This is all false, of course. But such a torrent of mud, in the context of Donald Trump’s return to power, has become the norm. “Americans are buried under an avalanche of disinformation”Joe Biden noted on Wednesday evening during his farewell speech. The wildest rumors, lies and conspiracy theories also surged after the terrorist attack in New Orleans and the explosion of a Tesla SUV in Las Vegas. To the point that it is no longer a question, for the authorities or the media, of reestablishing the factual truth, but of reacting to the new “reality” that constitutes this universe of alternative facts. Now, predict Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, co-founders of the Axios site, “the skeptics and naysayers [à ces fake news, ndlr] will have to respond to worldviews and entire narratives that will have such momentum – and audiences so powerful – that they will become the reality that legislators, regulators, journalists and citizens will have to face..
How can we explain such an acceleration? First, with the way Trump, Musk and Republicans, in general, have turned their backs on any pretense of factual accuracy. In the above list of lies about the fires, far from being exhaustive, many were uttered, repeated or amplified by the Trump-Musk tandem. The one about allegedly not signing a “water restoration declaration,” for example, came from Trump and was shared by Musk on X. The president-elect has only 8.5 million followers on his platform Truth Social, but its posts are instantly picked up and amplified by other social networks and the media. Elon Musk has 212 million followers on X, Mark Zuckerberg 118 million on Facebook and 15 million on Instagram.
Second factor: the abandonment of content moderation by platforms, initiated by Musk with most content that is misleading or deemed unacceptable. As Allen and VandeHei note, “We are in uncharted territory. What is real? What is the order of interpretation? What constitutes outright misinformation? And who can we trust to make sense of it all? And what happens if other people trust people who are untrustworthy? »
All the more dizzying, and this is the third accelerating force, that the traditional media are undergoing a crisis of rare violence. Those owned by billionaires, like Los Angeles Times or le Washington Postdiscover that the latter put their personal interests above the independence of their newspapers. Others, like television news channels, are facing a desertion of listeners, in a media landscape that is now completely fragmented, and therefore more and more shaped every day by influencers who are often misinformants.
-How to counter such a prairie fire? Throughout the country, municipalities, firefighters and police dedicate a good part of their energy, and their staff, to a “rapid response” force in the face of fake news. The Las Vegas police chief, in particular, was applauded for holding press conferences after the explosion of the Tesla Cybertruck, during which, with supporting video and photos, he took seriously and defused the wildest rumors.
Can this be enough to stem the tsunami of fake news? Doubtful. “Trump – and Trump’s world – helped create this new reality. Whether it’s launching its first term with “alternative facts” or changing the meaning of “fake news,” the MAGA world has always sought to discredit the traditional gatekeepers of information.write the two journalists from Axios. Add to this the redoubled activism of Musk and the capitulation in the open countryside of Zuckerberg: the winds of disinformation no longer have anything to envy of the terrible gusts of the Santa Ana wind, which sows desolation in Los Angeles.
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