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Fake news, social media, and “The Death of Truth”
We live in an age of alternate facts. More and more Americans are getting their information almost entirely from outlets that echo their own political point of view. And then, of course, there’s social media, where there are few (if any) filters between users and a wide world of misinformation.
For example: On July 13 a sniper came within inches of assassinating Donald Trump as he addressed an outdoor rally in Pennsylvania. Within minutes, social media was alive with uninformed speculation. One woman posted, “Who did it? I bet you it was the government themselves. They’re all on the same side.”
Koppel said, “We have no idea who she is, she has no particular credibility. Why should I even care that she is out there?”
“Because she could potentially have an audience,” said journalist and author Steven Brill. “If the algorithm gives it steam, that could be seen by millions of people.”
And then on X (formerly Twitter), this message: “You’re telling me the Secret Service let a guy climb up on a roof with a rifle only 150 yards from Trump? Inside job.” That message has seven million views and counting.
Brill said, “We’re at a point where nobody believes anything. Truth as a concept is really in trouble. It’s suspect.”
The cumulative impact of the lies and distortions just keeps growing, such that Brill titled his new book “The Death of Truth.” “There are facts,” he said, “and it used to be in this world that people could at least agree on the same set of facts and then they could debate what to do about those facts.”
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But we’re losing our grip on any sort of shared reality. Brill’s company, NewsGuard, is attempting to put the brakes on. Its 40 or so staffers around the world identify and rate the credibility of online news and information sources.
It’s a finger in the dike, because there’s no price to be paid. Almost 30 years ago, the federal government decided that internet platforms were like the phone company. You can’t sue the phone company for what a caller might say in a phone conversation.
Brill said, “They inserted a three-paragraph section called Section 230, which said that these [internet] publishers would not be responsible for anything that was published in their chat rooms.”
Instead, it left the internet essentially without any enforceable rules. Social media companies exercise only limited control, permitting lies, fake news and intentionally divisive content to proliferate.
The torrent of allegedly Moscow-backed content provoked an angry reaction from the U.S. this past week.
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But most of the damage is home-grown, from national and supposedly local outlets. “There are more fake news sites posing as legitimate local news in the United States than there are news sites of legitimate local newspapers,” said Brill. “There is no monopoly on virtue from either side here. Just to take an example, the most effective fake local news sites are financed by liberal political action committees. And they’re sort of especially self-righteous about it. When I interviewed them, they basically said, ‘Well, the other guys do it, so we’ll do it.’ But it’s undermining democracy.”
And then, Brill points out, we’re just beginning to come to terms with the full potential of artificial intelligence. Note that none of these images is real:
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Brill said, “It disorients everything, because you don’t know if something is a hoax, or is political propaganda, or is a deep fake. You just don’t know what to believe.”
Koppel asked, “In the environment you describe, is it possible for us to have a clean, fair, universally-acceptable election?”
“Your last condition is the one that is, I think, impossible – universally acceptable,” Brill replied. “Forget universally, even modestly acceptable. I have a real fear that one way or another, regardless of the outcome, that the chaos and the disbelief and anger that’s going to prevail on November 6, the day after the election, is really going to put our country to the test.”
READ AN EXCERPT: “The Death of Truth” by Steven Brill
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Story produced by Dustin Stephens. Editor: Ed Givnish.
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Police arrested a man on murder charges this month, 14 years after he allegedly killed a man in Virginia, but the victim’s body has never been found.
Shane Ryan Donahue, a Virginia man, is presumed deceased, the Prince William County Police Department said Tuesday. He was last seen leaving his parents’ home in Nokesville, Virginia, on March 22, 2010. Donahue, 23, was headed to his house in Nokesville, but never made it there.
Donahue was added to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System after he vanished. According to records, Donahue did not have a car and regularly got rides from friends. He frequented Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Fauquier County, Virginia, and Northern Virginia.
The case stumped investigators, who followed a number of leads over the years. This spring, detectives reactivated the investigation and started looking at every detail of the case from scratch, officials said. They revisited people who had been interviewed during the initial investigation and reviewed “digital evidence in greater detail due to advances in analytical technology and modern police investigative practices,” according to a news release.
Officers said Donahue was last seen leaving his parents’ home with Timothy Sean Hickerson, now a 43-year-old Florida resident. Investigators connected Hickerson to a burglary at Donahue’s home that happened just days before the Virginia man disappeared.
Detectives got an arrest warrant this month and, with the help of Florida’s Flagler County Sheriff’s Office, Hickerson was taken into custody in Palm Coast, Florida. Hickerson was charged with murder and burglary, is now set to be extradited to Virginia.
