Fight against misinformation faces headwinds as 2024 election nears

by Carrie Levine for Votebeat

We are 135 days out from the 2024 presidential election. The fight against misinformation and disinformation is hopelessly politicized, and the infrastructure set up to push back against bad or misleading information online is far less robust than it was.

High-profile efforts to combat bad information about elections, such as the Stanford Internet Observatory, have scaled back or shut down. Some are facing threats, as well as lawsuits and investigations from conservatives who say the groups are allied with the left and targeting speech liberals disagree with.

The result of the Republican pushback, some experts say, is a climate that’s friendlier to disinformation baselessly undermining faith in elections, and feeding political extremism.

“We may be less prepared 155 days out in 2024 than we were under President Trump” in 2020, Sen. Mark Warner told The Associated Press earlier this month. Warner, a Virginia Democrat, chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee.