The Trump administration's war on facts is now underway. Here's how to fight back.

OPINION By Michelle Daniel

As President Donald Trump begins his second term, pundits, analysts and democratic strategists will put forth a string of theories about what led to his return to the White House. Central to their discussions is the role of “new media”—podcasts, niche online news sites and social platforms—that has far surpassed legacy media in reach and influence, and Trump’s seemingly effortless domination of this vast, chaotic ecosystem. It certainly helped him secure the election. 

But the real winner this past November wasn’t Trump. It was disinformation. 

Disseminated and amplified by the very platforms that were designed to foster connection, disinformation has emerged as one of the most insidious threats to our democracy. Unlike misinformation, which is information that’s inaccurate accidentally and without ill intent, disinformation is deliberately untrue and misleading. President Joe Biden in his farewell address emphasized this concern saying “Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power.”

To seal the death of facts, one of Trump's first executive orders mandated the end of what the administration described as the government's censorship of social media—a manufactured crisis that the far-right has used to target disinformation researchers and social media platforms through lawsuits and congressional inquiries over the last several years. "Under the guise of combatting 'misinformation,' 'disinformation,' and 'malinformation,' the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States," the order reads. Trump also promised to investigate government agencies engaged in these activities, putting a stark end to federally funded research into mis- and disinformation.

The decline is only exacerbated by Meta ending its fact-checking program weeks before the inauguration, capitulating to the far-right's scaremongering about censorship. As Compiler contributor Ellery Biddle recently wrote, disinformation research—which  should be a bipartisan, scientific pursuit—has been bludgeoned by right-wing lawfare. Researchers, NGOs and universities that study this subject have come under increased scrutiny from conservative factions. This narrative has emboldened the incoming administration, whose leaders seem poised to not only defund disinformation research but also vilify and persecute those involved in it. 

The instability of our democracy, exacerbated by unchecked recklessness with information and a woefully inadequate education system, is glaring. Disinformation causes decay indiscriminately. No telling what America will look like in the next election cycle if we allow disinformation to negate truth, pollute online environments and erode public trust in institutions. To understand what’s at stake, let’s explore the current checks that will likely disappear under the new administration. Then we’ll discuss how we might salvage the remnants to stay in the fight. 

One of the cornerstones of the Biden administration’s fight against disinformation was the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. Founded in 2011, the GEC fell under the jurisdiction of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy. The agency’s original mission was to counter false narratives about the United States and harness social media data to understand how foreign disinformation campaigns impact perceptions of the United States abroad. Lee Satterfield currently holds the position of Acting Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, but she’s unlikely to be confirmed before the end of the current administration. Even if she were, the GEC closed permanently on Dec. 23, 2024 after being perceived by Republicans as a leftist censorship machine. 

In February 2023, Elon Musk provided a glaring example of the effort to discredit the GEC, which now stands out as most germane to the incoming administration. Via Twitter/X, he labeled the GEC as not only a threat to democracy but also “the worst offender in U.S. government censorship and media manipulation.” Tellingly, this accusation came just as the GEC decided to escalate its counter-disinformation efforts targeting Kremlin-funded campaigns. Another episode around this time involved Republican members of Congress—Michael McCaul (TX-10), Brian Mast (FL-21) and Darrell Issa (CA-48), among others—who sent an oversight letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken arguing that the GEC had violated its original counterterrorism mandate and had been censoring disfavored viewpoints particularly from conservative American media. The legislators also cited several of the leading counter-disinformation organizations in the U.S., including the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab, Moonshot and the Global Disinformation Index, as forming essentially unlawful partnerships with the GEC. The letter stated that they would not reauthorize the GEC until these issues were corrected. 

The GEC had created a framework for countering malignant foreign information in the hopes of building consensus among nations for this universal problem. It signed memoranda of understanding with other countries, attempted to build bridges with like-minded counterparts in academia and sought to create interagency collaboration for the purposes of disarming disinformation and propaganda. While the GEC might have been encumbered by bureaucracy and politics that limited its efficacy and action, it did in fact have an impact. And though a replacement body is in the works, this new office will be strictly focused on foreign interference and information manipulation. This precludes all the homegrown destructive narratives throttling the domestic digital space that creates impediments for local, state, and federal authorities simply seeking to do their jobs—as we have now seen countless times during climate disasters from Los Angeles to North Carolina.

Protecting our information environment goes hand-in-hand with media literacy. Any micro-momentum that has been made by the Department of Education toward getting school districts nationwide to integrate media literacy and cybersecurity training into the standard curriculum is going to be undone or halted. Education will overall be in crisis mode, and any chance we have of systemic change to keep pace with the needs of our tech-dependent workforce will fade—at least for a time. 

Some of the biggest traditional problems with tackling misinformation and disinformation are the fragmented, whack-a-mole approaches to “hostile information activities,” as NATO calls them. Working in silos does not lead to long-term change. The military does not send soldiers into kinetic warfare one at a time and separately without shared intelligence and operational support; tackling disinformation should be no different. The only way to begin to “win” the information war is through a cross-denominational, future-focused and horizontally structured collaboration in the form of an information working group (IWG). Disinformation researchers can take a cue from the Climate Action Network, a network of nearly 2,000 civil society groups in over 130 countries that collectively fight for sustainable solutions to the climate crisis. 

Why future-focused? A compelling vision of the future is a uniting force. Why horizontal? Cross-cutting networks are a deterrent to any one entity’s domination, and they connect many universities and researchers, cross-pollinating them with NGOs, advocacy groups, industry and intergovernmental organizations.

To guide the labor of this IWG, there must be a new kind of grand strategy. I dusted off my grad-school copy of “The Chessboard & the Web,” wherein Anne-Marie Slaughter proposes a pleasant grand strategy of Open Order Building. But given the extent to which the online ecosystem is independent of geographical boundaries, we shouldn’t be focusing on a state-centric approach of any kind. We should look away from government-funded institutions that are bound by geographical constraints: Borderless information requires borderless leadership and borderless strategy. Information disorder is universal. We need to move on from George Kennan’s “containment” or Biden’s “constrainment” and the overt democracy promotion inherent to each. Democracy is only as strong as its people. We should instead be guided by an urgent need to foster networks of collaborations while strengthening global media literacy programs. 

A significant impediment to the IWG model, which will certainly discourage essential cross-border collaboration, is the legislation allowing the Treasury Department to shut down 501(c)(3) nonprofits, as many key players rely on their nonprofit status to operate and fund disinformation research. To ensure resilience, the IWG must include international partners and diverse funding mechanisms beyond the U.S. government that can survive domestic political vicissitudes. Only a network of networks rooted in trust and collaboration can hope to counteract the destabilizing power of disinformation.

Are we willing to reimagine our current structures and operations, or are we going to allow disinformation to reign?

Michelle Daniel is the founder and CEO of Connexions Global Matrix, Inc., nonprofit devoted to advancing public education and developing expert, multi-sector, global leadership in the information and technology space. Previously, she served as assistant director at the Center for Russian, East European, & Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin