"Efforts to reach voters with trusted information are becoming more difficult as tech platforms lean into viral trends, instead of quality news."<p>The snake is eating itself. What is most dangerous about the current situation is now how easy it is to pull the natural strings of the western world order. Democracy. The ballot referendum. How you "vote" with your dollar. All of these things could always have been tightly influenced and controlled, but this was done more or less through an indirect incentive structure that favored existing large investment.<p>Now, anything is able to use these social media tools to run around existing capital structure and get whatever message out to voters and consumers directly. What captures the consciousness now isn't necessarily a consensus of an economies major investors, but simply whatever is able to abuse the viral phenomenon the best at the time and in the context.<p>Coupled with the ease of generating high quality propaganda of any shape or form through various publicly released tools, we are in for interesting times, for sure.