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      First came the bots, then came the bosses – we’re entering Musk and Zuck’s new era of disinformation | Joan Donovan

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      I’m a researcher of media manipulation, and watching the 2024 US election returns was like seeing the Titanic sink.Every day leading up to 5 November, there were more and more outrageous claims being made in an attempt across social media to undermine election integrity: conspiracy theories focused on a tidal wave of immigrants plotting to undermine the right wing, allegations that there were millions of excess ballots circulating in California, and rumors that the voting machines were already corrupted by malicious algorithms.All of the disinformation about corrupt vote counts turned out not to be necessary, as Donald Trump won the election decisively. But the election proved that disinformation is no longer the provenance of anonymous accounts amplified by bots to mimic human engagement, like it was in 2016. In 2024, lies travel further and faster across social media, which is now a battleground for narrative dominance. And now, the owners of the platforms circulating the most incendiary lies have direct access to the Oval Office.We talk a lot about social media “platforms”. The word “platform” is interesting as it means both a stated political position and a technological communication system. Over the past decade, we have watched social media platforms warp public opinion by deciding what is seen and when users see it, as algorithms double as newsfeed and timeline editors. When tech CEOs encode their political beliefs into the design of platforms, it’s a form of technofascism, where technology is used for political suppression of speech and to repress the organization of resistance to the state or capitalism.Content moderation at these platforms now reflects the principles of the CEO and what that person believes is in the public’s interest. The political opinions of tech’s overlords, like Musk and Zuckerberg, are now directly embedded in their algorithms.For example, Meta has limited the circulation of critical discussions about political power, reportedly even downranking posts that use the word “vote” on Instagram. Meta’s Twitter clone, Threads, suspended journalists for reporting on Trump’s former chief of staff describing Trump’s admiration of Hitler. Threads built in a politics filter that is turned on by default.View image in fullscreenImplementing these filtering mechanisms illustrates a sharp difference from Meta’s embrace of politicians who got personalized white-glove service in 2016 as Facebook embedded employees directly in political campaigns, who advised on branding and reaching new audiences. It’s also a striking reversal of Zuckerberg’s free speech position in 2019. Zuckerberg gave a presentation at Georgetown University claiming that he was inspired to create Facebook because he wanted to give students a voice during the Iraq war. This historical revisionism was quickly skewered in the media. (Facebook’s predecessor allowed users to rate the appearance of Harvard female freshmen. Misogyny was the core of its design.) Nevertheless, his false origin story encapsulated a vision of how Zuckerberg once believed society and politics should be organized, where political discussion was his guiding reason to bring people into community.However, he now appears to have abandoned this position in favor of disincentivizing political discussion altogether. Recently, Zuckerberg wrote to the Republican Jim Jordan saying he regretted his content moderation decisions during the pandemic because he acted under pressure from the Biden administration. The letter itself was an obvious attempt to curry favor as Trump rose as the Republican presidential candidate. Zuckerberg has reason to fear Trump, who has mentioned wanting to arrest Zuckerberg for deplatforming him on Meta products after the January 6 Capitol riot.X seems to have embraced the disinformation chaos and fully fused Trump’s campaign into the design of X’s content strategies. Outrageous assertions circle the drain on X, including false claims such as that immigrants are eating pets in Ohio, Kamala Harris’s Jamaican grandmother was white, and that immigrants are siphoning aid meant for Fema. It’s also worth noting that Musk is the biggest purveyor of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories on X. The hiss and crackle of disinformation is as ambient as it is unsettling.There are no clearer signs of Musk’s willingness to use platform power than his relentless amplification of his own account as well as Trump’s Twitter account on X’s “For You” algorithm. Moreover, Musk bemoaned the link suppression by Twitter in 2020 over Hunter Biden’s laptop while then hypocritically working with the Trump campaign in 2024 to ban accounts and links to leaked documents emanating from the Trump campaign that painted JD