Musk and friends are smothering the internet's truth seekers

Targeting groups studying disinformation is bad news for democracy.

- Parmy Olson

Not long after Hurricane Helene wrought destruction across the southern US, a more bewildering storm blew through: Officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) bumped up against angry residents and armed militia in Tennessee and North Carolina, people who had been riled up by rumors that the officials were there to take their homes. Fema evacuated its teams, leaving behind communities that desperately needed help.

A cursory search of X (formerly Twitter) brought up several viral videos suggesting that Fema was bulldozing bodies under the rubble, but press reports like one in the Washington Post were unclear about exactly where and how the rumors were spreading. They were just... spreading.

That posed something even more troubling: How could you hold online platforms accountable for conspiracy theories if you did not know where they were being shared?

The answer is "You can't," because the people studying the flow of disinformation are being sued by those who seem to benefit from the spread of "alternative facts."

A raft of lawsuits and congressional investigations against several groups studying disinformation in the US, coming largely from Republican lawmakers and tech billionaire Elon Musk, have had a chilling effect on the broader effort to tackle viral falsehoods.

These research groups study how lies spread online and alert the public when they find coordinated campaigns to mislead people. They analyze networks of accounts, map viral posts and document who creates and shares misleading content.

Why the aggro? In part, because of the way that some of the disinformation campaigns tracked by these groups have also aligned with conservative positions.