The 47th president of the US is now in office and President Trump’s second term looks certain to be consequential for the whole world. From the first words of his inauguration speech, Trump set the tone for the next four years.
Many of the concerns that scientists expressed following Trump’s re-election were realised in this barrage of day-one executive orders, including a second US withdrawal from the Paris agreement on climate change and exiting the World Health Organization. The casual attitude to facts that characterised Trump’s first term was also back. Fact checks of his inauguration speech chalked up a list of unfounded assertions and misrepresentations – including a scientific snub for New Zealanders with the mistaken claim that it was the US that had split the atom, a credit that actually belongs to their countryman Ernest Rutherford.
Science has had a strained relationship with President Trump, particularly during the Covid pandemic. The outgoing president Joe Biden even took the unprecedented step of issuing prophylactic pardons to protect, among others, the immunologist Anthony Fauci who guided the US response to Covid and became a target for attacks from Trump’s supporters. Yet, in general, polls show that scientists maintain high levels of trust around the world. Still, a recent survey of that sort in Nature Human Behaviour also warned that even small pockets of lower trust can be harmful, and that this is more likely to occur when topics receive extensive media coverage. And in that sphere, much has changed in just the last few years.
This consolidation could create an ‘infoligarchy’ of equal threat
The 2024 Reuters state of digital news report detailed the continuing decline of traditional media and the growth of social media platforms, aggregators and podcasts. Younger people are much more likely to use these sources for news and to rely on ‘influencers’, particularly on newer platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, to stay informed. The podcaster Joe Rogan, for example, has an average audience of 11 million per episode – while traditional media brands struggle to get a fraction of that. However, broadcasters in alternative media often have no obligation or duty to factual reporting.
Trump vowed in his address to protect free speech, and his influence here is already clear. His close ally Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, renamed it X, and enacted his ‘free speech absolutism’ by replacing its in-house fact-checking with a sort of post-publication review by users. At the start of this year, Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Meta which owns Facebook and Instagram, followed Musk’s lead and fired his US fact-checkers too. TikTok, another platform with enormous reach, was banned by the US supreme court over national security concerns, but has now been given a reprieve by Trump to allow time for its Chinese creator Bytedance to sell it into foreign (probably US) ownership. It seems unlikely that Musk and Zuckerberg took front row seats at the inauguration to bend Trump’s ear about the need for more US regulation on misinformation. It remains to be seen whether the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation will be able to rein in tech companies in the bloc.
It’s worth noting that fact-checkers can certainly be overzealous. Just a few years ago Facebook and the BMJ tangled over a Facebook post promoting a BMJ investigation into poor practices in a Covid vaccine trial. Facebook marked the piece as ‘missing context’ in part to cover concerns the report could be misrepresented by anti-vaxxers. Yet if debates like those are the price of trustworthiness, it seems a small one to pay.
In his farewell speech, Joe Biden warned of an oligarchy taking shape the US. Wealthy people having political influence and owning channels of communication is nothing new. But the plurality of news sources – underpinned by journalistic ethics, integrity and regulation to ensure accuracy – has always been a safeguard against a monopoly of news and opinion. As the platforms remove guardrails in the name of free speech, and the owners of those platforms set their sails to the prevailing political wind, this consolidation could create an ‘infoligarchy’ of equal threat.
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