By Sarah Ellison, The Washington Post (c) 2024
In the aftermath of the extraordinary 2016 victories by Brexit and Donald Trump, the Oxford Dictionaries chose “post-truth” as the word of the year.
The concept outlived 2016.
Conspiracy theories now help define elections once defined by their winners. After Trump lost in 2020, he denied reality, as did many of his supporters. The so-called “big lie” centered on rejectingthe results of the presidential election. As voters head to the polls this year, though, they confront an avalanche of deceptive and false assertions that go well beyond matters of election integrity: Democrats are importing immigrants to vote for them illegally and “replace” White Americans. U.S. intelligence agencies have plans to assassinate Trump allies after the 2024 election. Haitians are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. Elites are controlling the path of hurricanes. Trump sat on a towel during a recent Fox News interview to mask his incontinence.
Taken separately, the false claims are, in a way, beside the point. Oxford defined post-truth as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The underlying narratives that give rise to the false claims are the fuel for conspiratorial thinking that has already seeped into the electorate – to the degree that “the demand for a conspiracy may well outstrip the supply,” said Claire Wardle, an associate professor at Cornell who studies the contemporary information ecosystem and misinformation.
The 2024 vote is happening in a splintered reality where Americans must grapple with misleading claims not only about politics and the election but about nearly every aspect of their lives: health care, education, immigration – even the weather.
This split-screen environment has driven peopleaway from traditional fact-checking and reasoned arguments into a post-truth world where debate itself – fundamental to a democracy – feels dangerous.
“As a young single woman, it is a bit scarier to combat these beliefs given that most of the people I’ve interacted with who make these claims are White, middle-aged men,” said Hannah Pride-Smith, 26, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, who works as a veterinary assistant in an animal shelter and voted for Kamala Harris. “It’s hard to feel safe getting into heated, argumentative conversations.”
Pride-Smith gets most of her news from social media and friends and family, and she participated in The Washington Post-Schar School poll of registered voters in swing states. “When I was much smaller, talking about politics was never something that felt dangerous. Now that’s not the case,” she added.
Bree Burris, 18, of Concord, North Carolina, is a cosmetologist who voted for the first time, casting her ballot for Trump. She also expressed reluctance to engage. “I do not try to convince people of my views,” she said.
Stefanie Friedhoff, co-founder of the Information Futures Lab at Brown University, said that “one reason why people cannot agree on a common set of facts is that they do not live in the same information realities.” It has taken years to get here, she pointed out, and, “we are moving farther and farther away from one another.”
“Up until the last election, I was pretty open about my political beliefs,” said Kevin, 39, of Bayside, Wisconsin, on the outskirts of Milwaukee, who has a 14-month-old daughter and spoke on the condition that he be identified only by his first name. He has heard from friends false rumors – peddled by Russia – that Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, is a pedophile as well as sexist smears that Harris slept her way to her elected positions. Since his daughter was born, “I don’t say much because I don’t want to put a target on my back. … I don’t want to be on a list somewhere. … In the back of my mind is the fact that my grandmother grew up in Nazi Germany, and she was scared of the way Donald Trump was talking.”
Polarization and false rumors did not begin with Trump, but he supercharged them. Trump’s first term began with a demand that the public consider “alternative facts,” as a senior adviser of his said, when judging the crowd size at his inauguration. It ended with a violent insurrection he has since recast as “a day of love.” He routinely attacks the media as “the enemy of the people” and demeans experts in government as “the deep state.”
Growing skepticism toward traditional spheres of authority, including election officials, health-care workers, journalists and scientists, has by now drilled doubt into the bedrock of American democracy. Online algorithms that favor the most extreme storylines – and serve them up on repeat – help existing beliefs morph into full-blown conspiratorial mindsets.
Only 40 percent of Republicans reported trusting mainstream news organizations in 2024, about the same percentage that said they trusted social media for news, according to a recent Pew survey. For mainstream news, that is a dramatic decline from the 70 percent of Republicans who reported trusting them in 2016.
“Having a president who has become a master of disinformation is so hard on the press and on democracy,” said First Amendment lawyer Ted Boutrous, “We have a president who is at war with journalism and facts and with the truth, and it is a very toxic situation for our country.”
