These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

New sources of news tended to be unedited, their facts unverified, their politics unhinged. “Alternative” political communities took the 1990s culture wars online; Tumblr on the left and 4chan on the right, trafficking in hysteria and irony, hatred and contempt, Tumblr performing the denunciation of white privilege with pious call-outs and demanding trigger warnings and safe spaces, 4chan pronouncing white supremacy and antifeminism by way of ironic memes and murderous trolls.17 In a throwback to the political intrigues of the Cold War, Russia-sponsored hackers and trolls, posing as Americans, created fake Twitter and Facebook accounts whose purpose was to undermine the authority of the mainstream news, widen the American partisan divide, stoke racial and religious animosity, and incite civil strife. Under these circumstances, the fevered rants of deranged conspiracy theorists reached a new and newly receptive audience but, in a much broader and deeper sense, in an age of ceaseless online spectacle and massive corporate and government surveillance, nearly all political thinking became conspiratorial.