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Paving Trump's Path
Over the course of the last 18 months, most of the guardrails that technology and news organizations erected in the aftermath of Trump's 2020 defeat were willfully lowered.
Oliver Darcy
November 06, 2024
Donald Trump departs his victory event after winning a second term. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
A little after 1am on Election Night, a prominent news executive texted me, asking, "Can you believe this?" The results of the high-stakes contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, of course, were difficult to digest. But they were also not all that surprising — and they certainly should not have caught those in the upper echelons of the media and tech sectors off guard given the appreciable role they played in helping to pave the path to Trump's decisive victory.
Over the course of the last 18 months, facilitated in part by businesspeople trying to best position their companies for success in a polarizing climate, most of the guardrails that technology and news organizations erected in the aftermath of Trump's 2020 defeat were willfully lowered. Even some of the fundamental lessons from the 2016 election were thrown out the door. It all led to an information environment rife with pollution, making it easier for Trump to reclaim power. Broadly speaking, Trump reemerged from exile after the January 6 insurrection and found a media environment lacking either the resolve or desire to stand up to his menacing behavior.
In Silicon Valley, Trump’s suspensions were lifted by the Mark Zuckerberg-controlled Meta and Elon Musk-owned X. Musk, the self-described "dark MAGA" billionaire, transformed Twitter into a right-wing megaphone with nowhere near enough scrutiny from news organizations and journalists, most of whom continue to inexplicably lend their credibility to the zombie platform by remaining active on it. The Sundar Pichai-led Google allowed election misinformation to course through YouTube, even monetizing some of the dangerous lies. And across the entire industry, content moderation teams were cut and discarded in favor of maximizing profits. Instead of being served up authoritative content from trusted sources, a younger generation of voters who absorb news through osmosis on social media were algorithmically fed a diet of Joe Rogan and Theo Von clips.
The news media, nine years into covering Trump, also struggled to aggressively confront the GOP candidate, though that is not to say there weren’t some bright spots. Lies about everything ranging from the state of the economy to crime levels to domestic oil production were allowed to seep into the public consciousness, often with little meaningful pushback from fact-based news outlets. News outlets largely obsessed over the horse race, instead of placing a stronger emphasis on clearly articulating Trump’s dark vision for America to audiences, particularly in the final days of the election when voters were paying attention. As one notable journalist confided in me Wednesday…
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