By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
FBI Director James Comey said Americans’ trust in government institutions is eroding because of “echo chambers” like Twitter.
“My children, again, discipline me not to go on Twitter because apparently people say bad things about me on Twitter. But things like Twitter offer us the opportunity only to encounter views consistent with our own, 24 hours a day,” Comey explained at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event Wednesday, Politico reports. “There’s an opportunity to feed that monster of a bias, that confirmation bias, all the time. So it accelerates that fractionalizing of our society, and it makes it much harder for people like me, like you, like the people in here, to speak reason to folks about our institutions.”
Comey didn’t directly mention the Hillary Clinton investigation, but eluded to it.
Twitter has become an outlet for GOP attacks against the FBI’s decision against charging Clinton for her use of a private email server as secretary of state.
“I’m not going to talk about the email investigation but I see some of the things people say about this thing, I’m like, ‘really?’ But it becomes truth to so many people. And I don’t know how to unring that bell,” he said. “So I do think it’s become enormously challenging for people in institutions that depend upon the trust of the citizens to recapture trust where it’s been lost, explain ourselves in a way that allows them to resist demagoguery or the Twitterverse.”
