I grew up in the 1980s, in a working class neighborhood in Philadelphia called East Falls. At dinner time, my parents would put on the The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on PBS, and my older sister and I would all watch it along with my parents. I have no idea how common or uncommon that was at the time. It feels like an entirely different world now, looking back.

I realize now that the way that program presented and editorialized the news, the voices and tensions involved, still shapes how I think about how we get our news in the present, and how it’s shifted over time, and what that’s done to us collectively.

Tabloid journalism has existed in the US since before it was founded. Today the New York Post and Fox News pick and choose stories that amplify and reinforce negative, fear-driven narratives and subtexts that have existed for centuries. And even more importantly, a small number of for-profit social media companies decide which news stories are amplified and which are buried.

The book Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, provides a clear and damning portrait of how Facebook, rebranded to Meta, has willfully chosen, instead of taking a path available to becoming a change agent for good, to supercharge agit-prop, and work hand-in-hand with the Trump election campaign, to allow hate speech and propaganda to spread like wildfire. Sarah’s account of what happened in Myanmar shows what can happen when all guardrails are off. An entire country collapsing into ethnic strife, hatred, propaganda, and civil war - all within just a few years.

The odds of the US passing federal legislation preventing social media corporations from deploying algorithms that prioritize engagement and profit over all other concerns is low. But small steps can create meaningful change surprisingly quickly. States like New York, California, and Colorado could lead the way in passing state laws that treat TikTok-style social media algorithms as what they are: addictive and harmful. They can say to corporations like Meta, Google, and TikTok that they need to provide ways for users to opt-out of harmful algorithm designs, dial them back so they’re not so addictive and inflamatory. I could see certain European countries or the EU itself passing similar laws. We need to make it extremely difficult for these companies to do business, if we want to keep the West from turning into an authoritarian wasteland, where we have no say, no control, no voice.