When you couple the media reach of Elon Musk with the ‘promise’ of AI … it’s difficult to imagine just how much worse this situation is bound to get, and rather soon.
I mean, I understand what you’re saying. I think the trick is showing harm. I think successful defamation cases hinge on showing that someone intended to harm the plaintiff, and actually caused measurable harm to them. While an unjust civil judgement can ruin your life too, I think it’s important to recognize people aren’t going to jail for defamation.
With a lot of health lies, unfortunately, the person harmed is the least likely to sue. The reason they were harmed is because they swallowed the lie wholeheartedly, which makes them hesitant or outright resistant to pursue legal remedy. But with major public health situations like Covid and anti-vax hysteria, I think it could be, and should be easy to demonstrate that someone’s public lies caused real harm and death. I mean didn’t RFK Jr directly cause a major measles outbreak? It should be easy to demonstrate that to a sympathetic judge and jury. Nobody seems to have the guts to pursue and enforce these cases, but in theory that’s my preferred solution.
Which is different to the kind of pro-Putin trolling and informational chaos in the political sphere I was mostly talking about. Rather than punish people who try to convince Americans not to trust their own government, for example, the government should go to great lengths to demonstrate its trustworthiness, and make substantive changes if necessary to accomplish that.
I don’t know how, exactly, but transparency would go a long way here. Like, classify military vulnerabilities and troop movements and undercover CIA agents and the like, but, for example, Snowden’s leak about dragnet internet spying on American citizens shouldn’t have been secret at all. That was a big blow (one in a long history of them) that caused many Americans, rightly, to distrust their government.
Regardless of whether it’s right or wrong, I think jailing a bunch of online trolls, and their talking-head counterparts on the big podcasts and cable news channels, is going to be counterproductive, and make things worse rather than better. Even if it’s obvious to most of us at this point that they’re just Russian assets intent on destroying America.
Once again, I agree with you 99% but on this point:
I don’t think jailing, but fines, repeated fines for repeated transgressions, for knowing lies.
The ideal would be that agencies are as hesitant to just make up something about vaccines, as they would be to make up something about Disney. Neither should land you in jail.
I agree with this, though I don’t see how it is possible to remedy those defects from where we sit in 2025.
Today’s technology (and the way it has been levereged) gives bad actors (or maybe just selfish unscrupulous actors) power and a reach that folks 100 years ago could barely dream of, and the effort involved to leverage that power is miniscule.
Regulation is only a stopgap. It isn’t a viable long-term protection, and technology moves so fast these days that it’s barely a viable short-term solution.
The defect, in my mind, is a real-time 24/7 digital global communication network piped into everyone’s home and/or pocket. And we are so dependent upon it that no one is going to throw that bathwater out for fear of losing their baby.
Because creating that disinformation environment is their job. The media is overwhelmingly controlled by right-leaning corporations and individuals, and its purpose is to deceive; not inform. They aren’t going to undercut their work by pointing out how they are lying.
I agree with you, but it’s really ramped up in recent years.
I remember memes about the dishonesty of FOX, and the “american taliban” from 20 years ago, but such memes were pulled from months of content for the most egregious examples. Nowadays, and I mean this absolutely literally, you hear worse on any single day.
I don’t think that’s it at all.
Rather, I think that side of the political spectrum has essentially been ‘groomed’ to believe that the alternate news sources on their side are true, and everyone else is heavily biased at best, and outright untrue and pushing propaganda at worst.
That’s the real problem here as I see it- we’ve got competing sources of “truth”, and which one you choose guides what you consider to be the truth, and through that, your worldview, etc. It used to be that everyone read the local paper, watched the big 3 networks, and listened to the local radio stations. So in essence, we were forming our opinions based on the same “truth”, and just differing in what we thought its significance was and/or what should be done about it.
