The End of the Misinformation Panic

By Abe Greenwald

Thursday, May 15, 2025

 

The Trump administration is canceling a slew of grants that were slated to fund university research into online misinformation and what to do about it. Fine with me.

 

I don’t trust university researchers to assess online truth and figure out how to counteract or suppress what they deem lies. Expertise is valuable in a lot of areas, but the “experts” who work on mis- and disinformation often end up like those addiction doctors who get hooked on drugs. The Biden administration established the expert-filled Disinformation Governance Board only to put the fear of misinformation to political use. His team successfully pressured online platforms to censor legitimate dissenting opinion. And as Joe Biden’s cognitive functioning worsened, the White House took to calling footage of his slips and gaffes “cheap fakes”—manipulated clips (I don’t trust the Trump administration to be any better than its predecessor at labeling truth and propaganda). We’ve seen enough of the official effort to combat online lies.

 

In any event, the researchers are looking in the wrong place. The first piece of misinformation that needs debunking is that dangerous misinformation is spread primarily by shady internet users with fake names. It’s not. It comes from the most established media outlets in the country.

 

Cable news and prominent newspapers told us that Joe Biden was just fine, Hunter Biden’s laptop was probably a Russian disinformation job, gender is a choice, Covid arose from a wet market, police are killers in racist death squads, an illegal from El Salvador was a “Maryland man,” anti-Semitic harassment and violence is free speech, and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah “maintained that there should be one Palestine with equality for Muslims, Jews and Christians.”

 

The media disinformation campaign against Israel is its own category, and it’s ongoing: Legacy outfits continue to report Hamas’s casualty figures even though they’ve been thoroughly disproven. They’ve been telling us for a year and a half that Gazans are on the verge of starvation, the IDF targets innocents and kills mostly women and children, and some Palestinian terrorists were just, you see, journalists.

 

Given all the lies, I’m not even confident in the New York Times story reporting on the cancelled grants. Consider this sentence: “Officials at the Pentagon, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation contend that the research has resulted in the censorship of conservative Americans online, though there is no evidence any of the studies resulted in that.”

 

Something resulted in that. And the nexus of liberal academia, the Biden administration, and pre-Musk Twitter is clear enough. 

 

Of course, the media gets their misinformation from others: government spokespeople, activists, NGOs, etc. In recent years, the collaboration of politicized sources and politicized media created an atmosphere of stifling ideological orthodoxy. And as people grew more distrustful of the news, they became more gullible marks for anyone telling a different story. So all the agitprop and fake news that makes its way online falls into one of two categories: the garbage that’s created by professional liars or the garbage that’s composed in response to them.

 

What to do about it? Stop peddling official disinformation, and the market for the unofficial variety will dry up. You don’t need a federal grant to figure that out.