In economics, shifting from a concentrated market with a handful of dominant players to a highly competitive market of small players is usually considered a good thing. But when the products these players are targeting at different sets of consumers are alternative versions of reality as we know it, it’s not so clear that society benefits.
For all the attention given to misinformation, a narrow focus on objective falsehoods distracts us from a much more fundamental shift. The emerging democratic risk is not so much that people believe false things — they always have. It is that they no longer believe the same things as one another, false or otherwise.