MacDougall: To stop Trump, drain the social media swamp

Agree, but how to make this happen, no matter how needed:

…The West used to have systems in place to resist such people. The main bulwark of that system was a free and independent press and its scrutiny function. We have spent the past 20 years (inadvertently) dismantling that system. In the recent past, you couldn’t lie and expect to get to first base in politics. Now, lying is the key to hitting a home run.

Trump first mused about running for the presidency in the late 1980s. If you read the coverage of the time, much of Trump’s message was the same: the United States was getting ripped off and it was time somebody did something about it. His target was then (mostly) Japan, the then-economic upstarts “stealing” American jobs and prosperity. It’s not Trump that’s different; it’s the universe around him.

The moral for our story is: Trump’s 1980s bluster fell apart the first moment it was challenged by someone working for a serious news outfit. The same was true when he tried to run for the presidency in 2000. Moreover, he had no way to easily co-opt what was then a vibrant Republican Party, with its hierarchies and power blocs. It took hard work to be a serious contender and Trump doesn’t do hard work. The system screened him out.

All this changed in the 2010s when the information economy suddenly gifted Trump a megaphone he could use to get around the hard work of organizing. Twitter gave Trump a playground of shamelessness where fringe topics like “birtherism” were fuel for a political career, rather than a career-killer.

If Canada wants to inoculate itself from Trump, it should club together at the G7 and G20 and start asking why democracies like ours allow the (most American) behemoths of the attention economy to operate in the way they do. Why is “free” an acceptable business model when the cost to society is so great? Why do the authoritarians of the world keep these platforms out or use them as weapons (i.e. TikTok), while we allow ourselves to become addicted to them?

If we want to limit Trump, we need to start by draining the swamp that is the attention economy. Because in the current system Trump — or someone equally shameless — wins every time.

Source: MacDougall: To stop Trump, drain the social media swamp