The Chaos Era: Fighting Disinformation and Democratic Collapse
Longstanding, pervasive manipulation across systems is confusing voters, eroding trust and alienating us from a shared future
It’s Election Day on Tuesday, and disinformation is thriving. Call it whatever you want: fake news, alternative facts, propaganda.
Our information environment is filled with AI slop, clickbait articles designed to gather our data, pink-slime journalism feeding hyper-partisan content and full-blown political-interference campaigns promoted by fake accounts and bots.
Add to that unverified user content, algorithmic curation of our newsfeeds and lies that migrate from the online world to our other streams of entertainment and distraction. The list of manipulated information is too long and complex for any of us to fully understand.
This election cycle has again proven that such an environment will not magically disappear — so when all the votes are cast and we begin dissecting the results, questions about our disinformation environment will persist. How we engage in this moment is crucial.
Nora Benavidez
The way lies and hate have burrowed into our communities has been catastrophic: Manipulation has given us — among countless other harms — discrimination in health care and housing, environmental degradation and the sentiment that voting doesn’t matter.
As a free-speech advocate and civil-rights attorney, I’ve trained people to spot mis- and disinformation, pressured tech companies to better apply their policies and challenged discriminatory user experiences through civil-rights litigation against platforms. These efforts affirm for me that the goal of full-system manipulation is to wear us down. To create a sense of disorientation and fatigue. To distract and divide us from the urgent work of advancing progress.
Chaos we like and can’t resist
Bad actors sow chaos to remove cornerstones of civilized society and give credence to once-unacceptable values. That chaos makes it harder for us to sift through information, make sense of what we see and hear, and engage directly in public life. It does not hide information per se, nor does it persuade with lies alone.
The chaos era obfuscates integrity and, as a result, we lose a sense of society and ourselves. In this confused moment, the chaos era grants dark forces the ability to exploit this distraction while we are busy making sense of corners of information and fragments of each other.
According to Public Agenda’s polling, 73 percent of Americans feel they can’t trust politicians to put the interests of the country ahead of their party; 64 percent believe that politicians don’t care what people like them think and 41 percent feel that politics and government are so complicated that it’s hard to understand what is going on.
Manipulation has infected nearly every layer of our experiences on and offline. This kind of full-system breakdown is particularly potent ahead of and in the weeks after elections, the time when people need to trust institutions and each other. Instead, the chaos around us makes us less connected and more vulnerable to alienation.
Democratic oblivion
Authoritarian figures will exploit these fragilities to grab and grow their own power. Creeping authoritarianism can be hard to recognize in real time. Global leaders inject authoritarian values and rhetoric into everyday social-media posts. Dominant online platforms feature engagement algorithms that help spread and normalize extreme and bigoted viewpoints.
Having the leaders of the world’s most powerful technology companies capitulate to Trumpism only accelerates the advance against democratic society. See: our incessant exposure to Nazi-saluting Elon Musk, who promotes bigoted and white-supremacist beliefs — and who talks on X and elsewhere about how he himself can save humanity by having as many children as possible. Meanwhile, he has donated more political dollars than any other living human or entity in history — those monies advancing far-right candidates and causes.
Timothy Karr
This chaos era doesn’t end with our being distracted or overwhelmed. It doesn’t end with the global erosion of democratic norms as influential, illiberal voices prop up unpalatable and inappropriate values until they’re accepted. It invites bad actors to attack decades (even centuries) of progress and democratic practice. It shrouds this reality from its targets as people continue to live largely unaware of the overt efforts to undermine fundamental rights. In just the first year of his second presidency, Trump upended decades of civil-rights progress and basic democratic principles, pushing us ever further toward democratic collapse.
And the numbers don’t lie. We have examined hundreds of instances in which Trump’s second administration has infected nearly all levels of government with an ethos of illegality and a commitment to violating people’s basic rights.
The disappearance of democratic commitments isn’t unique to the United States. Democratic backsliding is on the rise globally. As of 2025, “global freedom declined for the 20th consecutive year,” marked by deterioration of political rights and civil liberties in 54 countries. Freedom House argues that “key factors driving the degradation in rights and liberties included violence and the repression of political opponents.”
According to the Cornell Chronicle, this backsliding is not emerging “from dramatic coups, military aggression or civil war, but from autocratic leaders leveraging democratic institutions — election officials, legislatures, courts and the media — to consolidate executive power.”
Undoing years of progress erodes various building blocks that are essential to a functional society: voting rights, free-speech protections, access to ideas and history, environmental safeguards, democratic ideals, the rule of law, and even the experts who seek to study and document these forces.
It might seem quaint to remind people to exercise their rights: “go vote,” “protest,” “share information with your community,” “support causes you like.” Though we should absolutely be doing these things. Regularly.
The integrity of our institutions is very much on the ballot, not just during election season but every day. The way through this chaos has to include confronting why we acquiesce our engagement in the world in favor of distraction. Our work is to develop a practice of democratic commitment. Start somewhere and start now.
About the author
Nora Benavidez leads Free Press’ democracy, free speech and tech initiatives, including its policy, legal and campaign efforts to curb disinformation, hate and other manipulation online while protecting digital civil rights, privacy and free expression. Follow Nora on Bluesky.
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Compiled by Pressing Issues editors
A “Super Bowl” of conspiracy theories. As if you need reminders, Election Day will most certainly have its share of conspiracy theories popping up on newsfeeds, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan writes.
“American elections are not perfect — no system is. But it’s important to remember on this Election Day that there are thousands of devoted election officials working across the country to ensure the election is safe and secure,” O’Sullivan concludes in his analysis. “There is also a committed industry of election deniers, motivated by politics or money or both, devoted to telling you otherwise. They will seek to flood the zone, to create the impression that there is a lot of smoke in the hope you might believe there is a fire.”
Let’s be vigilant out there, people.
The kicker
“A lie told 1,000 times becomes the truth. If you want to rip the heart out of a democracy, you go after the facts. That’s what modern authoritarians do. You lie. All the time. Then, you say it’s your opponents and the journalists who lie.”—Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Rappler founder