Former President Donald Trump, an avowed proponent of tax cuts, is floating the idea of reversing a measure passed during his tenure in the White House that effectively raised taxes for many U.S. homeowners.
In a post Tuesday on Truth Social, Trump suggested he would scrap a $10,000 cap on deducting state and local taxes (SALT) that was passed as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — a massive revamp that he has said boosted economic growth.
Now, in the run-up to the November election, Trump said in the post he would “get SALT back, lower your taxes, and so much more,” although he stopped short of offering details. Trump made the post ahead of a speech he’s giving Wednesday at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island.
Trump’s new proposal for getting rid of his $10,000 SALT deduction cap comes as the presidential hopeful is pitching several additional tax cuts that would, if enacted, reduce taxes for major groups of voters. He’s also vowed to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits, a pledge that could get support from the nation’s senior citizens, as well as to end income taxes on tipped workers and on overtime pay, ideas that would help lower- and middle-income Americans.
Yet Trump’s reversal on the SALT deduction has sparked skepticism from lawmakers as well as economists and policy experts.
“So … now Trump is against the SALT tax cap which *checks notes* is a key part of the — only — major piece of legislation passed during his administration?” noted Chris Koski, a political science professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, on X.
Rep. Tom Suozzi, a Democrat from Nassau, Queens, said in a statement on Wednesday that he is “happy that the former president is saying that he has finally reversed his devastating decision in 2017 to cap the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction.” He also urged Trump to convince Republican lawmakers to vote to restore the full deduction “if he is truly serious.”
The SALT deduction cap “has been a body blow to my constituents for the past 7 years,” Suozzi added.
Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, wrote on X,”Donald Trump took away your SALT dedications and hurt so many Long Island families. Now, he’s coming to Long Island to pretend he supports SALT. It won’t work.”
Asked for details about Trump’s proposal to restore the SALT writeoff, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign told CBS MoneyWatch: “While his pro-growth, pro-energy policies will make life affordable again, President Trump is also going to quickly move tax relief for working people and seniors.”
Here’s what to know about the SALT deduction.
What is the SALT deduction?
The state and local tax deduction allows taxpayers who itemize to deduct property taxes, sales taxes and state or local income taxes from their federal income taxes. Prior to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, there was no limit on how much people could deduct through the SALT deduction.
But the 2017 tax overhaul passed under Trump limited the deduction to $10,000 – a blow to many homeowners in states with high property taxes, many of which are Democratic leaning. At the time of the law’s passage, the Treasury Department estimated that almost 11 million taxpayers in high-tax states like New York and New Jersey would forfeit $323 billion in deductions.
Who benefits from the SALT deduction?
Homeowners with high property taxes, such as people in New York, New Jersey and California, were the biggest beneficiaries of the the full SALT deduction.
But some experts also noted that the SALT deduction primarily put more money in the pockets of higher-earning Americans. About 80% of the full SALT deduction had helped people earning more than $100,000 a year, according to the Tax Foundation.
What happened after Trump capped the SALT deduction at $10,000?
The limit has increasingly impacted middle-class homeowners across the U.S. because of rising property taxes and incomes. Some lawmakers have also sought to either repeal or increase the SALT cap, but none of those efforts have borne fruit.
Earlier this year, some lawmakers sought to double the SALT deduction cap to $20,000 for married couples, with the change retroactive for the 2023 tax year. But that bill was blocked in the House in February.
Won’t the SALT deduction cap expire anyway?
Yes, the SALT deduction cap is a provision that’s due to expire in 2025, as are many other parts of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, such as a reduction of the individual tax brackets. But Trump has previously indicated he wants to extend the provisions in his signature tax law.
How much would it cost the U.S. to repeal the SALT deduction cap?
It won’t be cheap, according to the the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a think tank that focuses on budget and policy issues.
Eliminating the $10,000 deduction limit “would increase the cost of extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) by $1.2 trillion over a decade,” the group estimates, adding that such a measure would be a “costly mistake.”
Extending the TCJA’s tax cuts would increase the nation’s deficit by $3.9 trillion over the next decade, the group estimates. By adding in a expiration or repeal of the SALT deduction cap, that would grow to $5.1 trillion, it added.
“Lawmakers should not extend the TCJA without a plan to – at a minimum – offset the costs of extension, but ideally the plan would raise revenues relative to current law and help put the nation’s debt on a better trajectory,” the group said in a statement.
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