I don’t know. And, as a journalist, I don’t like that I don’t know.
There has been a good deal of buzz in the news media in recent days about “AI disinformation” swirling around the Los Angeles ICE raid protests and the heavy-handed Trump administration response to them (plus the similarly heavy-handed, but less remarked-upon, response to same by cop-friendly LA Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom, Democrats both).
That disinformation amounts to an acceleration of already-existing disinformation that’s been dominating much of the traffic on social media platforms like Facebook and X/Twitter and TikTok since their inception.
Thanks to the First Amendment, U.S. citizens and immigrants alike have the right to say pretty much whatever they want about pretty much whatever topic they wish in pretty much any forum. Which I think is one of the great things about this country.
But that freedom of speech also means that people can make up stuff about happenings of the day at will and try to style their fever dreams as reality. Society has counter-measures to this kind of activity in the form of science and reason, dialogue and debate. Yet rational discourse based on empirical evidence is difficult when disinformation is being pumped out 24-7-365 by millions of people.
More to the point, advancing digital technology coupled with social media has already let people make different kinds of fake photos, video, and audio content to go with their fake text for over a quarter-century. And social media is run by algorithms that privilege excitement-inducing content (that is, “rage bait” or any material that produces any kind of strong emotional reaction) to encourage people to click on more things that deliver more ads to users—and, critically, provide more data points about those users that social media giants can sell for big profits on top of their already big ad profits.
Such data about individuals is particularly useful to those forces seeking to win and keep political power (mainly the Democrats and Republicans, currently slugging it out for primacy within bounds dictated by their billionaire donors) and/or those forces seeking to acquire and maintain economic power (mainly the corporations owned by said billionaires with the paid assistance of politicians).
What new AI-driven technology adds to this situation is its ability to make fake information in any form—text, audio, photos, and videos—look and feel increasingly realistic … as well as seem accurate and truthful, which it is not. When used by typical individuals who lack both political and economic power, such fakes are problematic enough. But when used by individuals and institutions with a great deal of political and economic power, it’s a major crisis for democracy. Since they have the ability to pay millions to use the latest tech in tandem with all the data that social media giants have been collecting on their users for over 20 years to weaponize those fakes as the sharp end of the spear of carefully planned propaganda campaigns designed to manipulate the public. The goal always being to increase their political and economic power.
Which brings us back to the LA standoff and the problem regular people have trying to figure out what is actually happening on the ground.
In the past, most people felt they could turn to journalists at news outlets large and small to give them a sense of reality—especially in times of crisis. There were always criticisms levelled at some journalists, mostly those working for the largest corporate news organizations, as propagandists of one kind or another themselves. And too often those criticisms had some merit … to the discredit of the journalism profession. But most journalists did a good job of being fair and accurate in their coverage and most people trusted the information they provided.
Now there are fewer professional journalists with paid gigs than ever and our ranks are thinning every year. In part, ironically, due to being replaced by cheaper AI chatbots by the profit-seeking media companies like Gannett who own much of what remains of the news industry.
With a lot of the current drama coming down to the Republican-led federal government trying to score political points against Democratic-led cities and states (that are themselves not always the bastions of democracy they pretend to be), it’s likely only a matter of time before we see fresh deployments of the National Guard and perhaps the U.S. military proper here in Massachusetts in response to growing protests against the ICE raids that many people see as an attack on the basic freedoms guaranteed in the the U.S. Constitution.
Which I certainly find worrying as both an American citizen and a Mass native, but more keenly concerning as a journalist.
Because how are journalists like me supposed to compete with the growing day-to-day flood of AI-driven disinformation … let alone the huge tsunami of garbage data that gets unleashed whenever the two major wings of the American ruling class vie for supremacy in the very communities we normally cover?
As it gets harder and harder to tell which information is accurate and which is fake—even as major political and economic factions weaponize AI tech to their own ends. And as such factions use their money and power to bombard the public with falsehoods, news outlets like mine are finding that now-AI-driven social media platforms are making it harder and harder for us to build and keep large enough audiences to have any effect on the public consciousness at all.
Major search engines like Google are making things even worse for us when they put AI-powered summaries (which you can turn off, by the way) at the top of the first page of results from every search people make, resulting in most searchers reading the summaries and ignoring the links below to news websites like HorizonMass and the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.
So when the big protests spread to Massachusetts, and Republican and Democratic leaders alike put militarized cops, the National Guard, and the military itself onto our streets to suppress protests that enjoy broad protection under the First Amendment and over two centuries of established legal precedent, how are journalists like myself working for news outlets like mine going to do our job and cover such crises in a fair and accurate manner in the public interest?
Right now, I have no answer to that disaster of a problem for the free press—particularly the generally smaller and poorer independent press of which my operation is part. And I’m not hearing about useful (and cheap) countermeasures that can help news organizations like mine reach larger audiences again as AI and related technology controlled by the lords of Silicon Valley further “enshittifies” the Internet. Not for lack of ceaseless searching and pinging my personal and professional networks on the matter either.
And that is what keeps me up at night of late.
Still, I have enough of an audience left to provide me with a great brain trust. So, if anyone among my readers has any great ideas for how journalists can combat “AI slop” and help rebuild at least a semblance of a trustworthy information ecology in the service of democracy, drop me an email at info[at]binj.news.
Apparent Horizon—an award-winning political column—is syndicated by the MassWire news service of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Copyright 2025 Jason Pramas.
