There's many things I see wrong with this argument/sentiment in general and I don't really know how to even address most of it. Apart from what are mostly just

There's many things I see wrong with this argument/sentiment in general and I don't really know how to even address most of it. Apart from what are mostly just biased judgements used to drive forward the narrative, there are 2 basic misconceptions that the article is trying to pedal as fact. 1: That democracy is supposed to inherently solve these issues; there's a clear reason why America was not founded as a democratic country. The founders of the US saw democracy in the same way they viewed autocracy. They called for a careful balance of different political systems in order to minimize the harm of each of these. Democracy was specifically avoided because pure democracy quickly devolves (and is synonymous) to "mobocracy." The article tries to place the blame for this on everything other than the system itself. However, the reason why these issues exist even in a system that is partially democratic (and obviously much more democratic than it was when the United States (or any other country mentioned) was founded) is because they have not taken over. Mob rule is slow to come to power, and this should be a warning to people that we're nearing the edge of the cliff (rather than that some have cheated the system into submission). It's also worth noting that democracy should never imply a system in which everyone independently forms views, as that is quite clearly impossible. Leading to the second point: 2: "Outside influences" are supposedly ruining political discourse. This idea just makes no sense to me. The blame placed on Russia for influencing the 2016 election is effectively for generating discussion. It is not for changing votes, because as far as we know that was never done. It's also not for lying to people; to argue that Russia was in the wrong for lying to people is 100% disingenuous because the authors of this article are just as happy lying to people in order to drive forth their own narrative. It seemingly blames the increased political division on right-wing politics by arguing how everything from Gamergate to Wikipedia has caused people to become more right-leaning. Ignoring the fact that they mischaracterize the entire movement of Gamergate (equating it to alt-right politics by linking it to 4chan, when in fact Gamergate was almost exclusively originating from 8chan, saying that it is trolling rather than a legitimate opinion to hold, etc.) and lie about Wikipedia's political agenda (it's quite easy to see that the major editors on Wikipedia are heavily left-leaning based on the frequent bans given to right-leaning editors), it's immediately clear from the graph showing party division that Democrats have "radicalized" far more than their Republican counterparts. In this scenario, they are using blatant lies and scare tactics to get across their opinion. How is this different at all from what they blame Russia/right-wing media/4chan for? Sure Russia might be using fake accounts to manipulate the public, but if the only solutions you can propose are limiting freedom of speech, you are doing much more to ruin democracy.