WASHINGTON (AFP) – Donald Trump’s election victory paves the way for a fresh wave of misinformation, not only around politics but also on vaccines and climate, with his expected cabinet picks ready to challenge the scientific community.
In the closing weeks of his 2024 campaign, Trump aired false claims about weather manipulation and government assistance after hurricanes hit North Carolina, a swing state he would ultimately win.
With fewer checks from social media platforms and the struggling traditional media, he also complained – without evidence – about voter fraud, the 2020 election, the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine harms and more. These claims ricocheted across the internet through a network of social media influencers, who in many cases have become news sources for the public as media become increasingly fragmented.
“The problem of misinformation and disinformation is the worst it’s ever been,” said Duke University Professor Bill Adair. The tactics designed to contain and correct misinformation, such as fact-checking and social media moderation, “are clearly not working”, Adair added.
He predicted few changes ahead from platforms that have largely exempted elected officials from fact-checking “because they don’t want to make the politicians mad”.
Even as the 2024 campaign was under way, polls found roughly one-third of Americans believed the 2020 election was stolen by Joe Biden. Misinformation researchers at NewsGuard found 963 websites and 793 social media accounts that have repeatedly published false election information, and 1,283 partisan websites masquerading as neutral news organisations during the campaign.
“The right has invested, since 2016, in building participatory, activist, factional social media networks that are directly tied into its ‘small batch’ propaganda media ecosystem,” said misinformation researcher Renee DiResta in a Threads post.
“Things move from one sphere to the next: rumours are picked up by the propaganda machine if useful. Memes shape the messaging. “The influencers boost each other.”
Researcher and professor Ethan Porter at George Washington University said that while misinformation efforts may not have been decisive in his victory, “Trump was almost certainly helped by Twitter/X’s apparent refusal to contain or mitigate pro-Trump misinformation”.
The upcoming four more years for Trump have raised concerns of legitimising misinformation about vaccines, climate change and other health issues given his alliance with Robert F Kennedy Jr, whose nonprofit has been a major promoter of false conspiracy theories on COVID-19.
