Though I appreciate Panievsky’s commitment to holding journalists accountable for the rise of the far-right, I feel she gives the danger of social media short shrift. She writes, “Journalists and newsrooms cannot cry ‘press freedom!’ and pride themselves on being essential for democracy, but blame it on TikTok whenever democracy goes rogue.” She also cites what social scientists call the “trust gap,” a phenomenon which describes the public’s belief in institutional/mainstream journalism being greater than news sourced from social media platforms. To be sure, journalists are certainly responsible, at least in part, for accelerating the far-right’s ascendancy. (Donald Trump, for example, has particularly benefited from the ceaseless mainstream news coverage). But most Americans do not have New York Times subscriptions, nor do they regularly watch CNN or NBC on network television. As of 2025, social media became the main source of news for most Americans. Even if the public is less willing to trust headlines on Meta, they are most definitely seeing them and internalizing them, even subconsciously. These platforms, I believe, are primarily to blame for the popularity of the far-right.
Part of the danger with social media is that it situates its users in echo chambers, where there may be a normalizing effect on extremist ideas. Panievsky writes about this phenomenon in the context of Trump’s election. His victory seemingly gave individuals the license to express xenophobic views which had previously been espoused privately. As Panievsky recounts: “After being shown data suggesting that Trump’s election was certain in their state, Americans were more likely to donate to anti-immigration causes. Even individuals who were less likely to agree with xenophobic behaviour sanctioned it less when they learned that it was more popular in their community than they expected.” The perceived reduction in stigma led to an uptick in vocalizing extremist ideas. This pattern is of course amplified on social media, where one’s feed consists almost entirely of ideological sycophants. It is no wonder, then, that these platforms can become breeding grounds for extremism.
Finally, I’m interested in the question of newsworthiness in the Trump era / Age of Distraction. Just over a decade ago, President Obama’s choice to wear a tan suit at a press conference constituted the biggest White House scandal of his tenure. Today, scandals of much greater magnitude – calling a female journalist “miss piggy”, falsely claiming that Haitian migrants eat their pets – are reported as mere headlines and disappear from the news cycle in a remarkably speedy fashion. What happens when these scandals/controversies occur so frequently that we hardly pause to recognize their danger? This, too, creates a normalizing effect which helps contribute to the destigmatization of extremist ideas.
