Politics now plays out parallel to conspiracy theories, expressing and promoting them. This has been building for almost a decade, while efforts to counter them have barely kept up and don't seem to stop them. Fact checking responds to conspiracy theories as if they are isolated incidents that can be corrected, rather than normal and regular manifestations of the political and media ecosystem in which we live.
Over the past decade, each time such conspiracy theories take hold, break containment and begin to spread widely, a range of counter-disinformation experts, researchers documenting far-right views, historians and journalists tracking the rise of Christian nationalism, fact-checkers and advocates for traditional media, and lobbying groups advocating for online and child safety have scrambled to respond. The idea that we can establish the truth is also attractive to those in the media, who, in their best days, believe that facts can change the world.
Increasingly, however, those who benefit from the rise of conspiracy theory politics (influencers, content creators, and even elected officials and the core of the Republican Party) then target these disinformation experts and fact checkers. In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol, Republican members of Congress seemed to recognize the threats posed by conspiracy theory politics: Their own lives were being threatened by supporters of election conspiracy theories promoted by the outgoing president. But Republicans have since reinforced the idea that they are under attack not from conspiracy theorists, but from content moderators. They have made dismantling the infrastructure to combat disinformation and disinformation a core part of their agenda. “Even before Donald Trump returned to the White House, the anti-disinformation movement had chalked up a string of victories through a common set of tactics that combined independent media pressure, congressional scrutiny and lawsuits that sometimes reached the Supreme Court.” writes journalist James Ball in a recent article for The Verge tracing the battle.
