They're Coming for the Billionaires
I’m writing from the Cambridge Disinformation Summit, an annual convening that brings together some of the best researchers in disinformation as well as policymakers, elected officials, and organizations working to combat this threat in a lot of different contexts. As those who have followed my disinformation course on Substack (self-paced, and available here with a paid subscription) know, understanding combating disinformation is difficult because it involves a number of overlapping disciplines: emerging technology, data science, psychology, sociology, history, and military strategy, to name a few. Tackling any one facet always seems like shoveling snow in a snowstorm — the overall problem can feel too big to solve.
I attended this same conference last year, and one big difference I am noticing is a shift from viewing disinformation as an individual-level problem — i.e., focusing on users’ susceptibility to disinformation and interventions like fact checking, “pre bunking,” media literacy, and content moderation as a way to create resilience (all of which are good, and important!) — to also looking at it as a systemic problem. This fascinating report from the European Commission, Fractured Reality: How Democracy Can Win the Global Struggle Over the Information Space, offers the following model which, I think, is a brilliant framing of the big picture:
As you can see, although addressing issues at the individual level — the bottom of the pyramid — is a huge part of the overall problem, it really can’t be divorced from two systemic issues: the design and revenue models of social media platforms, and the way that countries are using social media to impinge on the sovereignty of other countries (for example, through election interference). Indeed, some of the discussion at the conference noted that these platforms behave, and have the power of, sovereign nations unto themselves. So the some of the focus in the E.U. is now turning to these platforms and the countries that weaponize them and protect them against meaningful regulation, and looking at how the rest of the world can create “digital sovereignty” — the ability to be free of overt and covert coercion via disinformation on social media.
There’s a great scene in Jurassic Park where Jeff Golblum’s character says, “Life will find a way” — meaning that attempts to control it and bend it to one person’s will are doomed to fail. I think the same thing can be said for democracy — and that attempts to control the information space, which guys like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have been doing to the detriment of democratic cohesion, won’t last forever. On this front, a few new ideas and developments are worth highlighting, ones that all suggest that the era of autonomy and impunity for social media platforms might be coming to an end. Starting from the top layer of the pyramid above and working down, they are the following:
At the geopolitical level, it’s clear that in the U.K. and E.U., the U.S. is now considered a rogue state, not only in the physical world, but also in the information space. It was really jarring to hear “MAGA-backed influencers” mentioned repeatedly alongside Chinese and Russian bots as the leading sources of disinformation online. Now, technically speaking, MAGA is a political movement/hijacked political party, not the U.S. government — but when you see the Vice President backing far right parties in Germany and visiting Hungary in support of Orban, and President Trump attacking the Mayor of London (who was a keynote at the conference), I think it’s fair to say that they are one and the same, as long as Trump, and any MAGA candidate, is in power. This means that to the extent that social media platforms facilitate disinformation operations — and when their owners like Elon Musk sets the rules for what gets seen and amplified in the information space, leading to potential violence, election interference, and other real-world harms — U.S. tech companies and their owners are themselves global national security threats.
At the business model level, there was an interesting reframing among policy makers of social media as an entire communications infrastructure, not just as individual companies. That is, social media platforms provide, at this point, an essential service — much like other communications, energy, and other utilities and critical resources. But the monopolization of social media by a few, mostly U.S.-owned tech companies has huge implications for countries outside of the United States. It would be like the U.K. or E.U. allowing the U.S. to control their energy sources, or water supply. There was a world where the U.S. could have been trusted to be stewards of these kinds of services or resources, and to allow other countries to pass and enforce their own technology regulations. But it’s pretty clear to the world that that era is over.
For example, in December, the E.U. fined Elon Musk’s X €120 million (about $140 million) for violating the Digital Services Act because of its deceptive design and advertising features. In response, Musk tweeted that the E.U. should be abolished, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and JD Vance came to his defense, stating that the EU was engaging in censorship, and the Trump administration threatened to retaliate in kind against EU companies. In another instance, after the Trump administration imposed sanctions against the ICC in 2025, Microsoft disabled the email accounts of the Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and his staff. In short, the alliance of tech oligarchs with the Trump administration (and potential future untrustworthy administrations) threatens the ability of countries and international bodies to enforce their own laws, even outside the U.S.
It’s not surprising, then, that one possible long term solution is for the EU to invest in and create its own digital infrastructure, one that would not be controlled by the U.S tech oligarchs being protected by the U.S government and upon which new companies could emerge to compete with X and Meta. Although this would be a long-term project, it’s an interesting idea, and is really a direct challenge to the to the dominance of Silicon Valley in the information space and the power of the the tech bros to call the shots on their platforms — and now with AI — around the world. On the other hand, it probably means that the U.S. may not remain the innovation hub for emerging technology, which is bad for our own economic future.
Finally, at the individual level, Americans themselves are leading the pushback against the tech companies. A while back (like years ago), I wrote about how Big Tech is the new Big Tobacco, and why litigation, not regulation, might be the answer to reining in social media platforms. That seems to be the new strategy. Last month, a jury in New Mexico awarded $375 million in damages in a lawsuit brought by the attorney general against Meta for misleading consumers about child safety and enabling child exploitation on its platform. That was followed by a jury award of $6 million against Meta and Google in a lawsuit by an individual plaintiff in California, who claimed that the companies intentionally created addictive platforms that harmed her mental health. The Massachusetts Supreme Court just ruled that the attorney general of that state can sue Meta for similar harms. Ruh-roh!
And at the very very individual level, there was some anecdotal discussion that the youngest generation (I have no idea what they are called) is eschewing social media in favor of real life contact. I think both the kids and their parents are finally seeing how social media has been a wrecking ball for emotional health and intellectual development. My own anecdote is that one of my own kids, who is a bit older (19 yo) recently told me he deleted his social media apps from his home because they were distracting from his ability to focus on his college work and sustain attention on the large amounts of reading he has to get through. Just like Big Tobacco, Big Tech is depending on profiting off of a new generation of addicts…it will be interesting to see what happens to their bottom lines if when their product is seen as toxic as cigarettes.
At every level, the message to these platforms is the same We’ve had enough. The times, they are a’changin’. Democracy, it finds a way.
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