Feb 4, 2021 7:00 AM

Joe Biden Has to Walk a Fine Line When Fighting Disinformation

The president pledged to defend the truth, but how far can he go without impinging Americans’ rights or undermining his cause?

Of the 59 inaugural addresses in American history, presidents have mentioned “truth” in only a handful, and invariably as a passing flourish: a “simple truth,” a “profound truth,” or a pleading reference to the Declaration of Independence’s “these truths.” Joe Biden broke tradition on January 20 by placing truth itself, and fighting disinformation, at the core of his speech.

“Recent weeks and months have taught us a painful lesson,” he said. “There is truth and there are lies. Lies told for power and for profit. And each of us has a duty and responsibility, as citizens, as Americans, and especially as leaders—leaders who have pledged to honor our Constitution and protect our nation—to defend the truth and defeat the lies.”

How could he not invoke the truth? He was flanked by lies. Behind him was a crime scene, the Capitol, recently invaded by believers in the lie that the election was stolen. In front of him, along the National Mall, was a memorial to the then-400,000 Americans who had died from coronavirus, a toll exacerbated by lies spread by public officials and by disbelief in scientific fact. Above him, heading south on Marine One, his conspiracy theorist predecessor had just flown away from facing the truth that he’d lost.

Announcing a mandate for truth and to “reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured” is a bold, odd, precarious position for any politician to take, especially in hyper-polarized, social-media-dominated 2021. Not only does Biden lack a sterling record of pursuing truth, as president he’s going to lie. (Most presidents do, if not at Trump’s level, and Biden already has, about the Covid vaccine rollout). He’s been a serial embellisher, plagiarizer, and fibber since his career in Washington began in 1973, just as the lies of Watergate were coming to light, a time from which trust in government has never fully recovered. Today, “our trust in the United States’ entire information system—journalism, health care, education, science—is in tatters,” says Sam Woolley, director of propaganda research at the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Media Engagement.

Still, Biden has no choice but to fight. “For four years, we suffered under an administration that wholeheartedly embraced the most pernicious sorts of spin-doctoring and lies,” says Woolley, “and it was extremely effective.” Seventy percent of Republicans believe the election wasn’t “free and fair.” About half of Americans say they’ll delay or refuse receiving the Covid-19 vaccine, according to a new Kaiser Family Foundation survey. It is much harder for Biden to achieve the rest of his agenda—beating Covid, improving health care, combating climate change and racial injustice—if he cannot tamp out disinformation and restore trust in the institutions needed to enact it.

“Biden is right to stake a huge amount of his popularity on the notion that truth can matter,” says Larry Tye, author of Demagogue, a new biography of Senator Joe McCarthy. If there’s any single historical analog to Donald Trump’s four-year reign of lies, says Tye, it’s McCarthy’s four-and-a-half-year crusade against Communism, which began in 1950 when he brandished a list of what he unfoundedly claimed were 205 Communist spies in the State Department. And “if there’s any single black mark on Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential record,” it’s spending much of his first term as McCarthy’s “enabler in chief,” which allowed not only for McCarthy to put elected and appointed officials through sham investigations but also for anti-Communist paranoia to continue to spread throughout America. Biden should be less like Ike, says Tye, and more like Margaret Chase Smith. Then the only woman in the Senate, in 1950 Smith defied her Republican colleagues by delivering a speech roundly denouncing McCarthyism before McCarthy on the Senate floor. Her “Declaration of Conscience” set in motion McCarthyism’s eventual downfall and remains hailed as Smith’s crowning achievement.

Of course Smith suffered great backlash in the short term, and Biden certainly will too as he wades into a highly charged and notably partisan issue. More than anything else in Biden’s inaugural address, Rand Paul and other Republican senators attacked Biden’s lines on truth as a thinly veiled and unfair bashing of the right. While members of all political parties are susceptible to disinformation, far-right conservatives disproportionately share it. Should there be actual regulatory action against disinformation under Biden, it could very well fall disproportionately, too. “My only worry is that [Biden may] further politicize the work to try to combat misinformation,” says Kate Starbird, a misinformation researcher at the University of Washington. “Our vulnerabilities to disinformation are so tied up in our political identities that if you’re a government person talking about fighting misinformation, you’re going to get accused of being the Ministry of Truth.” Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami and coauthor of American Conspiracy Theories, adds that Biden risks “doing exactly what conspiracy theorists fear: powerful people shielding themselves from criticism and taking more power to control what people are allowed to say and think.”

When the climate is so corrosive that telling the truth is a liability, Biden has to “fight disinformation with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer,” says Woolley. A pressing question is where best to aim it. Our current epistemic crisis has myriad causes and accelerants: fringe media; foreign interference; the past president, his administration, and his loyalists’ daily distortions of facts; social media and algorithmic recommendation, hard-to-track private groups, and laissez-faire approaches to content moderation; an online culture that promotes sharing content without thinking. What levers should Biden pull? What should he leave to the private sector?

To the extent that Biden isn’t putting climate science deniers in his administration, making 50 misleading statements a day, or retweeting @OscartheMidnightRider1111’s claims that Bin Laden is alive, the Republic is already in a better place than it was under Trump. The more the Biden administration departs from its predecessor’s approach, offering comprehensive facts even when they may be politically detrimental, the more likely it is to “bring transparency and truth back to government,” as press secretary Jen Psaki said in her first briefing. (And when it’s not, the media would do well to call Biden’s lies as lies sooner than it did under Trump.)

