Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left Podcast.

Let's just say that it's not a coincidence that right-wing authoritarians are on the rise

at the same time as people around the world are having a harder time than ever figuring out what's true.

That said, society is beginning to fight back.

Sources providing our top takes in about 45 minutes today

includes the new abnormal, the Commonwealth Club World Affairs,

Wisecrack, Zoe B, Tech Tank, and on the media.

Then in the additional deeper dives half of the show, there will be more in three sections.

Section A, social misinformation, section B, live by the algorithm, and section C, solutions. I'm someone who is terminally online I have been since I first got an

AOL connection in 1996 I think and have had many experiences of refreshing a feed not of

journalists but of people who are rapidly trying to gather information ahead of the

journalists because the journalists are waiting to actually get sources and

confirm things. So I just did this yesterday after there was another

assassination attempt on the president like I was refreshing

Twitter and watching the bad information flow in and watching good information get discarded.

It's something I've been doing now for more than half my life.

So ultimately it becomes a story about that, about the movement of information through this bizarre system we've built.

Yeah, and look, there's a lot of stuff in the book is

about the internet and about social media. One of the characters in the book a

former FBI agent named Joan Key says that or is thinking in the book that Tic-Toc is possibly the most

addictive piece of software ever created. You in real life are someone who uses that

platform a lot and really well I should add. Do you share Joan Key's belief in this case?

...