Fediverse vs Disinformation

Donald Trump is back in office. Tech mogul Elon Musk, now a senior adviser to the president, is helming a government advisory body with an acronym derived from a memecoin: DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency). That organization is sinking its teeth into the federal government, and drawing blood.

Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of federal employees are being laid off this year. Over a dozen agencies have been affected. Executive power is being wielded so wildly that a federal judge has lamented “what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight.”

The Fourth Estate is tasked with serving as a check on abuses of power. But US media were not designed for this.

Though critical in much of their reporting, corporate outlets have at the same time substantially legitimized the project of DOGE. For one, longstanding fearmongering about government spending in the news sections of corporate outlets has elevated precisely the right-wing vision of government animating DOGE.

Even more worryingly, however, criticism of DOGE by major editorial boards has been weak, and in some cases has been overshadowed by these boards’ support for the ideas behind DOGE, or even for DOGE itself.