There’s Little to Stop Trump Shooting Conspiracies From Spreading

It took minutes after the shooting at Donald Trump’s campaign rally on Saturday for misinformation to begin circulating on social media. Maybe the shooter was an Italian soccer commentator. Perhaps Mr. Trump was shot in the chest. The platform X, formerly known as Twitter, promoted conspiracy theories sporting hashtags like “#falseflag” and “#staged” (alleging that the shooting was staged to gain sympathy for Mr. Trump) among its trending topics.

We’ve just experienced the first serious attempted assassination of a presidential candidate in the social media age. How widely are conspiracy theories being spread by our largest platforms? How many voters are being swayed by them? Are the platforms living up to their promises to stop misinformation from circling? Believe it or not, the answer is that we don’t know — and have few ways to find out.

Thanks in part to a coordinated attack on the internet research community by right-wing groups — and also by the failure of Congress and the courts to install adequate guardrails on the behavior of Big Tech — we now have less visibility than ever before into the impact our under-regulated social media platforms are having on our politics. As the Politico writer Mark Scott declared in a recent newsletter, “The U.S. is walking in blind into November.”

The 2016 presidential election was supposed to be a wake-up call about the role of social media in politics. Mr. Trump’s surprise victory was attributed partly to his campaign’s strategy of flooding the social media airwaves — an effort supported by a covert Russian influence campaign and a trove of misused Facebook data.

By the 2020 elections, an entire monitoring ecosystem had arisen to ensure that the public wouldn’t be blindsided again. Disinformation research centers popped up at universities across the United States, where academics combed through Facebook posts and Twitter feeds using automated tools. Journalists used publicly available tools to report story after story about fake news spreading across the platforms.

Four years later, most of that transparency is in jeopardy or gone. Some of the research centers stopped work or were shut down entirely amid pressure from lawsuits and a Republican congressional inquiry that alleged that the disinformation research was part of a government censorship conspiracy.