Now you’ve got one side saying “Global warming is a threat, scientists say it’s true, it’s advanced, and we need to make some sacrifices to hopefully stave it off.” Meanwhile the other side’s saying (through its captive media) “Global warming is a hoax, fossil fuels are fine and dandy, scientists have their own personal agenda and are pushing this for reasons, and you don’t need to drive a slower hybrid or electric car- you can have a big engined pickup and be happy with it”.
The problem is that it pushes the discernment of what is and isn’t true onto the information consumer far more than in the past, and most people don’t have the right combination of the intellectual tool kit or the intellectual horsepower to actually figure that out, and some are prone to going with the stuff that confirms their opinions and wishes, rather than what the evidence supports.
On top of that, there’s been a real increase IMO in the presence of conspiratorial thinking and lending credence to conspiracy theories. These are the same thing- they’re like little information viruses that people read, and if they don’t have the right intellectual immune system, they fall prey to the message in the conspiracy theory.
And finally, foreign interference and foreign information warfare is taking advantage of all this to drive their own agendas.
It’s a scary place to be, and I’m fairly unconfident that we can realistically teach critical thinking in schools to the point where it’ll make a difference. People are generally too stupid and disinterested for it to matter.
Maybe that used to be it, when people said Rush Limbaugh was the only one telling you the TRUTH.
Nowadays, aside from some whackjob conspiracy theorists who love Alex Jones, you mostly hear “it’s ALL bullshit… You can’t trust ANYONE…”
The message is no longer that the truth is out there. The message is that we don’t need to care about what is or isn’t true, because it’s all equally bullshit.
Paul Krugman wrote in his substack two weeks ago the following:
The political scientist John Sides, drawing on work by Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood, argues that the deepest divide in America isn’t between left and right, it’s between “rationalists” who focus on facts and reason, on one side, and “intuitionists,” who rely on their feelings, on the other.
This divide has always been there, although I suspect that the internet, which makes it easy to find people telling you what you want to hear, has increased the reach of intuitionism. What is relatively new is that these two kinds of people have sorted themselves along partisan lines.
I believe the last sentence is relevant to the discussion here. There are people out there that want to believe what they feel is right. Only “right” does not mean accurate, truthful or correct, it has become for them a moral category. Right is what they believe should be true. Those who do not believe it become not wrong, but evil. Quite Nietzschean, actually, Nietzsche would be astonished. And appalled.
Another aspect which for me is the real elephant in the room are social media. That has already been adressed here and I have little to add. I don’t believe disinformation, as the OP claims, is the elephant in the room, but that some people want to believe the disinformation and spread it through a very efficient vehicle. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram and whatever they are called. Helped, fed and fueled by networks with an agenda (Fox News and others) and rogue international actors (Russian troll farms, Chinese ones too). They fabricate endless memes, false memes mostly, together with uncounted people who do too, in the weird belief that “likes” show appretiation and that “friends” are buddies. And some even manage to make some money out of it, not just the corporations. That does not help either, as it keeps people trying, again and again. Those memes spread like wildfire, at least some of them. Much too many.
I don’t know how this can be stopped as long as the naive and literal interpretation of the 1st amendment is the one who is followed by the courts.
I don’t really get the distinction, especially since you are conceding that a lot of this disinformation can be “fed or fueled” by outlets like FOX, state actors and oligarchs like Musk.
Is the distinction that you’re making between the disinformation itself and the mechanism of it spreading? Because, yes, social media and the diversified landscape makes any kind of “policing” near impossible, I would agree with that.
As I’ve said upthread, I do not think that knowing lies should be protected speech, but it’s arguably a moot point, certainly in the US, where all the horses bolted long ago and a crazy horse is now in charge of the stable door (I’m talking about Musk…it’s a difficult metaphor to work with). So we can put aside that tangent if that’s it.
I think you’re right. Dating back to Obama’s birth certificate, I believe a majority of Republicans, including Trump himself, don’t really believe in a Kenyan birth. But it hurts the opposition, so many of them were willing to go along with it. While there are certainly true believers, I suspect a significant number of Republicans know Trump is a liar but he’s their liar and they’re going to support him no matter what.
