Challenges of Democracy and Social Media

And I think the, the dislike of, and

anguish over social media is just growing and growing and growing.

Uh, and it's part of our problem, particularly in democracies,

uh, in terms of building consensus around any

issue.

It's really hard to govern today.

You can't, you know, you know, there's no...

The referees we used to have to determine what's a fact and what isn't a

fact have kind of,

you know, been eviscerated to a certain degree.

And, um, people go and then people self-select where

they go for their news or for their information,

and then you just get

into a vicious cycle. So it's really, really hard, much harder to

build consensus today than at any time in the 45, 50

years I've been involved in this. And, and, uh, you know, there's a

lot of discussion now about how you curb, uh, those

entities,

uh, in order to guarantee that you're going to have, you know, some

accountability on facts, et cetera.

But look, if people go to only one source, and the source they go to is

sick

and, uh, you know, has an agenda, and they're putting out

disinformation,

uh, our First Amendment stands as a major

block to the

ability to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.

So what you need, what we need is to,

is to win the ground, win the right to govern by

hopefully having, uh, you know, winning enough votes that you're free to

be able to,

to, uh, implement change. Uh, now, obviously there are some

people in our country who are prepared to implement change in other

ways,

and that's where the danger is.

So you're questioning really if, uh, democracy can survive

unregulated social media?

I think demo- I think, I think democracies are de-

are very challenged right now

and have not proven they can move fast enough or big

enough to deal with the challenges that we are facing.

And to me, that is part of what this race, uh, this, this election is all

about. Will we break the fever in the United

States?