How to Survive the ’24 Info Wars

A moment I captured on the shore of Lake Champlain in Vermont

Hi you,

I was offline all of last week on one of the most meaningful, immersive experiences of my life spent with a group of indigenous elders. I’m still processing the layers of that time and will share more when I’m ready.

It’s been an intense time, and I hope you’re finding ways to take care of yourself amidst the daily deluge of painful, soul-inflaming, human-caused disaster in Gaza. I’ll resurface this account from Standing Together which is speaking fearlessly and lovingly about the tragedy of the moment alongside demands for peace.

If you need an uplift and temporary distraction from bombs, hostage-taking, mass shootings, and legal updates related to a former president, check out Shirley on Netflix. It’s the story of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress and the first Black person and first woman to seek the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Regina King delivers and transformative performance, and this story is just the sort of boost I feel I need in this moment.

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking a lot about the information environment in this high-stakes, record-setting, global election year. Yes, Democracy is on the ropes. Yes, authoritarianism is on the rise. I feel the fatigue of people being asked to step up yet again to “do our civic duty,” and I feel there is a lack of acknowledgment that the arena itself is toxic. What do we need to know about the information landscape to successfully navigate this year? What questions should we be asking about the discourse we encounter online that can help us feel a little less crazy about all the noise we are all already encountering? 

I don’t have answers to all these questions, but I found someone who can help, and I’m excited to share my conversation with her. If you’re feeling exhausted and overwhelmed already, know that you are not alone, and that there are people and institutions who want you to feel that way so that you’ve got nothing left to give to our common project of trying to live together. Knowing that doesn’t make it go away, but it does help. 

Here’s the start of my illuminating and often terrifying conversation with Jiore Craig, a misinformation specialist, about the unexpected ramifications of a TikTok ban, how bad actors prey on anxious populations, and how we can protect ourselves from manipulation. Full version in Puck.

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I first encountered Jiore Craig, a senior fellow of digital integrity at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, through my friend and pro-democracy colleague Jon Alexander, a U.K.-based writer I met during Covid. At the time, Jon, my partner Elizabeth, and I were beginning to explore more ways in which “citizen” can function as a verb, and how we can better understand “democracy” as a practice and not just an idea. Of course, these questions are now inextricably linked to our lives online, and the ways in which mis- and dis-information spread through the digital landscape. When I was introduced to Craig’s work, it felt like I had discovered a missing piece in the tapestry of our intellectual inquiry.

In her own telling, Craig’s field was born in 2015, and became hypercharged following the 2016 election. She studies how information is manipulated online—from the ways in which tech C.E.O.s put their thumbs on the scale in the battle for our eyeballs, to how our collective trust in one another has eroded as a result of the attention economy. Naturally, her work coalesces around how these dynamics impact elections and public opinion, which is why she was recently called before the House’s subcommittee on elections to discuss “foreign and domestic sources of disinformation.” Trust me, it’s worth watching in full. 

In this election year, which is starting to feel like the final showdown in the battle for democracy, Craig’s work can help illuminate the manipulation online that we so often cannot see. When my wife recently met her in person, she suggested I interview her. I’m sure you’ll find her insights as fascinating, and genuinely vital, as I did. Our conversation has been edited and shortened for clarity.

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There’s one addendum, an item that didn’t make it into the Puck version that’s been burrowing into my mind a bit, so I’ll share it here. Jiore told me that we often think about misinformation in terms of content, and that leads us down a path of debating “free speech,” and that isn’t very helpful because these online platforms are not free speech zones; they are manipulated speech zones where algorithms and engagement optimization determine what we see much more than any active choosing on our part. As she put it, “what shows up in our feeds is not based on our consent, it's not based on what we are choosing to consume or produce, it's based on that optimization for our attention.”

Meanwhile, the content focus avoids a focus on systems and the business models of the platforms where all this speech is playing out. The longer we avoid real regulation of the information space through regulation of social media platforms, the longer we’ll avoid any meaningful progress toward creating a healthy information ecosystem at all. She shared ideas that are in the full piece about what that regulation could look like, including far more transparency about what is in our feeds and why, but this distinction between a content focus and a systems focus felt important to highlight.

With Love and Appreciation,

Baratunde