To scroll through social media during an election campaign in 2025 is to experience some of the worst misinformation. But an online soup of bots spouting partisan talking points wasn’t inevitable, even in recent years. After the 2016 election of US President Donald Trump and UK vote for Brexit, it was clear that online platforms like Facebook and Twitter were used to target voters with misinformation and disrupt political discourse enough to sway elections. As a result, the social media giants really tried to crack down on harmful content spreading online…or at least they pretended to. But in the last year or so, they’ve almost completely given up… and the vast digital sea of misinformation has become more dangerous than ever.
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