If you wanted to know what was happening in Paris in 1750, you went to “l’arbre de Cracovie”. This tree was named so, not because it had any special connection with the Polish city, but because the term of the time for “fake news” (“made up” news) and the space under its branches was full of them.

And yet the tree didn’t just attract gossips who claimed to know what was really going on in the corridors of power. It also attracted the attention of the government, which wanted to know what the Parisians were thinking, as well as of foreign powers, which sent agents there to collect information or “plant it”, as the newspaper characteristically writes, among others, ” Guardian”.

In our time, those of us living in liberal democratic states that depend on an educated, engaged population for their continued existence continue to be faced with an… “arbre de Cracovie”.

Only this “new reality” is more ubiquitous, more immediate, more overwhelming and more powerful. And as voters around the world head into the biggest election year in history, one wonders: can democracy ‘survive’ social media?

David Colon, a French historian specializing in propaganda and mass manipulation, says that while propaganda itself is nothing new, what is new is the speed with which “fake news” is spread, as well as the plummeting of trust. of the world in the traditional Mass Media. There’s a “triplet” of things going on, all of which are likely to get worse, and which feed into each other.

Firstly, and probably unsurprisingly to most, ‘fake news’. The recent rise of Artificial Intelligence and deepfakes have caused future leaders, politicians and celebrities to lose sleep, with a recent notable example being Taylor Swift.

Have you ever wondered what will happen in an era – which is just around the corner – where, during global crises, people will be bombarded with footage of attacks that have not happened and forced to react in real time?

Conspiracy theories will rage even more, such as those that sprung up after the suspicious death of Alexei Navalny, claiming he was assassinated by Western intelligence or even that his death bears all the hallmarks of the Putin regime. Some will believe everything, even false facts, while others will deny everything, even true facts.

Second, the rise of “newsfluencers”, who further fragment our once shared informational reality. For example, how many of the nearly 500,000 followers of “Breakthrough News” on TikTok know that half of the social media accounts are linked to an American billionaire, Neville Roy Singham, whose alleged promotion of the interests of both the Kremlin and Beijing was detailed in reports by the New York Times and the Daily Beast. Few…

These trends are destructive enough on their own, but as Peter Pomerantsev details in his book 2019’s This Is Not Propaganda, the third arrow aimed at the heart of democracy is that authoritarian regimes exploit and actively promote both in a ubiquitous information war. Last week, France’s digital counterintelligence agency, Viginum, identified a massive Russian propaganda network called “Portal Kombat” that specifically targets western Europe.

And it is a fact that if you weaken the truth and create false equivalencies-facts, you weaken – in the long run – the ability of citizens to distinguish what is real and what is not. With the end result, of course, in this vacuum of generalized loss of trust, mistrust and not knowing who to trust, more and more people will turn to the strong hand of authoritarianism.

And to paraphrase Antonio Gramsci, there are many reasons to succumb to the pessimism of the intellect. In order not to do so, it will take a huge effort to cultivate the optimism of the will…