Anne Applebaum: “American politics, Polish politics, French politics, Italian politics, Ukrainian politics, all derived from their own history, economics, and culture, now have this in common: In each of these countries, deep informational divides separate one part of the electorate from the rest. Some voters live in a so-called populist bubble, where they hear nationalist and xenophobic messages, learn to distrust fact-based media and evidence-based science, and become receptive to conspiracy theories and suspicious of democratic institutions. Others read and hear completely different media, respect different authorities, and search for a different sort of news. Whatever the advantages of these other bubbles, their rules render the people in them incapable of understanding or speaking with those outside of them.”

“In some places, including Poland and the United States, the country is divided in half. In other places, such as Germany, the proportions vary, but the divide is just as deep. A couple of years ago, I took part in a project that looked at foreign influence in the 2017 German parliamentary elections. We found, among other things, that the overwhelming majority of Germans—left, right, and center—follow a mix of big newspapers, magazines, and television outlets, including public TV. But many of the Germans who vote for the far-right Alternative for Germany—the number hovers between 10 and 14 percent—get their news from a completely separate set of sources, including a heavy dose of Russian-funded German-language media, such as Sputnik and RT. The voters in the far-right bubble don’t just have different opinions from other Germans; they have different facts, including ‘facts’ provided by a foreign country.”