In the 2002–3 run-up to war, mainstream media outlets systematically suppressed evidence that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. They couldn’t have gotten away with it in the age of Twitter.
I find it odd that you write this given what we see around us today wrt Ukraine or China or the blowing up of Nordstream etc, etc etc. We have twitter, and substack, and youtube, and...but it is still next to impossible to widen the discussions around any of these issues, at least in the wider public domain. In fact it may be worse today. McClatchy did decent reporting about the weapons of mass destruction, or, should I say, the absence of evidence for such weapons. And they were a pretty big news outfit. But they were not the NYT or WaPo or WSJ or NPR and so their accurate skepticism did nothing. In fact, you seem to have forgotten them too. And despite this, millions marched against the war. Millions suspected the whole discussion was BS. And they were right. So, would twitter have made a difference? Not likely. Or maybe, yes, and we have seen what difference it would have made. There would have been no peace movement as activism would have meant tweeting apercus rather than marching for peace.
I find it odd that you write this given what we see around us today wrt Ukraine or China or the blowing up of Nordstream etc, etc etc. We have twitter, and substack, and youtube, and...but it is still next to impossible to widen the discussions around any of these issues, at least in the wider public domain. In fact it may be worse today. McClatchy did decent reporting about the weapons of mass destruction, or, should I say, the absence of evidence for such weapons. And they were a pretty big news outfit. But they were not the NYT or WaPo or WSJ or NPR and so their accurate skepticism did nothing. In fact, you seem to have forgotten them too. And despite this, millions marched against the war. Millions suspected the whole discussion was BS. And they were right. So, would twitter have made a difference? Not likely. Or maybe, yes, and we have seen what difference it would have made. There would have been no peace movement as activism would have meant tweeting apercus rather than marching for peace.