I think one of the biggest ways social media can harm democracy is that it’s trivially easy for a foreign actor (or anyone with malicious intent) to run an influence campaign now. How would they have done it before social media - printed out millions of leaflets? That would be very obvious, expensive, logistically difficult, and hard to scale.
It was very telling when X started showing people’s locations and a lot of the political accounts targeting the US were based in other countries.
It was very telling when X started showing people’s locations and a lot of the political accounts targeting the US were based in other countries.