I agree social media is mostly the problem but I think the issue is that social media (and more generally a globally connected digital world) creates a _much_ t

I agree social media is mostly the problem but I think the issue is that social media (and more generally a globally connected digital world) creates a _much_ tighter feedback loop. So you can see that politicians or anyone else with an agenda is able to test messaging and see how it succeeds/fails then iterate at a much faster pace. I don't think its a coincidence that we saw so many similarities in how certain world leaders mimicked Trumps approach of declaring Fake News etc. You see the same thing in a lot of app development frameworks / languages being more homogeneous in features these days after github and open source has really taken hold. Its much quicker to see something working in another ecosystem and then adopt it into your own.