What Happens to X With No More Libs to Troll?

Leah Feiger: Well, these are all horrifying thoughts and I'm going to go cry after this. David Gilbert: I don't know if we've been through the peak year of social media where people felt they needed to be on every app all the time and checking their messages, checking their engagement, all that stuff. Vittoria Elliott: I mean, I think frankly, fragmentation is probably really helpful because so much of conspiracy theory when I look at it really empathetically is people who see that there's problems in the world, they have an understanding of some data points around it, but they don't have enough information to draw the right conclusion around it, but they have access to more information than they probably should to be able to form that opinion. And study after study shows that, A, part of the way you change people's minds and, B, part of the way people absorb information credibly is through people they know and through smaller communities and communities of trust. And it almost feels like we're returning to the roots of media of information ecosystems, which is smaller communities of people that care about similar stuff where there is a baseline level of trust and talking to each other and letting stuff grow from there.