Vance in a negative light.Musk understands that he will personally benefit from being close to power. He supported Trump with a controversial political action committee that gave away cash to those who signed his online petition. Musk also paid millions for canvassers and spent many evenings in Pennsylvania stumping for Trump. With Trump’s win, he will need to make good on his promise of placing Musk in a position on the not-yet-created “Department of Government Efficiency” (Doge – which is also the name of Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency). While it sure seems like a joke taken too far, Musk has said he plans to cut $2tn from the national budget, which will wreak havoc on the economy and could be devastating when coupled with the mass deportation of 10 million people.In short, what we learn from the content strategies of X and Meta is simple: the design of platforms is now inextricable from the politics of the owner.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis wasn’t inevitable. In 2016, there was a public reckoning that social media had been weaponized by foreign adversaries and domestic actors to spread disinformation on a number of wedge issues to millions of unsuspecting users. Hundreds of studies were conducted in the intervening years, by internal corporate researchers and independent academics, showing that platforms amplify and expose audiences to conspiracy theories and fake news, which can lead to networked incitement and political violence.By 2020, disinformation had become its own industry and the need for anonymity lessened as rightwing media makers directly impugned election results, culminating in January 6. That led to an unprecedented decision by social media companies to ban Trump, who was still the sitting president, and a number of other high-profile rightwing pundits, thus illustrating just how powerful social media platforms had become as political actors.In reaction to this unprecedented move to curb disinformation, the richest man in the world, Musk, bought Twitter, laid off much of the staff, and sent internal company communications to journalists and politicians in 2022. Major investigations of university researchers and government agencies ensued, naming and shaming those who engaged with Twitter’s former leadership and made appeals for the companies to enforce its own terms of service during the 2020 election.Since then, these CEOs have ossified their political beliefs in the design of algorithms and by extension dictated political discourse for the rest of us.Whether it’s Musk’s strategy of overloading users with posts from himself and Trump, or Zuckerberg’s silencing of political discussion, it’s citizens who suffer from such chilling of speech. Of course, there is no way to know decisively how disinformation affected individual voters, but a recent Ipsos poll shows Trump voters believed disinformation on a number of wedge issues, claiming that immigration, crime, and the economy are all worse than data indicates. For now, let this knowledge be the canary warning of technofascism, where the US is not only ruled by elected politicians, but also by technological authoritarians who control speech on a global scale.If we are to disarm disinformers, we need a whole of society approach that values real Talk (Timely, Accurate Local Knowledge) and community safety. This might look like states passing legislation to fund local journalism in the public interest, because local news can bridge divides between neighbors and bring some accountability to the government. It will require our institutions, such as medicine, journalism, and academia, to fight for truth and justice, even in the face of anticipated retaliation. But most of all, it’s going to require that you and I do something quickly to protect those already in the crosshairs of Trump’s new world order, by donating to or joining community organizations tackling issues such as women’s rights and immigration. Even subscribing to a local news outlet is a profound political act these days. Let that sink in.Joan Donovan is the founder of the Critical Internet Studies Institute and assistant professor of journalism at Boston University More

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      A new era dawns. America’s tech bros now strut their stuff in the corridors of power | Carole Cadwalladr

