The thought was that new innovations in communications technology were going to make it impossible for authoritarians and tyrants to control the flow of information. The free-flowing exchange of ideas and news would undercut or even topple any leader who tried to clamp down on what his or her people read, listened to, or viewed.

A new era, one of liberation for the American spirit, had begun.

Three decades down the road, the view looks different.

Nearly two months into a disastrous war with Ukraine, polls show that support for autocratic President Vladimir Putin increased—by almost 10%, in fact.

This is so even though Russia’s army has been stymied where it hasn’t been defeated, casualties among the Russian troops have been much greater than expected, desertions are mounting, and Putin hasn’t achieved any of his war aims.

Some of Putin’s poll bump can be attributed, to be sure, to fears among the populace that indicating opposition to an authoritarian leader with a documented penchant for murderous violence isn’t the easiest path to a long and healthy life.

This is particularly true when that leader feels embattled and desperate.

But that’s far from the whole of it.

Many Russians are supporting Putin because the media they rely on tells a far different story about the war. The Putin-backing Russian media, for example, don’t describe the attack on Ukraine as an invasion—reporters or commentators are forbidden to use the word—and do not detail the many Russian setbacks in the fighting.

This is because Putin censors the media and punishes journalists who tell the truth but also because most Russian citizens choose to turn only to media that describe the war as a justified, tremendous success.

They put the blinders on themselves.

We Americans can shake our heads in dismay at the horrible things that happen in totalitarian nations and congratulate ourselves on not being subject to such repression, but the brutal fact is that it’s happening here, too.

Almost daily I receive emails or notes from people who assert things they believe but that just aren’t true or factual.

They tell me that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump and only Democratic judges have ruled against Trump’s claims. (The election wasn’t stolen, and many of the judges who ruled against the former president were Trump appointees. The U.S. Supreme Court, which has three Trump appointees and a two-thirds majority of Republican appointees, also has declined to intervene for the former president.)

They write that the Mueller investigation exonerated Trump. (It didn’t. Robert Mueller in fact said that only a Justice Department rule that precludes indicting a sitting president spared Trump from further consequences.)

They also say that it’s a travesty and a rank injustice that President Joe Biden’s son Hunter isn’t under investigation. (He is under investigation by the Justice Department. Law enforcement officials are questioning the younger Biden’s associates, just as they did with Trump, to determine if the president’s son broke the law.)

The most disturbing thing about all these departures from reality is that my correspondents often cite “sources.” The “sources” often are ladled out from the stewpot of rightwing conspiracy cookery, and the facts, such as they are, inevitably don’t stand up to either questioning or scrutiny.

But that doesn’t matter.

Because the stories are ones my correspondents want to believe, they do believe them. They swallow flat-out lies without question or pause and then pat themselves on the back for not being naïve or gullible.

No one forces them to do this.

Because they refuse to encounter any idea or fact that contradicts their biases, they serve as their own censors. They turn the key on the door to their own intellectual prison cell.

All those years ago, we thought that the advances in communication technology were going to liberate people—and, in some instances, they have.

But those same advances also have made it possible for people to create impregnable fortresses of fantasy and bias, dungeons in which neither fact nor disagreement has a place.

The irony is painful.

The communications innovations that were supposed to free people also gave them the means to enslave themselves.