Question: What is the most powerful news medium in the world today?

If you’ve even casually followed the news the past four years, the answer seems obvious: social media and the Web.

After all, as we’ve heard again and again, it was Silicon Valley that was responsible for Trump’s shock 2016 victory, thanks to a foul cocktail of fake news, bots, memes, and so on. In fact, social media, we’ve been repeatedly told, is the cause of just about everything good, bad, or in between that’s happened in recent years, from Brexit and unrest in Hong Kong to opposition to fracking and protests against police brutality. Tech CEOs have been repeatedly summoned to Congress and dressed down, pushing them into ever-intensifying efforts to censor content on their platforms. And of course, it’s social media that’s to blame for the Capitol riot last month, as various critics across the political spectrum have told us.