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      In hindsight, 2016 was the beginning of the beginning. And 2024 is the end of that beginning and the start of something much, much worse.It began as a tear in the information space, a dawning realisation that the world as we knew it – stable, fixed by facts, balustraded by evidence – was now a rip in the fabric of reality. And the turbulence that Trump is about to unleash – alongside pain and cruelty and hardship – is possible because that’s where we already live: in information chaos.It’s exactly eight years since we realised there were invisible undercurrents flowing beneath the surface of our world. Or perhaps I should talk for myself here. It was when I realised. A week before the 2016 US presidential election, I spotted a weird constellation of events and googled “tech disruption” + “democracy”, found not a single hit and pitched a piece to my editor.It was published on 6 November 2016. In it, I quoted the “technology mudslide hypothesis” a concept invented by Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, who coined the term “disruption” – a process endlessly fetishised in tech circles, in which a scrappy upstart such as Microsoft could overthrow a colossus like IBM.Whoever wins, I wrote, this election represented “the Great Disruption. With Trump the Great Disruptor.” And, for good measure, I chucked in some questions: “Will democracy survive? Will Nato? Is a free and fair election possible in a post-truth world?”View image in fullscreenThat article was the beginning of my own Alice in Wonderland tumble down the rabbit hole. and I reread it with the sinking knowledge that this next presidential term may yet provide those answers. If it seems like I’m crowing, I wish. This isn’t a valedictory “I told you so”: it’s an eight-year anniversary reminder for us to wake up. And a serving of notice: the first stage of this process is now complete. And we have to understand what that means.We’ve spent those eight years learning a new lexicon: “misinformation”, “disinformation”, “microtargeting”. We’ve learned about information warfare. As journalists, we, like FBI investigators, used evidence to show how social media was a vulnerable “threat surface” that bad actors such as Cambridge Analytica and the Kremlin could exploit. PhDs have been written on the weaponisation of social media. But none of this helps us now.There’s already a judiciary subcommittee on the “weaponisation of the federal government” in Congress to investigate the “censorship industrial complex” – the idea that big tech is “censoring” Republican voices. For the past 18 months, it’s been subpoena-ing academics. Last week, Elon Musk tweeted that the next stage would be “prosecutions”. A friend of mine, an Ivy League professor on the list, texts to say the day will shortly come “where I will have to decide whether to stay or go”.View image in fullscreenTrump’s list of enemies is not theoretical. It already exists. My friend is on it. In 2022, Trump announced a “day one” executive order instructing “the Department of Justice to investigate all parties involved in the new online censorship regime … and to aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified”. And my friends in other countries know exactly where this leads.View image in fullscreenAnother message arrives from Maria Ressa, the Nobel prize-winning Filipino journalist. In the Philippines, the government is modelled on the US one and she writes about what happened when President Duterte controlled all three branches of it. “It took six months after he took office for our institutions to crumble.” And then she was arrested.What we did during the first wave of disruption, 2016-24, won’t work now. Can you “weaponise” social media when social media is the weapon? Remember the philosopher Marshall McLuhan – “the medium is the message”? Well the medium now is Musk. The world’s richest man bought a global communication platform and is now the shadow head of state of what was the world’s greatest superpower. That’s the message. Have you got it yet?Does the technology mudslide hypothesis now make sense? Of how a small innovation can eventually disrupt a legacy brand? That brand is truth. It’s evidence. It’s journalism. It’s science. It’s the Enlightenment. A niche concept you’ll find behind a paywall at the New York Times.You have a subscription? Enjoy your clean, hygienic, fact-checked news. Then come with me into the information sewers, where we will wade through the shit everyone else consumes. Trump is cholera. His hate, his lies – it’s an infection that’s in the drinking water now. Our information system is London’s stinking streets before the Victorian miracle of sanitation. We fixed that through engineering. But we haven’t fixed this. We had eight years to hold Silicon Valley to account. And we failed. Utterly.Because this, now, isn’t politics in any sense we understand it. The young men who came out for Trump were voting for protein powder and deadlifting as much as they were for a 78-year-old convicted felon. They were voting for bitcoin and weighted squats. For YouTube shorts and Twitch streams. For podcast bros and crypto bros and tech bros and the bro of bros: Elon Musk.Social media is mainstream media now. It’s where the majority of the world gets its news. Though who even cares about news? It’s where the world gets its memes and jokes and consumes its endlessly mutating trends. Forget “internet culture”. The internet is culture. And this is where this election was fought and won … long before a single person cast a