Misinformation And Disinformation

During his historic comeback campaign in 2024, President Trump vowed to close the book on a dark chapter in America’s constitutional history: the weaponization of America’s own government to silence, censor, and suppress the free speech of ordinary Americans. The American people responded to this promise by giving President Trump a landslide victory last November.

We are being treated to what the CIA called a "modified limited hangout" as they try to recover their credibility after the systematic failures and lying that have disgusted the less self-deluded members of the public. 

Over the past decade or more, the formerly "mainstream media" engaged in a series of lies, hoaxes, campaigns of slander against disfavored peoples and movements, and coverups of Democrat scandals. Having been exposed, members of this priesthood of the cult are busy explaining why they got it so wrong.

Elon Musk, the billionaire leading a government efficiency initiative, has for weeks made broad and unsupported claims of rampant fraud in federal spending.

In a series of interviews on conservative podcasts and television interviews, Mr. Musk has defended attempts by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to target popular entitlement programs like Social Security and access sensitive payment systems with a series of inaccurate claims. A representative for DOGE did not respond when asked for evidence of Mr. Musk’s claims.

While the internet has made accessing information and updates on what is happening in the world extremely easy, it has also facilitated the proliferation of fake news. Over the past decades, fake news has thus become a heated topic of debate, with some social media platforms introducing measures aimed at curbing online misinformation.

Elon Musk has repeatedly misled the public about federal spending while playing a leading role in President Donald Trump’s effort to cut that spending.

When Musk was asked earlier this month about one of the inaccurate statements he had promoted, he conceded that “some of the things that I say will be incorrect, and should be corrected.” But “some” might be an understatement. The billionaire businessman has made or amplified numerous false or misleading assertions in the past month alone, largely on the X social media platform he owns.

Last week, I dipped back into X just to see what I’d been missing on paternity leave. A post from Benny Johnson, a conservative activist with 3.4 million followers, caught my eye. Apparently, he had discovered “the biggest scandal in news media history.”

According to Johnson there was a “crisis” at Politico, the Washington-based news site: It was unable to meet payroll because it had been “massively funded” by USAID, but DOGE had just “deleted” the cash. “Now Politico will go out of business,” Johnson wrote. “The corruption is endless. Good riddance.”

While the 2024 presidential election dominated American news headlines in 2024, a lot more than just politics captured Snopes readers' attention. 

Based on our site's traffic analytics, more people read fact checks about sports stars like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Brittney Griner and Aaron Rodgers than any others. Readers also gravitated to pages about high-profile celebrities such as Sean "Diddy" Combs and Elon Musk, as well as rumors about a giant sea creature and musicians' concert tours.

A new survey from UNESCO found that 62% of digital content creators don’t use basic fact-checking practices — which is particularly unsettling when you consider recent data showing that 1 in 5 Americans get their news from “news influencers” online.

Since President Joe Biden took office, his administration has spent more than $267 million “combating misinformation,” according to a new report from OpenTheBooks, a government transparency watchdog group. This comes as a major initiative under President-elect Donald Trump’s second administration takes shape.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, aims to reduce government waste.