WaPo | At first glance, the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak and the Democratic
Party’s bungling of the Iowa caucuses don’t seem to have much in common.
Yet take a closer look and you’ll see that both attest to the growing
power of the agents of chaos who are prepared to twist information to
nefarious ends.
It’s
the uncertainty and the fear surrounding the Wuhan virus that have made
it a global news story. The Chinese Communist Party reacted to the
initial outbreak just as it has in the past — by suppressing any information from the source of the epidemic, including cracking down on a doctor who revealed it early on.
That
has created a fertile environment for overheated media coverage,
half-truths and conspiracy theories. No, the Wuhan virus almost
certainly didn’t emerge from Chinese bioweapons research. And no, you can’t cure it with oregano oil.
Which brings us to Iowa. The state Democratic Party’s catastrophic
mismanagement of the caucus vote count would have been bad enough in its
own right. On Thursday, the chair of the Democratic National Committee said
that he wants to see the results recounted. Yet the spreaders of
disinformation have been working around the clock to exacerbate the
damage — and here, too, Facebook, Google and Twitter have proved
completely incapable of reining in the falsehoods.
The reality is that too many people have figured out that undermining the truth is easy, fun and profitable.The agents of chaos have the upper hand. We’d better figure out a way to fight back, and soon.
