In the heat of this historic election, educated elites who should know better — billionaires, elected officials, journalists — keep falling for fakes, conspiracy theories and outright lies…
Each day on the digital campaign trail has brought a torrent of false or misleading claims, often courtesy of partisan accounts with massive audiences. In the last few weeks alone:
-MAGA influencers breathlessly spread the false claim that Vice President Kamala Harris used a teleprompter during her Univision town hall, which the X algorithm then promoted in its trending topics as fact.
-Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) posted a purported screenshot of a headline in The Atlantic that read: “To Save Democracy Harris May Need To Steal An Election.” It was fake, and Roy deleted the post.
-Bill Ackman, a hedge fund billionaire with 1.4 million followers on X, obsessively promoted allegations from an ABC News “whistleblower” that the network had given Harris questions in advance of her debate with Trump. On Wednesday, more than a month later, Ackman admitted it was “fake.”
Elon Musk, whose takeover of X has enabled fake news slop at scale, is among the most consistent offenders — credulously promoting baseless claims about voter fraud that rack up billions of views.
“Is this true?” the pro-Trump billionaire will often ask his legions of followers about blatant bunk, helping it spread like wildfire.
Musk frequently touts the “Community Notes” system, whereby X users can vote to add fact checks to false posts, but many posts don’t get the Community Notes treatment until well after they go viral, if at all.
Axios reports that liberals do this too, noting that there was a viral untrue rumor that Karl Rove was stumping for Harris and a spate of conspiracy theories about the Trump assassination attempt. (I might add that the rumors were even more plentiful on the right about that last one.)
Anyway, as we know this takes a real toll on people’s lives when it affects the information necessary to help people in a disaster.
“The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality,” The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote in an article about hurricane conspiracies headlined: “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is.”
And apparently, 54% of respondents in an Axios Vibes survey published last month agreed with the statement, “I’ve disengaged from politics because I can’t tell what’s true.”
Come on people. It’s crazy out there for real. We all know that. Just look at the circus sideshow the Republicans are trying to sell us for the presidency. And it’s also crazy out there because our media econsystems are full of lies and BS. But if you use your intuition and your brain you can get your way through it even if you screw up once in a while and believe something that’s fake. But it’s important to stay engaged. Reality still exists.