Biden could start simply by reaffirming what truth is. While he admits it’s no panacea, Woolley suggests new public school curricula on media, social media, and informational literacy could help those who lack access to credible information, and raise a generation of more discerning readers. The White House could also build a PSA campaign on a clear definition of scientific fact. The administration has already created a new, comprehensive vaccine information page.

Education is a tiny piece of the puzzle; many insurrectionists, QAnon believers, and other conspiracy theorists hold advanced degrees. The larger issues are the systems that amplify harmful disinformation, and the challenge for any government official is to find a way to mitigate them without mitigating First Amendment rights. With regulating speech online, as Emily Bazelon recently wrote in The New York Times Magazine, “we are uncomfortable with government doing it; we are uncomfortable with Silicon Valley doing it. But we are also uncomfortable with nobody doing it at all.” One option, Woolley suggests, is to bring the two together in a blue-ribbon commission to craft sensible regulation for all social media platforms. “Most of what we’ve seen in terms of self-regulation by Facebook or YouTube has been solely focused upon doing stuff on their platform,” he says. “Anyone that studies disinformation would say that disinformation flows without borders.” Biden could assemble leaders of platforms giant and small, academics, elected officials, and, crucially, representatives from State and Defense. For regulation like this to have bipartisan buy-in, “this has to be made an issue of national security,” says Woolley.

Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have both intimated to lawmakers they have too much power over speech, though what exact regulation they’d be amenable to remains to be seen. Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, suggests that the administration should push to mandate “public interest obligations” for platforms to police far-reaching accounts. “If your account is reaching, say, 50,000 people, then there are different rules about what you can and can’t do with your account. If you're using your account to push hate speech and incite violence and harass people, there’s going to be consequences.” Those consequences aren’t limited to suspensions or bans like Facebook and Twitter handed Trump. Donovan proposes a range of tools including time delays for certain types of content or tiered systems for enforcement based on reach.

The power that the major platforms have also hints at another tool the Biden administration could use: antitrust. Of course, the primary goal of antitrust enforcement is to ensure fair competition, but many disinformation experts believe that regulators could also help achieve a healthier information environment when it comes to social media. If breaking up the likes of Facebook and Google gives birth to a smorgasbord of platforms for users to choose from, that might put more pressure on the platform giants to adjust their privacy and content moderation policies in ways that better curtail misinformation. (Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has argued that breaking up his company would make moderation harder.)

The most politically risky but perhaps most immediately effective tactic Biden could take is following Margaret Chase Smith and directly calling out the elected officials who spread the Big Lie that the election was stolen. “Biden should work with leaders in Congress to have the members of the Senate and the House who aided and abetted the insurrection expelled,” says Uscinski. “We’ve got to make an example of this, that this can’t be tolerated. Put the blame where it belongs: on the people who actually have influence, not some random fucking Twitter account.”

Some of the biggest liars and enablers are already facing some reckoning. Since Twitter banned Trump and 70,000 QAnon accounts, some (very) early data suggests that misinformation has dropped on the platform. Twitter has also launched a community fact-checking feature. Parler, a “stop the steal” hotbed, is homeless. Under new scrutiny, prominent conspiracy theorists like Marjorie Taylor Greene are scrubbing lies from their social media accounts. (The House will vote on Thursday on whether to remove Greene from her congressional committees.) Sidney Powell, Trump’s former lawyer, and Rudy Giuliani have been sued a message-sending $1.1 and $1.3 billion each for spouting alleged defamatory lies about Dominion Voting Systems.

And Trump awaits an impeachment hearing, where his lies will be on trial and watched by millions. As Tye points out, the televised Army-McCarthy hearings exposed Joe McCarthy’s lies once and for all and torpedoed his approval rating to 34 percent. While McCarthy “was initially defiant, as were his millions of supporters, he quickly understood that he’d be shamed and that going quietly was the thing to do.” Tye suspects the same of Trump. Then again: “It takes a lot to be more shameless than ‘Low-Blow’ Joe McCarthy, but Donald Trump has managed that.” (Trump’s post-insurrection approval rating already matches McCarthy’s low point.)

Other things have changed: McCarthy had to schedule press conferences, while Trump could reach millions more from his toilet. Facebook’s Oversight Board may soon allow Trump to return to the platform. Starbird predicts that many misinformation spreaders sent packing from Parler and other platforms will soon find a new home, perhaps one that, as he has suggested, Trump himself may create. And as Joan Donovan notes, most “studies” suggesting a decline in misinformation rely exclusively on publicly available posts, the tip of the iceberg. “Especially on Facebook,” she says, “you have the stuff that happens out in the open, and then you have the stuff that happens in the private groups, which is really hard to track and really hard to manage. We will never know the denominator of how much misinformation is out there.”

Thorny as it is, urgent as it is, calling out lies and curtailing their spread only goes so far in understanding why they are told or believed. Joe Biden is leading a country reeling from disparate tragedies that are connected by deep-seated beliefs in lies. These lies—about the Other, about science, about democracy—have been weaponized to infringe on or even end their fellow humans’ lives, liberties, and pursuits of happiness: Charlottesville, a Muslim ban, family separation, an opioid epidemic fueled by a lying pharmaceutical company, a knee on a neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, storming the Capitol, 450,000 dead. The past four years have made self-evident the truth that many Americans don’t hold “these truths” to be self-evident. The investigations and hard questions required to understand that uncomfortable truth may not be savvy politics, but they’re necessary for democracy.