TrumpTrain. They proudly adopted the term Clinton used to describe them---"deplorables"---and lived up to the name.
For conservative writer David French, this meant enduring a deluge of photos doctored to make his daughter look like a slave. For writer Bethany Mandel, who received a slew of anti-Semitic tweets, it meant buying a gun to protect herself in case any of this violent rhetoric turned into action.
"Every campaign attracts its share of fools, cranks, and crazies. But Trump’s candidacy has weaponized them," French wrote in a column for The National Review.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, there were 2.6 million anti-Semitic tweets sent between last August and this July, a whopping 60 percent of them in reply to journalists. But while this spike could easily be construed as a widespread increase in anti-Semitic sentiment, the survey also showed that just 1,600 accounts generated 68 percent of the tweets.
In a way, Trump validated this behavior by hiring an icon of the alt-right, like Steve Bannon, former executive chairman of the ultra-conservative website Breitbart, to join his campaign. "That is something that Trump enabled," Nell Irvin Painter, a professor of American history at Princeton University, says of the racist rhetoric that has surrounded Trump's candidacy. "It was this underground stream, and he poked it, and put a hole in the crust, and it came oozing out."
But it hasn't just been Trump supporters. During the primaries, the so-called Bernie Bros (leftists Bernie Sanders devotees) became infamous for their well-documented misogynist rants and threats against Sanders critics and Clinton supporters.
The trolls may make up a tiny fraction of any given candidates' supporter base, but unfortunately, they make the most noise. As Dominique Brossard, who studies these issues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told WIRED, “You have very vocal minorities on two sides of the spectrum, and then the vast majority in the middle that are pretty silent about it.”
This election---with all its digital death threats and intimidation tactics---has proved that all that polarization online can not only be destructive to political discourse, it can be downright dangerous.
It's also proved that even as the internet has made it easier to spread information and knowledge, it's made it just as easy to undermine the truth. On the internet, all ideas appear equal, even when they're lies.
The splintering of the media, of course, has a lot to do with that. Where once there were a handful of newspapers and television stations vetting the news to sort fact from fiction, now there are innumerable publications, social media pundits, and hoax websites calling another person's fact their fiction.
“From a contradiction, you can derive anything,” University of Connecticut philosophy professor Michael Lynch, who wrote the book The Internet of Us, recently told WIRED. “You get people to a point where they’re receiving contradictory signals, and they start to just ignore the bit that seems inconsistent with their own beliefs.”
That's been true for some time, of course, but this year in particular, people have lost faith in the trustworthiness of the so-called mainstream media, with just 14 percent of Republicans saying they trust the media, down from 32 percent in 2015.
And that makes political discourse difficult, because as tough as political cooperation has ever been, it's that much harder when two sides can't agree on even a basic set of facts.
Social media exacerbates this problem, allowing people to fall easily into echo chambers that circulate their own versions of the truth. A Buzzfeed analysis of partisan Facebook pages found that often, the more a page shares false or misleading information, the more viral its posts become. A recent study of which Zika-related stories were shared most across Facebook, conducted by scientists at the University of Wisconsin and published in the American Journal of Infection Control, found similar results. The more inaccurate the article, the more popular it was likely to be on Facebook. This is more troubling when you realize that social media is second only to cable news as Americans' primary political news source.
This has allowed dangerous conspiracies to fester online for years. Birtherism, Painter notes, is a potent example of that. "It’s been disproved time and time again, but it still lives," she says. "Birtherism is not amenable to truth. It’s not amenable to fact. It belongs to an ideology in which it functions as ideological truth."
Both Facebook and Twitter are now grappling with how to stem the spread of disinformation on their platforms, without becoming the sole arbiters of truth on the internet. Just Thursday, Twitter suspended an account that was spreading false information in order to suppress votes for Clinton.
This election blurred the already blurry line between politics and entertainment, in large part because this year a reality star was running for president. Trump knew how to command the airwaves---and the web.
As CBS CEO Leslie Moonves put it, the country's collective fixation with Trump has been "damn good for CBS," and the rest of the media landscape. According to data compiled by Mashable and the tracking firm Newswhip, out of 10 major news websites including WSJ.com and NYTimes.com, Trump content accounted for 38 percent of all engagement. For sites like Vox.com, it accounted for nearly 60 percent.
It's not just that Trump knows how to keep himself in the news, though. The issue is also that media itself has become as much an entertainment channel as it is an information one. On Facebook, breaking news stories and longreads that contextualize candidates mix and mingle with your friends' birthday posts and wedding photos. On Snapchat, the news now fights for attention alongside selfies with rainbow vomit filters.
The media's entire business model now depends on cutting through that clutter. Enter such media upstarts as NowThis, focused on getting millennials to stop and watch a short news video before scrolling down their feeds. Headlines grow a bit more outraged, a bit more exaggerated, and small stories---like a vague missive from FBI Director James Comey about emails that may or may not have something to do with Clinton's private email server---get distorted and misconstrued six ways to Sunday before any details even come out.
Speaking of that private email server, this election has showcased just how susceptible both politicians and private citizens are to massive privacy breaches. Not only was the Democratic National Committee the victim of a massive hack this summer, but more recently, Wikileaks has made years' worth of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's emails public, emails that were stolen by Russian hackers.
Whether the press has an obligation to report on stolen emails (the Clinton camp has argued it does not) the leaks still serve as a concrete reminder that we're all exposed. Most of us entrust our every communication---no matter how mundane or secretive---to tech companies that can never truly offer us protection from determined hackers who want access to that information.
So we hold our breath and hope that what happened to Podesta and former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz never happens to us. After this election, though, we know it can happen to anyone, particularly if you're someone who has a political opinion.
"The security thing has always been a big fear of ours," says Scott Tranter, founder of 0ptimus, which ran Marco Rubio's data operation during the primaries. "When you have more data and a high-profile opinion people might not agree with, you open yourself up to an attack."
As individuals who care about our own privacy, that is scary enough. As citizens of a country that depends on free and fair elections, it's even scarier.
What's equally scary, though, is how quickly the public can forget---if not forgive---a major scandal. As Tranter notes, during the primaries, he would monitor the data about what his target audiences were watching. Each time Trump said something objectionable---like, for instance, talking about the size of his manhood on a debate stage---Tranter expected Trump to tank. He never did.
"All the bad things? The electorate saw it. We know they saw it," he says. "Yet in the primary, he was able to get consistent wins."
During the general election, we've seen much the same thing. In polls, Trump has rebounded from his public fight with a Muslim Gold Star family. He took a beating after an Access Hollywood video came out, in which he talks about sexually assaulting women, and it continued after more than a dozen women came forward to accuse him of sexual assault. But look at the news today, and it's Clinton's email scandal that dominates headlines.
The public has developed a Twitter-sized attention span, in which the latest outrage always seems to supersede the one before it. Maybe it was always this way and there were just more scandals this year, but the result is the same: no one can focus. Trump has taken full advantage of that fact. People start to talk about his bad debate performance? He'll pick a fight with Miss Universe. People start to talk about how he allegedly sexually assaults women? He'll tell the world the election will be rigged. And on November 8, you'll scratch your head and wonder, who was Judge Curiel again? (You know, the judge Trump accused of being biased because of his Mexican heritage.)
This has always been part of the human condition, of course. But it's not hard to see how technology---despite all of the ways it's made our lives better---can actually make these instincts worse.
So, yeah. Sorry to go all dark on you, WIRED readers. As for tomorrow? We're trying to be optimistic.
