The Democratic Challenge in Times of Bots, Trolls and Fake News

In 2017, in a paper entitled “The Age of Outrage,” social psychologist Jonathan Haidt put forward a provocative hypothesis: liberal democracy is as unlikely and fragile a system as life in the universe. To understand why, Haidt proposes to look at our evolutionary history: we are tribal primates, adapted to live in small societies marked by intense religions, violent conflicts and territorial struggles. This tribal predisposition is so profound …