S2 E10. Digital Wasteland

Democracy in Danger

The toxic waste that seeps into rivers taints everything downstream, spoiling lakes and oceans, killing flora and fauna, altering the air we breathe and raining back down. Information works the same way, media scholar Whitney Phillips says. Fueled by human passions, falsehoods permeate the mainstream media, undermine trust and hurt vulnerable people most. To untangle this trash, she argues, we need to think ecologically, too: looking not only to coders but faith leaders, teachers, even healthcare workers.