The 2020 presidential election hasn’t yet come to a definitive conclusion, due in part to the power of the internet to enable and reinforce an alternate reality in which widespread voter fraud—despite no material evidence or even credible suspicion by serious observers—robbed President Donald Trump of reelection.

All too often causal factors that have nothing to do with technology collide with digital communication to accelerate and amplify distrust and confusion. We are where we are in mid-November because the president himself is unwilling to respect the most basic political and cultural conventions around the transition of power. Yet it’s impossible to quell the anxiety that the internet—what it enables and how people use it—is playing a central role in translating the president’s intransigence into a credible threat to democracy. The ability to reach a large and dedicated audience directly through social media has been a signature feature of President Trump’s governing style, and the predilection for that audience to ravenously feed its motivated reasoning is facilitated by the internet.

Social media is, in this respect, not unlike nuclear weapons: They didn’t create malevolence, but they vastly raised the stakes.

What we must recognize, however, is that the power of the internet to destabilize our democracy and society has simply been thrown into relief by the election. These deleterious effects had already reached troubling levels, even before the confusion of the past few months. For philanthropy and civil society, the task is to develop clearer knowledge of the endemic challenges the internet now poses for our society, of which the election is merely the latest and most vivid symptom.

Read the full article about the power of the internet by Sam Gill at Stanford Social Innovation Review.