On November 9, Elon Musk shared a video posted by president-elect Donald Trump and captioned it with a single capitalized word, “YES!” In the video, Trump shouts at the camera for a whole six-and-a-half minutes and insists that he will “shatter the left-wing censorship regime and reclaim the right to free speech for all Americans.” This regime was, Trump claimed, run by “a sinister group of deep-state bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media.” Over the last few years, these groups have conspired to suppress “vital information on everything from elections to public health.”

The president-elect has vowed to take five steps to smash the “censorship cartel.” He will, he claims, ban federal agencies from labeling “domestic speech as mis- or disinformation”; fire “every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship directly or indirectly”; have the Department of Justice investigate and prosecute “all parties involved in the new online censorship regime”; revisit Section 230 of the Communications Act, which provides immunity from civil liabilities for service providers that restrict access to content they deem obscene; defund “the entire toxic censorship industry that has arisen under the false guise of tackling so-called mis- and disinformation, including universities”; and pass a “Digital Bill of Rights,” the content of which is still unclear, which is also to grant anyone over eighteen the right to “opt out of content moderation and curation entirely.”

YES!
pic.twitter.com/yrtfxAGfXi

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 9, 2024

Trump is effectively turning the disinformation debate upside down. Worried about disinformation? Trump has “an unmanipulated stream of information” in store for you. Worried about hate speech and fake news? Trump will revise Section 230 for you, raising its “standards of neutrality, transparency, fairness, and nondiscrimination” while protecting “lawful speech.”

The problem is that the social-media-centric information debate we’ve been having ever since 2016 is, by and large, one big distraction. Trump’s attempt to reclaim this line of argument for the Right only serves to refocus attention onto the discursive online world that liberals have, confusingly, held responsible for his victory. A typical knee-jerk response by many liberals and Democrats to the election of Donald Trump, now just as back in 2016, has been to blame a faulty “information ecosystem.” We need to fight “misinformation” and “disinformation,” the argument went.

A Jimmy Kimmel sketch, aired shortly after election day last week, featured interviews mocking random passers-by for thinking they could still vote on Wednesday. This focus on the apparent stupidity of sections of the electorate that do not support the Democrats was a prominent feature of the failed Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, but the party has learned few lessons in eight years. Instead, the same old condescension, the same old easy answer to massive electoral defeat: the other side just doesn’t get it. It’s the ultimate apolitical answer to politics, and Trump’s new plans show it’s time to leave it behind.

The invention of disinformation, which in the United States entailed the creation of the ill-fated (now dissolved) Disinformation Governance Board under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security, followed in the aftermath of the 2016 election of Trump. Despite the red flag that Hillary Clinton’s much-debated “basket of deplorables” remark should have raised, the election outcome was followed by the liberal commentariat’s broad refusal to believe that anything could compel people to actually vote for Trump other than Russian hacking or fake news.

Shock and utter disbelief — both entirely understandable — led to a focus over the next few years on social media bubbles, echo chambers, deepfakes, and so on. A whole industry mushroomed, heavily funded by Big Tech, to diagnose and offer solutions to the crisis. This is only superficially contradictory: for the likes of Meta and Alphabet, cleaning up the feed with fact-checking and content moderation maintains ad revenue just as much as anything-goes content flooding did previously.

The whole debate relies, implicitly, on the assumption that were it not for disinformation the majority of people would pivot toward the Democratic Party. But inflation and unemployment are not phenomena that people experience through their screens. In fact, much of the messaging from the liberal mainstream in the lead-up to the election, which dismissed worries about economic insecurity as resulting from a “vibecession,” could not unfairly be described as fake news.

Of course, access to clear information about politics is essential to the functioning of any democracy. But focusing on disinformation has largely become a condescending distraction for a liberal politics unwilling to pursue concrete political and economic policies in the interest of most people.