Halting misinformation in its tracks

This article Halting misinformation in its tracks was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Democracy is not a feeling. It’s designed to not fall to the whims of a single authoritarian viewpoint. The political theorist Lisa Herzog calls our evidence-based institutions “epistemic infrastructure” that help secure some degree of shared reality. It is scientists, doctors and officials who create a buttress against despotic biases, especially those which will cause great harm.

For a long time, Donald Trump’s truth-bending propensities were treated as a mere P.T. Barnum-esque degree of showmanship. With the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters, and in the years that followed, we saw Trump using the “big lie” of election fraud to draw a line in the sand with his loyal supporters. You either buy into his reality or you are attacked. Now we are seeing a full-scale attack on the foundations of truth and information, with Trump’s egoistic worldview spreading like a fast contagion in order to justify his whims and legal immunity.

I recently spoke with the scientist and science communicator Dr. Lucky Tran about the importance of science, truth and evidence-based understanding. You might recognize him from his social media where he’s been at the forefront of clear messaging around climate change, COVID and more. He told me how this administration’s attacks are similar to what happened during Trump’s first tenure as president, but they are now happening at an even larger scale. “In the first term, the administration was censoring science by erasing websites,” he said. “And now that’s scaled up to dismantling entire science agencies.”

I first met Tran during the 2014 People’s Climate March, where he and other scientists marched down the streets of New York City with a large blackboard that read “The ‘debate’ is over! The facts are in. The evidence is clear.” Our planet’s rising temperatures do not care how you voted, and will continue to cause real havoc, unless we take action that’s grounded in evidence. Just as a virus will attack your immune system despite what you believe.

We need this shared reality in order to move our country ahead. “If we don’t have a shared truth, then we can’t build solutions together,” Tran said. “So I think it’s quite as simple as that. That’s another reason why it’s under attack, because if you are not interested in building equitable solutions, then one way to do that is to manipulate a perception of reality.” We cannot protect our communities based on vibes alone. For example, if we actually want to understand autism and neurodivergence in real ways, then being guided by existing evidence will produce more tangible results than following the inclinations of cronies.

The Trump administration is twisting the facts to justify all sorts of egregious actions, including sending federal troops into Washington, D.C., and now Portland and Chicago, promoting anti-immigrant crackdowns, defending economic miscalculations and so on. Trump’s dismissal of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner after a bad jobs report had a very similar signal to Joseph Stalin’s preferred methods of reality control. The historian Adam Hochschild, noted how “When the national census showed that his reign of terror was shrinking the country’s population, Stalin ordered the members of the census board shot. The new officials, not surprisingly, came up with higher figures.” Recently, Trump announced the canceling of the annual USDA survey on food insecurity. This is helpful for him, especially since his recent bill decreased SNAP benefits for millions of Americans. If you don’t know the facts, you can’t be criticized.

Authoritarians know they do not have to attack every institution in order to gain control, they just need to set enough examples. Disney’s initial capitulation and the sudden canceling of Jimmy Kimmel has thrown into the spotlight the importance of the First Amendment. Back in May though, seven of the nation’s most prominent free speech and press organizations came out with a statement emphasizing the importance of stopping the infection of Trump’s warped lie filled reality. They wrote, “When one institution ‘bends the knee,’ its peers face increased pressure to do the same. Each surrender makes the assertion of First Amendment rights more costly and more perilous.”

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How the Disney boycott beat the FCC’s censorship push

Thankfully, people organized. The #BoycottDisneyABC campaign took off, with guidelines quickly spreading about how people can cancel their Disney+ and other steps to make their voices heard. Celebrities and cultural figures also chimed in. The collective momentum pushed back hard, and it didn’t take Disney long to read the room (and the bottom line) and reinstate Kimmel. The pressure continued and even holdouts Sinclair and Nexstar finally gave in.

We have become well versed with the mathematics of infection (though many still sadly refuse to recognize it). Thankfully there are ways that every single one of us can block the spread of authoritarian agitprop. It will take a widespread effort, but every barrier put up helps keep the misinformation virus at bay.

The courts and legal system have become a crucial fighting ground. As of July, Trump only had a 31 percent success rate in the courts. Recently, a Florida federal judge tossed out Trump’s $15 billion defamation lawsuit against the New York Times by saying “A complaint is not a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally.” Meanwhile, District Court Judge Karin Immergut, who ruled against Trump’s troop deployment to Portland, pushed back against the administration’s facts, saying the Portland ICE facilities were “not significantly violent or disruptive.” The truly worrisome part though is how no matter what the state and federal judges say, Trump always has the Supreme Court to back up his desires.

