There Is No Truth, There Is Only Truth Social
How social media radicalized the 2024 presidential race to elect Donald Trump
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, celebrated Donald Trump’s presidential victory on X, calling its users the new truth-tellers. The new journalists. “You are the media now,” he gushed.
Let’s just take a moment to let that settle in.
Most American right-wingers deride legacy media — the national political news media in print, digital, or televised — as liberal-owned, literally or ideologically.
They consider academia itself to be itself to be ideologically captured. (That’s all colleges and universities, not to mention most of science and medicine.) Even the search engine Google and video hosting platform YouTube are owned by “liberal” Alphabet and so must be corrupt, along with Meta’s Facebook and Instagram.
Essentially, in the mind of the average right-winger, reality has been co-opted and perverted by liberal media.
The heroes, patriots and underdogs have but a few strongholds for free speech and democracy. They’re like the rebels in Star Wars, fighting the galactic empire who claims all.
Like it or not, of course, legacy media involves sourcing stories, fact-checking and…
