Trump is drowning in the swamp of misinformation that he helped create

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The Republican presidential candidate appeared live on television and presented a crazy, debunked Facebook rumor as fact. When a moderator corrected him (several times), Donald Trump persisted: “The people on TV are saying their dog was eaten by the people who were there.”

“They eat the dogs” quickly became a punch line among commentators who realized that the whole story of Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets in Ohio is a lie rooted deeply in a well-established racist history.

It’s a form of outrage bait that, while disgusting, is hardly unexpected on Facebook these days.

But elevating this claim to the presidential debate underscores a grim reality about the internet in 2024: misinformation is pervasive, platforms are abandoning moderation, and artificial intelligence is making matters worse.

Trump’s performance during the debate “was like a 4chan post come to life,” said CNN’s Jake Tapper.

That is an apt comparison.

Once a harmless online message board for anime fans in the early 2000s, 4chan is a prime example of what happens when you remove the guardrails of a social media site and it’s left to be regulated by just a handful of community members. Over the years, 4chan has become a cesspool of violence, conspiracy theories, and its very own brand of “edgelord white supremacy,” as The Verge put it.

Scrolling through Facebook or X, it’s hard to miss some of this chaos seeping into the mainstream.

As my colleague Clare Duffy wrote last week, Facebook spam is on the rise and, in extreme cases, is being weaponized to scam and mislead people. This shift coincides with a deliberate strategy by the platform to downplay news and politics while injecting mindless, computer-generated content into users’ feeds.

On X, which Elon Musk took over in 2022 and immediately stopped his moderation efforts, hate speech and threats of violence are now fair game.

A spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said last week that it was working to “remove spam content and curb its spread to ensure a positive user experience” and “take action against those who try to manipulate traffic through fake engagement.”

Musk, who fired communications staff when he took over Twitter’s platform, did not respond to a request for comment.

Of course, there has always been unsavory and fake content on social media. The difference today is how quickly it turns into misinformation, often fueled by human-like AI text and images, while fewer people are employed to monitor and remove misinformation. In the past, you had to go through a process overseen by human moderators to get a “verified” tick on Twitter; today, anyone, with or without an agenda, can simply buy it.

In some ways, Trump’s political career has followed the rise and fall of social media over the past decade. The former reality star made his name in politics in part by exploiting the power of social media to spread lies and conspiracy theories, starting with his racist “birther” attacks on President Barack Obama.

With his foray into the pet eater lie on Tuesday evening, he may have finally gotten so deep into the Internet swamp that he can no longer see through it.

Just a few weeks ago, the former president posted an image generated by artificial intelligence on his platform Truth Social that suggested Taylor Swift had supported him. “I accept,” he wrote in the post.

Of course, it was a fake image—the same kind of obvious AI junk that has flooded Facebook and X. Either Trump didn’t know the image was fake, or he didn’t mind lying to his followers and maintaining the fake support.

Neither scenario suggests that he is overly concerned about the problem of misinformation on the Internet.

Taylor Swift, for her part, is concerned. In her support for Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday, Swift wrote that the incident involving the fake images of her had “revived my fears about artificial intelligence and the dangers of spreading misinformation.”

She signed her post by describing herself as a “childless cat lady” – an allusion to the much-ridiculed comments of Trump’s running mate JD Vance.

As if on cue, Musk, the pro-Trump multi-billionaire who also spread the fabricated story about the pet eater on X this week, chimed in to remind everyone that you can say whatever you want on his platform, no matter how mean or threatening it is to a woman who has never publicly committed to him.

“Fine, Taylor… you win… I’ll give you a child and protect your cats with my life.”