The coming misinformation war

A week from today, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as president. The ensuing months and years will bring much chaos and catastrophe. I say that not to scare you but because it’s the truth. Much of the legacy media continues to fail to meet this fraught moment by acting as if this is politics as usual — American life as usual. (See these many examples as well as the general turmoil at the Washington Post.) Needless to say, none of this is normal.

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Now, welcome to American Doom, 2025.

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By now it has become clear that the world’s biggest tech companies and most of corporate America are willing to do anything to get on Donald Trump’s good side. They have been donating vast millions to Trump’s inauguration fund and, in the past week, the platform perhaps most responsible for the degradation of reputable information and the hyper-polarization of U.S. society — Facebook — announced that it will essentially act as propagandist arm of the Trump administration and the misinformation infrastructure of the American right. Yes, Facebook is doing away with fact-checking. This means you can expect even more misinformation madness than that which has roiled the nation and the world in the last decade as a result of Meta’s lax approach to stopping dangerous lies from proliferating on its platforms. Chaos will surely follow.

That’s why it’s important to get your news not just on what’s happening in the world but on what’s happening with Big Tech from reputable sources. I can think of none better than Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project. The last time we spoke with Katie, she was monitoring social traffic — primarily on Facebook — from right-wing militias preparing for violence in the wake of the election. Today, Katie and I discuss Meta’s decision to do away with fact-checking, a troubling development considering Facebook’s past role in real world violence based on misinformation and lies spreading on the platform.

You can view our discussion above, listen to it here, or subscribe to the American Doom podcast on Apple and Spotify, as well as our YouTube page.

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