The sky is not falling. The Earth is not flat. Fiction is not at all the same as facts no matter how loud you scream. It is time to rally against the popular wholesale rejection of truth.
Ahead of the second Donald Trump presidential inauguration and the eight-year anniversary of the fabricated crowd size claimed to gather for Trump the first time on the National Mall in 2017, it is critical to call for the end to the Era of Disinformation. And not just because truth is inconvenient, but lies are dangerous.
The People’s March, set for inauguration weekend on January 18, has shifted its branding from the Women’s March with the goal to be more inclusive. March leaders intend for everyone to turn out for fairness, justice, equal rights, gender, and racial equity.
But the march mission needs to go further and become the People’s March For Truth, a day of action calling to stop lies to masquerade as truth in social media, real life, and politics.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced its platforms of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram—with a total of more than 8 billion users—will no longer fact check content. Instead, the platform will rely on Community Notes. Here come the lies again.
The attack on truth in this country is ongoing as the U.S. recently imposed sanctions on the Russian Center for Geopolitical Expertise and the Iranian Cognitive Design Production Center, for ruthlessly propagating disinformation in U.S. media outlets and social media platforms ahead of the 2024 election.
With the goal of bombarding U.S. voters with falsehoods and fake news in order to sway the election, these foreign operatives worked to spread inconceivable fabrications—and succeeded.
PolitiFact recently called the 2024 Lie of the Year the claim both Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance repeatedly projected that illegal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets.
In a recent event at Harvard University, Bill Adair, founder of PolitiFact, Duke University journalism professor and author of the new book, Beyond the Big Lie, told the audience, “When politicians choose to lie, there are often people who suffer, and often an individual who suffers a great deal, often someone whose reputation is damaged, whose life is turned upside-down.”
This is certainly true of those in this country who believed the lies that COVID-19 was a hoax and refused vaccinations.
The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that the danger of misinformation continues. In “2023, more than 916,300 people were hospitalized in the U.S. due to COVID-19 and more than 75,500 people died from COVID-19,” the Centers for Disease Control stated. Most who were hospitalized had not received the updated vaccine.
Proud anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is set to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, as Trump announced his appointment on Truth Social—a platform name that is ironic at best. Recently more than 17,000 doctors in this country, members of the Committee to Protect Health Care, signed a letter to the U.S. Senate urging senators to reject Kennedy’s nomination because of his “well-documented history of spreading dangerous disinformation on vaccines and public health interventions.”
In the fog of all these cloudy claims, it is questionable if consumers of news and social messaging want to know what is true and what is not; not just that they have an inability to discern what is false.
A 2024 study reveals disturbing results about voter dismissiveness of political lies. Researchers show, “voters justify demagogic fact-flouting, or disregarding or ignoring facts, as an effective way of proclaiming a deeply resonant political ‘truth.’”
Indeed, belief in the truth may be partisan. A Pew Trust report shows that by 2023, the gap in media trust “had widened dramatically, with just 11% of Republicans trusting the media, compared with 58% of Democrats.”
A separate more recent Pew Research report shows in 2024, “37% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they have a lot of or some trust in the information that comes from social media sites.” The study reveals that 38 percent of Democrat or Democrat-leaning people “have at least some trust in the information that comes from social media sites” while 78 percent report trust in national news sites.
Truth matters to me personally and professionally. I have been a journalist for 45 years and taught journalism at Northwestern University for 18 years. Yes, I have made unintentional factual errors, but have never willfully spread a wrong fact. Ethical journalists and policymakers practice this commitment.
As consumers of information, it is possible to reject false facts no matter how long you have believed them.
Recently a crew of flat earthers, or those in 2024 who contended the Earth is not round, were guests on an expedition to Antarctica. Once there, in real life, they admitted what they had believed was completely wrong.
May every American have the strength to discern disinformation, rally for truth, and take action to stop the spread of lies for the safety of everyone.
Michele Weldon is an award-winning journalist, emerita faculty at Northwestern University, senior leader with The OpEd Project, and author whose most recent book is, The Time We Have: Essays on Pandemic Living.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
The post Bring Back Truth—March Against Lies, Fake News, and Disinformation appeared first on Newsweek.
