From the Arab Spring uprisings to the ongoing electoral gains of the radical right and left to the rise of anti-science sentiment, the past 15 years have been characterised by waves of populism, polarisation and an erosion of trust in experts, expertise and the establishment. Many factors contribute to these trends, but, as I have previously argued, a key one is the dramatic change in our information environment brought about by the rise of social media.
Every media revolution has transformed who distributes information, what messages are distributed and what form they take. As such, some media are fundamentally democratising and polarising, widening the pool of publishers and views beyond a narrow elite and amplifying radical and anti-establishment voices. TikTok and the printing press arrived almost 600 years apart but share these characteristics. Others push the opposite way: radio and television had high barriers to entry, creating a monopoly for the voices and views of elites and experts.
As the use of AI chatbots takes off, it’s worth pausing to ask which of these categories they fall into. There is good reason to believe it is the latter.