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When the dust settles, I expect the people who assess elections will tell us disinformation was key in 2024. It wasn’t the economy, it was the disinformation about the economy. That disinformation successfully led voters across the country to believe they were worse off, despite October reporting in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere that we have the best economy in the world, a remarkable recovery from Covid.
There was Trump’s persistent lying. There were the highly successful disinformation campaigns by hostile foreign entities. There were billionaire newspaper owners who withheld endorsements the editorial boards wanted to give to Harris, endorsements that would have focused on the strength of her economic policies and the importance of democracy issues. There was Elon Musk, who bought Twitter and converted it from the public square to a mouthpiece for Trump.
There is data from a Reuters/Ipsos poll in October that shows just how damaging the information gap is. People who are in possession of truthful, accurate information voted overwhelmingly for Harris. In other words, if you believed violent crime in major American cities was at an all-time high—which is not true—you were far more likely to vote Republican. Voters who knew that inflation had declined over the last year and was close to historic averages were +53 Democratic votes. Perhaps most disturbingly, people who did not have truthful information about undocumented people crossing the southern border were more likely to vote Republican.
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We are back to George Orwell and “1984”: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
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It worked for Trump in the White House, and it worked for him on the campaign trail. He lied about schools arranging for transgender surgery without parental consent. He lied about cats and dogs being eaten. Anything that caught his fancy, however absurd, was something he would repeat lies about long after the truth had been firmly established. Of course, he’s the man who has continued to lie about the 2020 election. Donald Trump established an alternate reality for his voters to live in and then bought real estate there. The problem is fairly obvious; the solution is going to be much more elusive.
I have been thinking about this problem as much as anything since the election. History is full of examples of authoritarian governments that restricted access to information in order to control people. They burned books in Nazi Germany and suppressed dissenting authors like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in Soviet Russia. China uses a “Great Firewall” to prevent access to the internet. The issue used to be access to information. But now, it seems that’s morphing in modern American society. We have plenty of access to information, so much information—online and on social media, often distorted by algorithms that are concerned with selling something or pushing something and not with accuracy—that it’s a flood. It requires education and discernment to separate fact from fiction, and often that's lacking. That’s the problem: educating people so they can make judgments about what’s true.
Donald Trump, of course, has a solution for that problem. Project 2025 calls for abolishing the Department of Education. (And do reread that August piece on Project 2025, one of many we will have reason to revisit.)
This is one challenge, if not the key challenge, ahead of us. The cavalry isn't coming. We don't have, at least as of now, a Democratic billionaire championing the First Amendment and the free press. So we're going to have to build the accurate information airplane while we’re flying it.
We can all do something, of course, even if that means starting small with one-on-one conversations. Lots of people are going to be suffering buyer’s remorse about their votes for Trump. Some already are, as they learn what Trump’s tariffs really mean for them or that their families will not be safe from his mass deportation plans. It feels like we are at the start of a very long path, a difficult hike to get home.
But we need to get started. One person doing something is just one person. Give that person a follower and you have the start of a movement. And that’s what we need, a movement to reclaim the information ecosphere. There’s lots of interesting writing and thinking going on about this. I’d love it if you’d share your thoughts.
We’re in this together,
Joyce
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