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About a week before he used the national political stage to ask viewers to think about Donald Trump’s “finger” size, Marco Rubio told the audience during another recent Republican presidential debate to Google “Donald Trump and Polish workers.” They did.

The worry is no longer about who controls content. It is about who controls the flow of that content.

Rubio wanted voters to see news stories about Trump illegally hiring undocumented Polish workers more than 35 years ago to demolish a building to make way for Trump Tower. Searches for those terms, and the fraudulent “Trump University,” shot way up. It was like a public version of the now ubiquitous phenomenon of everyone whipping out smartphones to verify a disputed fact at a party or meeting. Not that it did much good in this case; as numerous commentators have noted, Trump and many of his supporters don’t seem particularly worried about minor annoyances like “facts.” (For the record, PolitiFact, which checks the veracity of politicians’ statements, judged Rubio’s charge to be “half true.”)

Nonetheless, Rubio’s Google gambit and Trump’s (non)reaction to it, reveals an interesting, and troubling, new change in attitude about a philosophical foundation of democracy: the ideal of an informed citizenry.

Political thinkers have long claimed with Jefferson that, “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.” The idea is obvious: If citizens are going to make even indirect decisions about policy, we need to know the facts about the problem the policy is meant to rectify, and to be able to gain some understanding about how effective that policy would be. In the larger sense, if we are going to decide who runs the country — and we are, if you think the electoral college allows for that — we need to know the facts about the candidates’ records.



This is one reason philosophers have always been worried about the ebb and flow of information, and who controls it. Plato argued in “The Republic” that the fact that democracies couldn’t control that flow and point it toward truth was one reason they often dissolved into tyranny. In a different vein, Noam Chomsky argued in the 1980s that consent was being “manufactured” by Big Media — large consolidated content-delivery companies (like this newspaper) that could cause opinions to sway one way or the other at their whim. Knowledge is power; capture it and you capture power in a democracy.

Now in print The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments An anthology of essays from The Times’s philosophy series, published by Liveright.

The political importance of information — and the fear that it can be manipulated — has not changed. What has changed is how we are informed about politics or anything else, or how we aren’t. The Big Media that worried Chomsky 30 years ago is largely a thing of the past; many of the largest newspapers are gone, and others are shadows of their former selves. In the halcyon early days of the Internet, when we began excitedly exploring the information Garden of Eden, still free of the shadow of social media, it was easy to think that knowledge itself had become democratic, and that Plato’s worry had at last been shown to be bankrupt. But the worry hasn’t gone away — it has just changed form.

The worry is no longer about who controls content. It is about who controls the flow of that content. It is no coincidence that we are now seeing Big Data companies like Facebook sponsor presidential debates. Nor is it a coincidence that people are increasingly following the election on social media, using it both as the source of their information and as the way to get their view out. Consent is still being manufactured, but the manufacturing is being done willingly by us, usually intended for consumption by other people with whom we already agree, facts or no facts.

It really isn’t a surprise that Rubio would ask us to Google for certain facts; that’s how you and I know almost everything we know nowadays — it is a way of knowing that is so embedded into the very fabric of our lives that we don’t even notice it. What else could Rubio ask us to do to fact-check Trump? We used to say that seeing is believing; now Googling is believing.

Of course, in many ways following that norm — Google it! — can help us realize the Jefferson ideal of an informed citizen I sketched above. That ideal, recall, emerges out of the simple fact that reasonable action requires knowledge, and reasonable political action requires political knowledge. And Google places more politically important information at our fingertips than ever before. So if the ideal of being informed means having more information available for uptake, there is a case for saying that we are now closer than ever to realizing that ideal. That is behind the thought, commonly voiced in the early part of this century, that the Internet has “democratized” knowledge.

The Internet is both the world’s best fact-checker and the world’s best bias confirmer — often at the same time.

The problem of course is that having more information available, even more accurate information, isn’t what is required by the ideal. What is required is that people actually know and understand that information, and there are reasons to think we are no closer to an informed citizenry understood in that way than we ever have been. Indeed, we might be further away.

One reason for thinking so is that searching the Internet can get you to information that would back up almost any claim of fact, no matter how unfounded. It is both the world’s best fact-checker and the world’s best bias confirmer — often at the same time. Group polarization on the Internet is a fact of digital life. Liberals “friend” liberals and share liberal-leaning media stories and opinions with them; conservatives friend conservatives, and do the same.

And the flow of digital information is just as prone to manipulation as its content — even when that flow is directed at an audience larger than our own immediate circle. Take an example: Search for “what really happened to the dinosaurs” and one of the top results is likely to be from a site called answersingenesis.org — not, I suggest, a good source of information on the T-Rex. But it illustrates how canny use of search engine metrics can be used to push an agenda. No wonder Trump and his followers on Twitter immediately shrugged off Rubio’s inconvenient truths; there is nothing to fear from information when counterinformation is just as plentiful.

That’s why the real worry here isn’t about the regrettable if obvious fact that citizens are less informed than our ideals demand. Nor is it simply the amusing specter of candidates’ shouting competing Googling instructions at the audience like so many carnival barkers. The real worry concerns our faith in the ideal of an informed citizenry itself. That worry, as I see it, has two faces.

Related More From The Stone Read previous contributions to this series.

First, as Jason Stanley and others have emphasized recently, appeals to ideals can be used to undermine those very ideals. People on both the left and the right tell one another that “the information is right there; people just aren’t paying attention to the facts (Google it!).” The very availability of information can make us think that the ideal of the informed citizen is more realized than it is — and that, in turn, can actually undermine the ideal, making us less informed, simply because we think we know all we need to know already.

Second, the danger is that increasing recognition of the fact that Googling can get you wherever you want to go can make us deeply cynical about the ideal of an informed citizenry — for the simple reason that what counts as an “informed” citizen is a matter of dispute. We no longer disagree just over values. Nor do we disagree just over the facts. We disagree over whose source — whose fountain of facts — is the right one.

And once disagreement reaches that far down, the daylight of reason seems very far away indeed.

Michael P. Lynch is a professor of philosophy and the director of the Humanities Institute’s Public Discourse Project at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of the forthcoming “The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data”. Twitter @Plural_truth

Now in print: “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” An anthology of essays from The Times’s philosophy series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.