Comment This article came up with the wrong answer (Score 1) 95
Those who don't know the history are not doing a fair analysis of the problems going on. The big problem is when there is an intentional distortion of events, and then you have the distortions being what gets put onto the news(traditional as well as online). You have certain groups that LIVE in a bubble where they know that most of the things they see are fake or misleading, and they LOVE the intentional distorting of reality. You see it all over, the "echo chamber" effect, and yes, that ends up being harmful when people embrace the distortions, because they don't like reality.
Then, you have the big social media companies that intentionally promote misleading content to try to manipulate people for various reasons. Social media by itself is not the problem, but the companies that are in control have set things up to encourage the distortion of these echo chambers and to then send it out, so you get distorted information that is now being amplified. That is where we have a problem. AI picks up on this as well to continue the cycle and makes it worse over time.
Now, when the GOVERNMENT(s) are pushing the distortions, that is when you get propaganda, and the companies that just do what government tells them to do. With freedom, it wouldn't be a problem, but we have a number of people who are being empowered to be dictators who get no push-back, and when the social media companies do what these dictators tell them to do(on threat of shutting down their business), again, propaganda is the result.
The harm to democracy is when people cave in to those who WANT to distort the message to favor what the dictators want, but again, it is because governments themselves are not pushing back against the trend of letting authoritarians gain greater levels of power. If you don't push back, the "never again" that was said so loudly after the end of World War II ends up being, "sure, we know what happened before, but we don't care that it is happening again". We MUST push back against the propaganda governments are pushing, and push back when they try to strong-arm the media into doing what government wants.