America's gullibility crisis
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
In the heat of this historic election, educated elites who should know better — billionaires, elected officials, journalists — keep falling for fakes, conspiracy theories and outright lies.
Why it matters: Human gullibility is not a new phenomenon. But social media and polarized politics are exposing it at industrial scale, fueled by a poisonous cocktail of bad actors, media illiteracy and plummeting trust in traditional news.
Driving the news: Each day on the digital campaign trail has brought a torrent of false or misleading claims, often courtesy of partisan accounts with massive audiences. In the last few weeks alone:
- MAGA influencers breathlessly spread the false claim that Vice President Kamala Harris used a teleprompter during her Univision town hall, which the X algorithm then promoted in its trending topics as fact.
- Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) posted a purported screenshot of a headline in The Atlantic that read: "To Save Democracy Harris May Need To Steal An Election." It was fake, and Roy deleted the post.
- Bill Ackman, a hedge fund billionaire with 1.4 million followers on X, obsessively promoted allegations from an ABC News "whistleblower" that the network had given Harris questions in advance of her debate with Trump. On Wednesday, more than a month later, Ackman admitted it was "fake."
Zoom in: Elon Musk, whose takeover of X has enabled fake news slop at scale, is among the most consistent offenders — credulously promoting baseless claims about voter fraud that rack up billions of views.
- "Is this true?" the pro-Trump billionaire will often ask his legions of followers about blatant bunk, helping it spread like wildfire.
- Musk frequently touts the "Community Notes" system, whereby X users can vote to add fact checks to false posts, but many posts don't get the Community Notes treatment until well after they go viral, if at all.
The other side: It's not just Trump supporters who are prone to gullibility and confirmation bias.
- Pro-Harris accounts falsely claimed last week that former Bush aide Karl Rove was campaigning for her in Pennsylvania. "It's amazing what people come up with and what they'll fall for," Rove tweeted.
- Liberal conspiracy theories flooded social media after the first assassination attempt against Trump, a phenomenon that researchers dubbed "BlueAnon" — a play on the far-right QAnon movement.
The big picture: The misinformation crisis may be playing out online, but the real-world implications are vast.
- The deadly hurricanes that swept across the Southeast in recent weeks exposed the staggering extent to which people have become prone to conspiracy theories, spurring threats against emergency responders.
- "The truth is, it's getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality," The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel wrote in an article about hurricane conspiracies headlined: "I'm Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is."
- 54% of respondents in an Axios Vibes survey published last month agreed with the statement, "I've disengaged from politics because I can't tell what's true."
The bottom line: Never before have so many people been so exposed to so much misinformation. Given the increasing ubiquity of AI-generated content, this may be only the beginning.