As I’ve said before, it’s faith based politics. We train people from childhood to respect faith in order to support religion, but that has consequences; we are a society full of people who have been taught that it’s virtuous to deny facts and reason. So yes, they’ll know that Fox and Trump and so on are full of falsehoods; and by believing in those falsehoods anyway, they are proving that they are good people. Doubt and logic are sins, and facts are the tool of evil.
It is a tangent and I happily put it aside. Talking about horses (although not about Musk, but Kim Jong Un will have to do) I expressed my opinion 7 years ago already 
like this. My way of passing the calumet de paix along to you. I think we broadly agree.
Slight hijack, but: I’ve often wondered if no one — no, literally no one — actually cared, even a little bit, about the tan suit. That’s not hyperbole: if no one on the planet happened to, in fact, care.
Thanks, and it was a tangent I kicked off.
Is that your artwork? Very cool…and also nightmare inducing 
Well, I think some were bothered but not because of the color of the suit.
Anything Obama did was seen as lowering the tone in the white house, for reasons that are difficult to put one’s (low melanin) finger on. I bet a street hoodlum like him would be bringing in mcdonalds, or using profanities, letting his gang smash up the place and then pardoning them.
I wonder often if historians hundreds of years from now will pinpoint the beginning of America’s decline to the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980s. That’s what begat Rush Limbaugh’s success, and when he hit it big, broadcasters began handing out microphones to seemingly every belligerent asshat with a grievance. From that point on, it was no longer enough to simply agree to disagree with your political opposites. Now, your political opponents had to be treated as evildoers who want to destroy America. Those rancid radio talkers set the foundations for the massive misinformation machine that’s been poisoning American political discourse for decades.
What we have now is a media ecosystem that not only tells people what they want to hear, but makes them view with suspicion anyone who seeks out information from outside that bubble. It’s a perfect environment for a bullshit artist like Trump to thrive in.
Numerous mainstream outlets over the past 10 years have run investigative pieces about Trump cheating on his taxes, about his sketchy business practices, about his treatment of women. None of them have really managed to put a chink in his armor. A big reason why is that people on the right have been conditioned not to trust any media that’s not parroting the Dear Leader’s party line. The people who watch Fox News or OANN or listen to talk radio, aren’t going to hear about his most embarrassing gaffes. They aren’t going to be informed of his astounding hypocrisy. They might be aware of his numerous legal problems, because they’re simply too big to ignore, but they’re led to believe those problems are the product of a nefarious deep state conspiracy.
That is a term I am incomfortable with. It’s only a hobby.
I completely agree, only hundreds of years seems too long. Historians already know. I once started a thread asking what that talk-radio-thing is one keeps hearing about. It was illuminating. I still don’t think there is such a thing in Europe, and social media are the logical exageration of that medium. Those we have in Europe.
We also have the Digital Services Act, which tries to limit disinformation, even deleting it when it gets too crass. The lobbying against it is fierce:
A bipartisan group of US senators have called the DSA and DMA discriminatory, claiming that the legislation would “focus on regulations on a handful of American companies while failing to regulate similar companies based in Europe, China, Russia and elsewhere.”
The second sentence is a plain lie, of course. Facebook and TwiKKKer are particularly incensed:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-16/meta-is-ready-to-bring-trump-into-play-in-fight-against-eu-rules (no preview, it is behind a paywall anyway. The title is enough: ready to bring the temper tanTrump into play)
It reminds me of the complaint of “unfairness” because goods imported to countries like the UK have VAT (value added tax…a sales tax) added.
In the UK all businesses, small and large, and individuals even, must pay VAT for goods, services and utilities with just a few exceptions (I won’t list them but they are for specific goods considered essential, not exceptions for country of origin)
It would be bizarre if US-goods were exempt. What other special treatment would they like? Special roads on which only trucks delivering American goods can travel?
Don’t give them ideas!