An Eight-Year Struggle for Accountability in the US Ends in Defeat
Dean Jackson / Nov 18, 2024Dean Jackson is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.
Like every year of the past decade, I spent most of 2024 thinking about the impact of social media and disinformation on democracy. Over the past twelve months, more than half of humanity lived in a country holding a major election, and countless ink and dollars were spent on understanding the potential impact of artificial intelligence. But, as an American, no issue left deeper scars on me than the backlash against disinformation research, the 2024 election, and the ultimate irrelevance of eight years of effort to improve the US media environment and safeguard American democracy from whatever is about to happen.
In 2025, the US will grapple with the consequences of that failure as it sinks into the minds of key decision-makers. Because of US predominance in global philanthropy, foreign aid, the tech sector, and other fields, those decision-makers’ rationalizations will have an outsize influence on the world.
Counter-disinformation, as it has been practiced since 2020, is a dying enterprise in the US. Social media companies learned that not only could they cut costs by reducing their trust and safety teams but that it is safer to ignore criticism of those cuts than to meaningfully combat political disinformation. The federal government significantly reduced its role in protecting election integrity from disinformation in 2024, and civil society efforts to monitor the online environment were more fragmented than in 2020. An organized effort to demonize and discredit disinformation research had considerable success and is, by all indications, set to continue under the second Trump administration.
It’s not clear these trends contributed much to President-elect Trump’s astounding comeback. Disinformation was probably not determinative (at least in an acute sense), and it's not clear that counter-disinformation efforts would have been, either. Post-election violence—the prevention of which was a major priority in 2024—was not a factor because the Republican party won victory outright. Government, philanthropy, media, and civil society spent the better part of a year warning about and preparing for a deluge of AI-generated disinformation that ultimately felt more like a rainy day than a hurricane.
These results will leave many in philanthropy, academia, and advocacy grasping for a rationale to continue their focus on this challenge. Others will have to cease work because of the inevitable reshuffling of federal dollars away from counter-disinformation programs in and outside of the US and the fear of political or legal reprisal by the government and its political allies.
Tech accountability will remain on the agenda, but ambitions will be diminished. Significant reforms to the poisonous American media ecosystem—of which social media and disinformation are components—look farther out of reach than at any point in the last decade. For the last year, the most promising frontiers have been in children’s online safety, and that trend will probably continue. How the US movement for tech accountability will fare overall as the judiciary resumes a multi-generation shift rightward is an open question.
If US government agencies and foundations pull back their support for counter-disinformation and tech accountability, it will have implications for the globe. Many civil society organizations worldwide depend on that support for their work—especially when domestic funding sources avoid controversial causes. Budgetary realities may force many civil society leaders to focus their efforts elsewhere.
While governments in Brussels, New Delhi, Brasilia, Nairobi, and other countries have spent years trying to bring Big Tech to heel, the US may stand as an outlier. Elon Musk’s strategic and ideological alliance with President-elect Donald Trump may not last, but if it does, he stands well positioned to capture, if not liquidate, large parts of the American regulatory state while securing lucrative government contracts. This alliance between Musk and Trump, two oligarchs, is an ill omen for press freedom, political accountability, and electoral competition—at least if the trajectory of democratic backsliding in the US follows patterns seen in countries like Hungary, the authoritarian leader of which has been a welcome guest at the annual conference of the influential Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC).
This grim prognosis for tech policy in America is a consequence of a similarly dark outlook for US democracy. Eight years ago, the opposite seemed true: the prevailing theory was that if tech policy could improve the US media ecosystem—an increasingly noxious place dominated by well-funded right-wing grifters and propagandists—it could thereby also help save US democracy. Now, not only does tech policy look like an inadequate lever to move this boulder—but the failures of representative democracy in the US seem to preclude significant tech policy reform. That is to say: the growing political influence of alt-tech moguls, the reality of demographic trends in Senate representation, and President-elect Trump’s transformation of the judiciary—already so consequential but only just begun—will be severe constraints on the imaginations of pro-democracy reformers.
A hard look at these questions invites despair, which is not constructive, but a hard look is necessary to begin imagining a new path for both tech policy and democracy in the US. A majority of Americans have just voted for the destruction of political accountability, an age of retribution, and the demolition of government. The consequences will be civilizational due to the stakes of climate change and other daunting challenges. As we work to mitigate them—it is too late to stop them—the only responsible thing to do is to stop tinkering with the dials and to strip American institutions down to the bolts. The prerogative to end one-party dominance in a majority of state legislatures and to reduce the extremist chokehold on party primaries is urgent; so is reform of the judiciary, the Senate, the Electoral College, and a two-party system seemingly designed for gladiatorial partisan combat. These are only a few ideas; there are others.
All of this will take time, perhaps too much to avoid planet-wide crises. It took conservatives more than fifty years to reshape the US government and institutions; US democracy will not be saved in a few Congressional cycles. Ultimately, though, our public square cannot continue to be dominated by corporations that thrive by mining personal data in order to enrich an endless stream of grievance hawkers. We can commit to reforming our economic and political systems, or—in the recent words of technology advocate Alix Dunn—we can “continue to be a band of earnest experts, commentating the rapid and terrifying merger between raw corporate power and state power to devastating results.”
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