Jesse Singal

In theory, crowdsourced “citizen journalism” is a good idea. After all, all it really takes to be a journalist is certain critical-thinking skills and/or access to information that other people don’t have. Gather a big enough crowd online and that is a lot of brainpower, a lot of access to information. Of course, that isn’t how things seem to work these days at all. Rather, whatever potential the concept of crowdsourced citizen journalism has is getting squandered rather spectacularly.

Take the final weeks of this brutal presidential campaign, where there’s by now a well-established pattern: Every time WikiLeaks drops a new trove of Hillary Clinton or Democratic National Committee e-mails, a torrent of bullshit is uncorked. That’s because countless citizen journalists rush to pore over the documents, posting j’accuse screen-grabs ripped from context that are quickly retweeted through huge, hyperactive networks of anti-Clinton Twitter denizens.We’re all engaging in a big, messy experiment in how human beings produce, consume, and disseminate knowledge, and in how they form ideological and identity-based alliances with one another. There’s never before been anything like it, and it’s not going well so far.