Archived version

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Iran may be outgunned on the battlefield, but the country is holding its own in information warfare. Report after report has documented its propaganda network. Iran’s messaging efforts include mocking Trump, promoting false military wins and sowing discord and confusion by claiming, for example, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was dead. (He’s alive.) Iran’s Lego videos have gone viral. And there’s evidence that Russia and China are amplifying Iran’s propaganda.

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Over the last year, Trump and his allies have fought fact-checking journalism and other accuracy safeguards on X and other platforms at every turn. Trump crowed when Meta dismantled its U.S. fact-checking program last year, and still brags about it. X’s Elon Musk joined the administration to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, a foreign assistance fund that supported scores of international independent fact-checking programs. And a congressional committee headed by Rep. Jim Jordan has worked overtime to dismantle disinformation research at universities and recast independent journalism as part of a “censorship industrial complex.”

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Trump has gone after journalists, universities, medicine, the legal profession and science. If an industry has mechanisms to independently verify evidence while resisting political pressure, Trump has attacked it.

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That mentality is now paying terrible dividends. Platforms like X and Meta have ditched professional fact-checking for community notes, a system that has lots of promise in theory but is troubled in practice. Bad actors can game the system to suppress notes, and casual users have little incentive to write notes in the first place, findings recently reiterated in a report from the Meta Oversight Board, an independent body designed to review Meta’s content decisions.

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The political attacks aren’t the only headwind; a lack of sustainable business models is holding back independent journalism. As people turn to AI agents to answer questions and find detailed information, publishers are seeing less traffic to websites. That limits the growth of subscriptions and advertising. AI was built with all the knowledge of the internet, but if publishers can’t support themselves, we risk losing the main means of sustaining high-quality information. If there’s less journalism online, then less content goes into AI, starting a negative reinforcement cycle.

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