Conspiracy theories are unavoidable following the Trump shooting. But social media firms are making things worse
The truth just had a real bad weekend.
Social media has long played a major role in making society more conspiracy-minded, by creating filter bubbles and stimulating the virality of outrageous notions to serve a business model built on the never-ending quest for engagement. The result is what we’ve seen online following the shooting of former President Donald Trump on Saturday.
On Facebook, X and elsewhere, falsehoods about what happened quickly became ubiquitous. Some were straight-up kneejerk partisan conspiracy theories, such as the dueling claims that the assassination attempt was staged by Trump's team or ordered by President Joe Biden. Some seem to be fragments of early reports that quickly turned out to be untrue but that live on regardless, like the idea that Trump was wounded by a piece of teleprompter glass rather than a bullet.
Some conspiracy theories were propagated not merely by social media, but by social media mogul Elon Musk himself, who used X to suggest that the Secret Service might have deliberately ignored Thomas Matthew Crooks as he took aim from a nearby roof (85 million views). Musk also agreed with a post alleging that the shooter would “almost certainly” turn out to be Antifa (207,000 views. Crooks turned out to be a registered Republican.)
(Also of note: Musk used the occasion to endorse Trump's presidential bid and reveal that two people had “tried to kill me” in the last eight months.)
In an information whirlwind like this one, it would be incredibly hard to stop conspiracy theories flying across social media even if the proprietor wasn’t enthusiastically joining in. The situation isn't helped by the fact that—certainly at the time of writing—we still don’t know what motivated Crooks.
But the social media platforms have also made decisions that exacerbate situations such as this.
In a move that was likely inspired by Musk’s free-speech-first stance at X, Meta last year diminished the impact of its fact-checking program by allowing Facebook and Instagram users in the U.S. to stop suppressing debunked posts in the feeds they see. YouTube allows 2020 election denialism these days. Meanwhile, X’s algorithm is shoving conspiracy theories about the assassination attempt into its trending topics feeds, and Musk’s decision to change the meaning of a blue check from “person who knows what they’re talking about” to “person who pays to appear authentic” was always going to turbo-charge the spread of disinformation.
The deceptive nature of X’s blue-check system has now earned the company preliminary charges under the EU’s new Digital Services Act (DSA), which covers content on major online platforms. “There is evidence of motivated malicious actors abusing the ‘verified account’ to deceive users,” the European Commission, which has been formally investigating X since December, said Friday.
Musk responded with the assertion that the Commission “offered X an illegal secret deal: If we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us. The other platforms accepted that deal. X did not.”
All three of the EU charges against the company are about its lack of transparency; none is about censoring content. But there is also no great mystery about the fact that the DSA requires large platforms to fight disinformation and take down illegal content. These responsibilities are written into the law, which Musk explicitly endorsed two years ago while standing next to Commission digital chief Thierry Breton. "There has never been—and will never be—any ‘secret deal’. With anyone,” Breton tweeted Friday in response to a legal threat from Musk. “See you (in court or not).”
I am extraordinarily cautious about offering advice that touches on the U.S.’s febrile political moment, not least because I’m not American and I live on the other side of the world. However, I will say this: Given how systemically broken social media is when it comes to the spread of disinformation, it’s really up to each individual to be extra-careful about the ideas they spread and skeptical about what they read, especially if it fits too neatly with their own outlook. The truth is out there, but it has strong competition.
More news below—and do check out the livestream for Fortune Brainstorm Tech, which begins this afternoon in Park City, Utah. You might particularly want to tune in for a session with cybersecurity startup Wiz at 3:15 p.m. MT, for reasons that will become clear below.
David Meyer
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com