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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

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March 10, 2021

Can Online Politics Be Fixed?

Most of us didn’t need an attack on the US Capitol to see that the Internet has done strange things to our politics.

At The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev write that for some time, the Internet has been sowing “anomie and alienation”—the opposite of what Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 19th-century America’s institution-centered public life. (Tocqueville noted the ubiquity of “associations,” which Americans used “to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books.”)

The Internet seems to have helped degrade that civic fabric, but thankfully, cures are percolating. “[A]ctivists, lawyers, designers, regulators, and philosophers” have offered plans “to resurrect the habits and customs that Tocqueville admired, to bring them online, not only in America but all across the democratic world,” Applebaum and Pomerantsev write.

Recommended-content algorithms may inflame us, but political theorist Francis Fukuyama has proposed the advent of “middleware”: third-party algorithms from which users could choose. Others have designed alternative platforms: In Vermont, a site called Front Porch Forum “is used by roughly a quarter of the state’s residents for all sorts of community activity, from natural-disaster response to job-hunting, as well as civic discussion,” Applebaum and Pomerantsev write. “Instead of encouraging users to interact as much and as fast as possible, Front Porch slows the conversation down: Your posts come online 24 hours after you’ve written them. Sometimes, people reach out to the moderators to retract something said in anger.” A Seattle-based startup called Polis lets 140-character posts receive votes, but not replies, to avoid trolling; a Polis debate hosted by the Taiwanese government helped defuse tensions between Uber and taxi associations. Applebaum and Pomerantsev float another idea: having courts examine whether users violated social-media platforms’ terms of service. (That would put a public institution in charge of deciding, for instance, whether a president should be allowed back on.)

“The internet was the future once, and it can be again” Applebaum and Pomerantsev argue, if we “apply the best of the past” and reshape it with healthy civic life in mind.

Vaccinators vs. Memes in the UK

The UK ranks first among large countries in Covid-19 vaccinations per capita, having delivered at least one shot to more than 34% of its population, according to Bloomberg. But at The New Yorker, Anna Russell writes of concerns about vaccine skepticism, as online and offline disinformation fighters note the spread of false notions about infertility, Bill Gates, and implanted microchips.

As Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote recently for the same magazine, at least one researcher has observed anecdotally that in the US, even well-informed citizens can exhibit skepticism. Russell cites a UK study that found Covid-19 vaccine resistance can be singular, with skeptics embracing other vaccines but not these. In response, one UK charity is running pro-vaccination public-service ads in more than a dozen languages, and some faith leaders are playing a role. “Misinformation is something that’s ongoing,” a Leeds imam tells Russell; one “cannot put a lid on it.”

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$3 Trillion Just Waiting to Be Spent?

Thanks to Covid-19, consumers in 21 countries are sitting on a $3 trillion pile of extra saved-up cash, The Economist estimates, citing its own count of excess household savings over the first nine months of 2020. That’s “a tenth of annual consumer spending in those countries,” the magazine writes. “Households in some places have built up bigger cash piles than in others,” with the Canada and the US leading the way.

The question, the magazine writes, is whether people will decide to spend that money if or when the pandemic clouds lift; if they do, we could see a “rapid bounce-back” in consumer activity. In that scenario, America’s larger savings and stimulus spending could see the US leave Europe’s putative rebound “in its dust.”

Do Iranians ‘Want the Bomb’?

The Biden administration seems still to be figuring out how to approach Iran over its nuclear program, after the latter rejected an EU offer to talk last month. As Washington and other capitals recalibrate, a Foreign Policy essay by Maysam Behravesh argues global observers should focus on Iran’s citizens, not its leaders, when assessing the country’s nuclear ambitions.

When Iran decided in 2013 to negotiate with world powers over its nuclear program, Behravesh writes, a “massive force of public opinion and its prevailing narratives in favor of nuclear diplomacy”—which had been frustrated for years, including during the country’s much-protested 2009 election—"compelled Iran’s top leadership to give diplomacy a decent chance.” International pressure and US President Barack Obama’s willingness to compromise may have played a role, but to Behravesh, popular sentiment was the deciding factor.

Today, thanks to “foreign punishment” seen as “unfair,” things are different, Behravesh writes: “Now almost eight years on, and under the heavy and humiliating weight of U.S. maximum pressure, the same collective forces that compelled Iran to open up to nuclear compromise are nudging it in the opposite direction, thanks to an incremental resurgence of territorial nationalism across society. And Iran’s long-asleep nuclear genie is waking up and dancing its way, to that nationalist tune, out of its bottle.”