Tuesday is the election and mainstream media has a real problem dealing with what happens on the internet instantaneously.
High profile individuals make a social media post and it travels around the world in an instant.
As an example, a month ago, an anonymous poster claimed that an ABC whisleblower had come forth saying that ABC had provided the questions for the presidential debate to Kamala Harris. Then the ABC whistleblower supposedly died in a car crash. Marjorie Taylor Greene pushed the original claim, and then the whistleblower's death, then said it was all fake, but it should still be investigated anyway. Even JD Vance talked about it at a campaign stop. Trump added it to his three against one claim that the moderators were biased against him. Jake Tapper had to waste 9 minutes on CNN's State of the Union to debunk the whisleblower claim.
It was a single blog post about someone's cat being missing in Springfield, Ohio, that was turned into Haitian immigrants eating lots of cats. Trump still peddles the lie, which Vance told him, adding dogs and generic pets. Vance told Dana Bash of CNN that it was a lie, and that he'd keep telling lies to draw attention to problems. Now Vance is still telling the story in order not to contradict Trump.
It shouldn't have to be the job of quality news organizations to quash rumors and lies. Notice that it always happens with Trump and his MAGA supporters. It's all designed to take attention away from Trump's campaign gaffes. If it's something the Harris campaign puts out, it has to be double and triple fact checked by themselves even before giving it to the mainstream media or on their own social media sites.
Case in point is Biden's accidental use of "garbage" while talking about Trump supporters. It was spread across the internet in an instant and then Trump did a photo op and news conference dressed up as a garbage collector with a garbage truck.
The Harris campaign doesn't need to make things up. All they have to do is use video clips of Trump and others that are impossible to refute. That doesn't stop his sycophants from making excuses for Trump in trying to interpret what he really meant. Mainstream media have been guilty of the same process, which is called sane-washing. Taking Trump's insanity and trying to make sense of it.
Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, they had a division that spent their time fact checking posts and community members that could warn of lies, and dangerous topics. Musk fired most of them and we got a massive increase in racism and anti-semitism on Twitter, now called X. Other social media sites have not followed suit. It is a massive job to monitor and cancel out this information every single second of the day.
The fake news concept has been pushed by Trump since the start of his first candidacy in 2015. It's a tactic that has worked very well for him. While he was president, he would call news organizations fake news to their face at news conferences, and everywhere else they ran into him. He has this problem with inconvenient truths. If reporters asked him an important question that he had no answer to, he would say it was a nasty or a stupid question. To this day he still picks out individual reporters to denigrate them. He threatens news organizations critical of him with prosecution if he gets back in power.
Things could be fixed for the future if legislation was passed that made platforms responsible for the content displayed on them. Enforcement would be hell. But it's possible to examine each and every word of a post before it is allowed to be posted. With artificial intelligence the job can get a lot easier to monitor misinformation and dangerous posts.
Video and pictures are much harder to examine. But the fact that we can use AI to generate them also means we can use AI to examine them. The problem is that this uses up a lot of processing power and electricity and where we get it from matters.
So what can we do today with only two weeks to go for the election? It's too late to convince MAGA true believers. For them, it's don't confuse me with facts, my mind is already made up. The lies come so fast that there's no way to counter them all.
Bombarding the airwaves and the internet with truth is the only way to convince fence riding Republicans. Get Nikki Haley voters to realize it's okay to vote for a Democrat. Get Latino voters to realize that Trump is going to deport 10 million of them, whether they're legal or not. Get Black men to realize it's okay to vote for a Black woman.
The only way for Harris to garner the uncommitted and youth vote is to say something other than we support Israel's right to defend itself, and more than how the Israelis do so matters. It's plainly apparent that the only leverage we have on Netanyahu is withholding arms. We can't keep conflating Netanyahu with Israel. He is continuing the war in order to stay in power. The death and destruction in Gaza could have ended a long time ago.
Remind people that Trump's words kill, like on January 6th. People die in his name, such as the man who was enraged about the search of Mar-a-Lago and tried to shoot up the Cincinnati FBI office and was shot and killed.
Every four years we talk in earnest about countering how lies spread through the internet, but do little to stop them.
If Trump wins again, it will be because he knows how to game the system. The television huckster knows how to sell things, even if they're bad ideas. He knows that the internet spreads lies easily. There could be ones that change the election results. It's a shame that Democrats can't fight back with the same tools, because they have principles and a conscience. Truth should always conquer over lies, but it's an awful lot of work.
