The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread

by Cailin O'Connor

Two months later, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other nationalist and nativist extremists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, carrying torches and chanting anti-Semitic, racist, and pro-Trump slogans.50 Violence broke out between the “Unite the Right” crowd and counterprotesters, injuring fourteen people. The following day, a twenty-year-old white supremacist named James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a counterprotest. He injured nineteen people and killed a thirty-two-year-old woman named Heather Heyer. In the month before the attack he reportedly had posted photos of Nazis, swastikas, and pro-Trump memes on his Facebook page, as well as pictures of alt-right icons such as Pepe the Frog.51 The term “polarization” originated in physics to describe the way some electromagnetic waves propagate in two oppositely oriented ways. By the mid-nineteenth century, political pundits had embraced this metaphor, of two opposite ways of being, to describe disagreements in a state dominated by two parties. Today it captures the broad sense that Democrats and Republicans, Labour and Tories, left-wing and right-wing, are increasingly divided in their beliefs and moral stances.