NPR – That Could Mean A Nightmare For Democracy: “America’s new socially distant reality has warped the landscape of the 2020 election. Candidates aren’t out knocking on doors, and U.S. election officials are bracing for a record surge in mail ballots. But another subtler shift is also occurring — inside people’s brains. Four years after Russia’s expansive influence operation, which touched the feeds of more than 100 million users on Facebook alone, Americans’ usage of social media has only increased — and drastically so, as a result of the pandemic. More people are more online right now than at any point in human history, and experts say the Internet has gotten only more flooded since 2016 with bad information. “It’s far, far worse in terms of quantity,” says Steven Brill, a former journalist and now the CEO of NewsGuard, a browser extension that helps users discern the quality of what they’re reading online….A study out last week from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that nearly half of the Twitter accounts spreading messages about the coronavirus pandemic are likely bots — automated accounts designed to make it appear that more humans are acting a certain way than truly are…”