This Is How to Debunk the Onslaught of Disinformation

The last Trump administration might not have introduced the concept of disinformation, but 2.0 has taken propaganda to a new dangerous level. Are we better equipped to combat it this time around?

So here we are, back in a disinformation-riddled Trump administration. This time around, though, we have fewer journalists, no Twitter, and malevolent maniacs wrecking our federal government.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure rhymes. I’ve heard it again and again, along with that famous quote about history repeating itself first as tragedy and then as farce.

It’s true. We’re in a terrifying farcical time where government policy is run by social media posts—again. We’ve got the same former real-estate developer and his sneering wife that we got back in 2017, and his blasts from the firehose of disinformation have eaten up the attention of the press—again.

It’s easy to say that Americans have a unique capacity for self-destruction, but I have an alternate theory.

I think that the mess in which we find ourselves, with all of our public institutions under direct attack from the global far right and their funders, is an inevitable outcome of the toxic stew of corruption and disinformation we are mired in increasingly by the day without much hope for pushback from elected officials.

We cannot debunk our way out of a country in which a president threatens to withhold fire-disaster aid unless a state implements his specific demands.

In other words, this system will inevitably bring us more Trumps until we change our approach. Debunking disinformation is no longer valid. The means of our cultural production are being co-opted or outright seized. Now, disinformation ceases to be regarded as such once it becomes policy.

Instead, we have to transform ourselves and our approach.

Before my time as a professional fact-checker and debunker, I had a pretty lively career for about 20 years as a breaking-news radio reporter who went all up and down the West Coast of North America covering disasters. I covered Katrina and its aftermath from the Houston Astrodome. I covered the beginning of Iraq II from CNN headquarters in Atlanta. I spent a long time covering the U.S.-Mexico border during my last run as a reporter before I threw it all in to try to fight the disinformation that was getting aimed straight at the heart of representative democracy.

Breaking-news reporting between 1995 and 2015—the time period I was reporting, rather than debunking or editing or writing commentary—meant I covered a lot of natural disasters, Katrina to the Witch Creek and Guejito fires, mostly landslides and earthquakes and wildfires and floods.

In fact, the first big story I ever covered was a climate-related disaster, a freeway onramp built over a clay sewer pipe that everyone had forgotten existed collapsing during record rains in an El Niňo year. Today, looking back at my career, which is now somehow entering its thirtieth year, it’s clear to me that every step of the way was formed from and part of the climate crisis that has now reached catastrophic proportions.

That includes the last decade, during which time I worked as a fact-checker and debunker. The strange rumors I started to hear around every disaster starting in the early aughts unfurled over the last decade into protracted disinformation attacks, such as those spread in Los Angeles right this moment by loathsome far-right figures as they work to leverage the devastation wrought by historic wildfires there for political and personal gain. 

A unified Greek chorus of voices is blaming diversity, equity, and inclusion standards for the destruction of the fires, as if one has anything to do with another; those same voices are also finger-pointing at Democratic leadership from the governor all the way down to the mayor of Los Angeles.

If you have been tracking disinformation campaigns over the last several years, then the goal of the ghoulish coordinated messaging and public relations campaign is clear. It’s an attempt to replace Democrats with right-wing and extractive leadership so that California’s vibrant industries can be used instead in the service of further enriching the super-wealthy. 

It’s what I said it was all along: A global, far right power grab that uses disinformation to leverage the ills of climate change so that its aligned members in each nation-state can grab up resources and power.  

The problem is, that same global far right succeeded in capturing a lot of the information world by now. The United States has a fraction of the working journalists that it had even a decade ago. Libraries are under ideological and literal attack,and ditto for schools. Our once-vibrant internet has been turned from a dazzling if overwhelming wonderland into a series of dying strip malls populated with ghastly AI-generated images and corporate brandspeak and a megaphone for hate speech and bullying mobs that are calculated to wreak chaos and push women of color in particular out of power. 

But it’s all still happening because of the climate crisis. There would be far less instability to leverage if we weren’t all getting hit by increasingly destabilized weather systems and previously rare disasters happening just about every year now. These disinformation tactics were used on us all by fossil fuel corporations for decades before the narratives began to get spread by other political figures as well. However, the goals are the same—controlling large populations at scale—and so are many of the major players at this point. They’re trying to say climate change was caused by the planet having too many people, the biggest lie of them all. 

