Hello, my name's David Rumsman and this is past, present, future, the History of Ideas

podcast. We're coming to the end of our series about how to fix democracy. But before we do, we're talking today

about a subject that a lot of people have contacted us and asked us to discuss social media,

information, disinformation, where and how we get our news and what that is doing to our politics.

I'm talking to the writer Sam Friedman, who has written extensively

about this subject. We're going to discuss TikTok. We're going to discuss all of the ways in which

we may be getting the wrong information. And we're going to ask whether democracy can cope

with the media environment we find ourselves in.

Sam, I'm going to start with the question, which I suppose is a devil's advocate question.

I'm not even sure about that because I'm not sure I know what I think about this.

But why does it matter what the quality of the information that people are getting is? And I ask that for a couple of reasons, one of which is, it's not clear to me in the history of democracy, people have ever had

good information. And we're talking about news mainly, but not just news, the ways in which people

are informed about what's going on so that they can make choices. There isn't a golden age, I don't think at any point when the information was good. And then that's a sort of historical point. And then there's a more political sciencey point, which is when there is good information, there's not much evidence that it makes any difference to how people behave politically anyway. And yet, I feel instinctively it must be a problem if the information is getting worse. So why does it matter?

So I think it's true that there's never been a golden age of sort of incredibly well-educated voters who sort of

understood all the issues. But the nature of the information people have got has changed

dramatically insofar as it's become far more fragmented and differentiated

in the way it operates. So you had a period for most of the 20th century and certainly post-war

where the news sources, certainly in the UK, but in other countries as well were newspapers, a small number of newspapers,

and then a small number of television channels, most of which were either state-run

or had some kind of state-level regulation around the content that attempted to make that

content broadly neutral and non-partisan,

not always successfully, but that was the goal.

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