Legal fights matter though. Projects like Democracy Docket, which provides key insight and analysis on pro-democracy legal fights, can help, as can other important voices in the judicial realm. When Trump makes a ludicrous announcement, it gets lots of attention, and then when the courts overturn it the spotlight is weaker. Instead, we need to amplify every judge that calls out Trump’s egregious claims.

Many local and state officials have also played a key role in ensuring our common reality is preserved. States in the West and East Coast are putting out their own vaccine recommendations, despite Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s fallacious medical advice. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker called out Trump’s lies around Chicago’s crime rates. As Trump turns his attention to other cities with large Black communities, politicians like Tennessee State Rep. Justin Pearson are speaking out strongly to condemn the errors. Our politicians and other state/local officials are a crucial part of holding the line. Even if you live in a Republican-controlled area, call them up and let them know what data and facts you want represented.

As the recent example with Kimmel showcases, authoritarians do not have a sense of humor. From Myanmar to Russia and beyond, comedians have often been on the frontlines of authoritarians’ wrath. The Serbian activist Srdja Popovic, who has trained others extensively on nonviolent resistance loves to elevate the power of humor, saying “Humor melts fear. Fear is the air the dictators breathe.”

More than just comedy though, the arts and culture sphere play a prominent role in calling forth what is true and minimizing the ridiculousness of propaganda. At this moment, big celebrities like Jane Fonda and Pedro Pascal speaking out matters, and everyone with a creative edge — whether you are a musician or TikTok influencer — can play a role in calling out the administration’s fallacies.

Another key tenet is our media landscape, which is at great risk given the FCC’s mafia-esque threats, as well as the consolidation of outlets under the control of Trump-friendly oligarchs. We have the power to push our media to continue to stand for truth. And so far, it seems that organized boycotts and hitting companies in their wallets can be an effective strategy.

There are more and more great voices moving beyond the controls of oligarchic media and creating their own spaces, like Zeteo by Mehdi Hasan and Joy Reid’s newsletter. While newsletters and social media are great — they are often still at the mercy of large companies. There’s a lot to learn from other countries where they have used radio, zines and even music to get their point across, while also protecting themselves. In Venezuela, journalists are using AI avatars to hide their identity while reporting. In Myanmar, where digital technology has long been restricted, outside radio stations like the Democratic Voice of Burma have been crucial in getting uncensored news to people.

Additionally, we need to be aware of our own media diet. Are we getting our information from Instagram memes or are we searching out verified sources? If we want to hold the line for truth, we need to be mindful of what we are consuming.

So much of our information battle is happening online. With our personalized algorithms that create bubbles of confirmation bias, AI distortion and more, the digital space is a hazardous one for truth. Researchers have found that falsehoods are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than truth, and false news reached 1,500 people about six times faster than the truth.

Some psychologist and communication researchers are testing out “inoculation theory” with the idea that exposing people to small amounts of misinformation techniques can neutralize “the misinformation’s influence, without even mentioning the misinformation specifically.” It was also great to see some scientific outlets do some “pre-bunking” before Trump’s announcement that the use of Tylenol (acetaminophen) during pregnancy led to an increased risk of autism in children.

We all need to increase our digital literacy skills to have awareness of the variety of tactics used to spread misinformation online. We can all be victim to this in the haste to confirm our own worldview. Here are some good guides from Princeton Public Library and First Draft News. We need to be aware of who we are amplifying and why. If something sounds too wild or too good to be true, it just might be.

It’s also really tempting to get into online arguments to call out misinformation and prove a point. There are limits though to how effective this is. “Studies show that people listen to their neighbors,” Tran said. “They listen to people who they know in their communities. The best way to overcome misinformation is in one-on-one conversations that are empathetic and that are built up over time.” We can’t forget the importance of face-to-face engagement in real life, which can actually start shifting some people’s minds. In this work, we must stay grounded in our own humanity and be brave enough to have some hard personal conversations.

Limiting Trump’s truth contamination is essential, because like any other virus it will not stay contained within the U.S. borders. Other governments that are authoritarian-inclined are already picking up the trend. We are in a pivotal period in global history and every action to limit the spread of dangerous misinformation matters.

This article Halting misinformation in its tracks was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/10/halting-misinformation-in-its-tracks/