When facts are irrelevant, beliefs step in to fill the void.
As two dangerous storms bore down on the American South this fall, a collection of influencers and foreign and domestic fake-news purveyors chimed in with stories and posts to sow mistrust and resentment about meteorologists who were providing information about the hurricanes, as well as federal agencies tasked with relief efforts.
Individuals urged their fellow citizens to kill meteorologists who did not back up the theory that Democrats had sent the storms to punish their political enemies. People urged those affected by the storms to disrupt the aid efforts of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which was beset by false rumors that it had run out of money due to its support for undocumented immigrants arriving in the United States.
“In isolation, conspiracy theories can look outlandish. It’s easier to understand them in light of how they were built over time,” Friedhoff said. “This is a cascading process where you are gradually getting used to things that are increasingly removed from reality.”
When a school shooting happens, researchers find that the affected community, dealing with the reality of the tragedy, has a very different conversation from the rest of the country. The community frequently is mourning, and the rest of the country is having a fight over gun laws.
“And what happened after the hurricanes was comparable to that in that the community was mourning and responding and trying to figure out what to do,” Friedhoff said. “And the country was having these conspiracy theories circling around which were very much about the election and not actually the hurricanes, grooming more people into those belief systems by making up stuff about the response, making up stuff about the government.”
For people who had listened for years to the purported dangers of immigration and who were already primed to believe that the federal government was interfering too muchin their lives and taking too much of their money, the false claims about FEMAaligned with their views thattax dollars were abused for the benefit of undocumented people. They were ready to welcome these false claims.
The pandemic, too, provided an opportunity to spread mistrust in expertise and the federal government, two of Trump’s longtime bogeymen.
“The single biggest predictor we found when we looked across the country at vaccination rates at a county level is just the proportion of people in each county that voted for Donald Trump and their consumption of partisan news sources,” said Jay Van Bavel, a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, who studies how social identities shape behavior. Partisanship outpaced education level, race, rural vs. urban and previous flu vaccination rates as factors when it came to covid-19vaccination rates.
“None of those come close to being as good a predictor as partisanship, which can be easily traced to misinformation about covid and the vaccine,” Van Bavel added.
The prevalence of conspiratorial thinking has become more common among conservatives, but it is not a problem confined to one side of the political spectrum.
Though they tend to die down more quickly than false claims on the right, untruths designed to discredit or damage Trump circulated online earlier this year. Immediately after an assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, skeptical reports on social media alleged that the shooting had been staged to gin up support for the former president. After Trump sat for an interview on “Fox & Friends” last month, some social media accounts incorrectly posited that he was sitting on a black towel to avoid staining the couch. He was sitting on his blue suit jacket.
“We often think about this as a conservative problem, but it is really a human problem,” Friedhoff said, even more so now that people have been encouraged for years to think using a conspiratorial lens, “which wasn’t happening in 2016.”
Creating stories out of a lack of information “is just part of how our brain works and how our cognitive biases work,” Friedhoff said.
As the media environment has fractured, the most relied upon sources of news, especially local news, are friends and family, according to Pew.
“We really look to people we know, or who we think we know, for trusted news,” said Wardle, the Cornell professor. But trust in individuals over institutions can be abused.
That instinct dovetails with the rise of individual social media influencers who address their audiences in direct, familiar terms. These personalities have gained mass audiences on the back of Trump’s denial of the 2020 election results. It is why the Russian propaganda scandal of this election season centered on Tenet Media, a Russian-government-funded company that lavishly paid homegrown, right-wing social media accounts already popular with Trump supporters to spread a message to their mass audiences.
In that environment, there isn’t one trusted source of news but rather scores of different accounts providing personalized appeals. The messages are similar but shaped to resonate with specific audiences.
“People misunderstand misinformation as something that exists as an individual piece of bad information to be batted down,” Wardle said, but that is not how it operates. “It is about building, over time, a conspiratorial mindset that can then be kicked into gear in almost any circumstance.”
That mindset is well-primed to see what it wants to see on Election Day.
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Beth Reinhard contributed to this report.