If you look at where the disinformation is going and who it is directed toward rather than what it says, the pattern is clear. These streams of highly weaponized disinformation are being directed at entities that would stand between resources and corporate control. (Humans, as perhaps the incoming Trump administration has already made clear, are considered resources by those wielding these toxic narrative campaigns.)

The destruction or tainting of information and the ability for the public to access it was always where it was going. The fact-checkers tried to warn everybody. The debunkers tried to keep us out of this future. The toppling of a democracy always begins with tainting its information.

Democratic norms can be strengthened by outside attacks, but they cannot withstand individual worldviews being widely tainted by deliberate malinformation. In order to have a democracy, you need to have a shared worldview, and how can you have that if you can’t even agree on base reality? How can you have a democracy when there are people in this nation who earnestly buy into tainted narratives like Pizzagate, or its much more weaponized successor, QAnon? How can you have a democracy when those exact people are allowed into power?

The worst part about all of this is that it could have been stopped at any time, but elected officials decided not to listen to the people they purported to represent, and ceded power to the known community of global fascists.

But now we’re here, and we’re all going to have to figure out a way to get through it together. We are now living through an absence of any fact-checking to speak of, in a time and place in which absolute tragedies such as the homes in Altadena burning will be openly used for the gain of the loud and openly corrupt, and no one will hold them to account. It is a very sad time, and one I gave everything I had to try to avoid. 

Now we must preserve and protect all the information we can before it is destroyed. We are poised to lose so much of what humanity has learned together in my lifetime alone, and so it is up to us –each of us, individually – to save as much of it  as we can. We will have to become our own fact-checkers and archivists. We lived through this before, so we have an idea what to expect – although last time around, our democracy was healthier and so was our media. That means this time around, it will be worse. We will be barraged with lies tainting our present and our future as the global far right tries its best to destroy our past. 

We will be deluged with lies and misdirections and disinformation and misinformation that plays on the histories of our regions and uses them in the service of hideous lies during fires or floods or bombs or earthquakes, whenever we need vetted, good information the most. It has already happened. It is happening right now. We will all have to learn to discern what is true and what is false for ourselves.

But I have some ideas that might help. Here is what I have learned from my work as a debunker and a cross-border reporter with a background in breaking news, where you have to learn to protect yourself and your information:

1. Limit the time you spend consuming news. The news cycle is being deliberately weaponized to make you feel hopeless in ways that many journalists are unable or unwilling to understand and mitigate at the moment.
2. Limit your time on social media unless you can have trusted private networks. And even then don’t talk about anything unlawful. Save those conversations for face-to-face meetings.
3. Embrace physical media. Write things down. Send letters to each other. No, really.
4. It’s possible to step up and help when others won’t. We can learn from previous disasters and do better, if we work together.
5. Find and form trusted mutual aid networks.
6. Support your local libraries.
7. Do not waste your time appealing to authority that has demonstrated they are unwilling to fight for you. Fact-checking is always important, but it is only effective on its own in a healthy democracy. We are not in a healthy democracy.
8. Learn your regional history, particularly unresolved crimes against humanity such as slavery and genocide. Learn about vulnerable groups and how they are treated. Often, those painful histories are leveraged in the service of disinformation campaigns. Listen to marginalized people.
9. Follow people online who you have already observed having integrity. Give people the benefit of the doubt if you hear rumors. Do not give them the benefit of the doubt if you observe them engaging in bad behavior.
10. Toss toxic people out of your trusted networks.
11. Keep a journal. Write a few words in it every day, if you can; it doesn’t need to be a long letter to yourself.  Writing down your thoughts will help you remember what you want to remember, and it will also provide you with a bulwark against weapons-grade gaslighting.
12. Take breaks and find joy somehow. This is going to really suck. Find or make a haven for yourself if you possibly can.
13. Take care of your health. Don’t forget to rest, eat, and hydrate. Find a place you can retreat and shut out the rest of the world if you have to.
14. Spend time with your loved ones.
15. Stand up for each other, even when it’s hard. (And it will be hard.)

We can get through this. But in order to do so, we all have to work together to debunk poisonous lies and preserve our memories and our thoughts, because that’s how we build resilience, real resilience, the type that gives us what we need in order to bounce back from the heartbreak and tragedies of the last few years and whatever is to come. We can do that if we work together, and the time to do so is now.