ballot.Steve Bannon was right. Politics is downstream from culture. Chris Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, quoted his old boss to me in my first phone call with him. Elections are downstream from white men talking on platforms that white men built, juiced by invisible algorithms our broligarch overlords control. This is culture now.The Observer’s reporting on Facebook and Cambridge Analytica belongs to the old world order. An order that ended on 6 November 2024. That was the first wave of algorithmic disruption which gave us Brexit and Trump’s first term, when our rule-based norms creaked but still applied.View image in fullscreenThe challenge now is to understand that this world has gone. Mark Zuckerberg has ditched his suit, grown out his Caesar haircut and bought a rapper-style gold chain. He’s said one of his biggest regrets is apologising too much. Because he – like others in Silicon Valley – has read the runes. PayPal’s co-founder Peter Thiel, creeping around in the shadows, ensured his man, JD Vance, got on the presidential ticket. Musk wagered a Silicon Valley-style bet by going all in on Trump. Jeff Bezos, late to the party, jumped on the bandwagon with just days to go, ensuringhis Washington Post didn’t endorse any candidate.These bros know. They don’t fear journalists any more. Journalists will now learn to fear them. Because this is oligarchy now. This is the fusion of state and commercial power in a ruling elite. It’s not a coincidence that Musk spouts the Kremlin’s talking points and chats to Putin on the phone. The chaos of Russia in the 90s is the template; billions will be made, people will die, crimes will be committed.Our challenge is to realise that the first cycle of disruption is complete. We’re through the looking glass. We’re all wading through the information sewers. Trump is a bacillus but the problem is the pipes. We can and must fix this.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk More

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      Musk says Trump’s podcast appearances made ‘big difference’ in election

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      Donald Trump’s stunning election triumph was won partly thanks to his willingness to undergo freewheeling interviews with popular podcasters like Joe Rogan, the US president-elect’s most influential backer, Elon Musk, has claimed.Speaking to Tucker Carlson, Musk said Trump’s three-hour conversational encounter last month with Rogan – America’s most-listened-to podcaster – and other podcast appearances allowed listeners to decide whether he was a “good person” and was a major point of distinction from Kamala Harris.“I think it made a big difference that President Trump and soon to be vice-president Vance went on lengthy podcasts,” Musk told Carlson, who expressed agreement.“I think this really makes a difference because people like Joe Rogan’s podcast, which is great, and Lex Fridman’s and the All-In podcast. To a reasonable-minded, smart person who’s not like hardcore one way or the other, they just listen to someone talk for a few hours, and that’s how they decide whether you’re a good person, whether they like you.”Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, each underwent several podcast interviews during the campaign, including on Call Her Daddy, in which the US vice-president talked about abortion.But she did not appear on The Joe Rogan Experience. The podcaster later said he declined her campaign’s insistence that it should last for just one hour, rather than three, and that Rogan travel to meet her, instead of his preference that it take place in his studio in Austin, Texas.Musk, who has frequently belittled Harris, claimed she had refused a three-hour sit-down because it would have exposed her supposed inability to talk in a relaxed and spontaneous manner.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      “I actually posted on X [that] nothing would do more damage to Kamala’s campaign than going on Joe Rogan, because she’d run out of non sequiturs after about 45 minutes,” he said. “Hour two and three would be a complete melted puddle of nonsense. So, it would just be absolute game over. That’s why she didn’t go on.“But, on the other hand, Trump, he’s there, there’s no talking points. He’s just being a normal person, having a conversation and doing three hours of Rogan, no problem.”Rogan’s interview with Trump, conducted at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort, was noted for its friendly exchanges and words of praise from the podcaster, which included him lauding the then candidate’s speaking style and “comedic instincts”.“You said a lot of wild shit and then CNN, in all their brilliance by highlighting your wild shit, made you much more popular,” Rogan told Trump, explaining his ability to get more publicity than other politicians.“It’s funny. It’s stand-up. It’s funny stuff. You have, like, comedic instincts. Like when you said to Hillary: ