Politicians have long used misleading information as a tactic to manipulate society. In the past, misinformation caused devastation in the form of wars, injustice, exploiting leaders, and more. Current leaders are no strangers to this. For instance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the head of the Department of Health and a known anti-vaxxer, stated that vaccines are increasing autism in children, which health specialists debunked by explaining that the increasing cases of autism are a result of the advances in autism detection.
President Trump in particular has a history of spreading fake news that goes beyond his days in office and into his personal life. In his first term as president, Trump shared inaccuracies on Obama’s administration, Democrats, immigration, and COVID-19. The amount of falsehoods has increased drastically over the past year, and we see him using many of the same arguments as before. Famously, in Sept. 2024, he said in the debate against his rival Kamala Harris that, “they [Haitian illegal immigrants] are eating the pets of the people that live there[Springfield, Ohio],” a fabrication that the governor of Ohio denied profusely. More recently, he has made false claims on immigration, inflation, the wars in the Middle East, and statistics of American, Canadian, and other countries’ happiness levels.
In modern times, politicians utilize social media as a platform to spread misinformation. X, formerly known as Twitter, and Facebook are used frequently to spread false information. The White House also began choosing Trump’s pool reporters as well, allowing them to control which journalists can come close to the president. These factors increase the chance of uninformed exposure and blind trust in twisted information.
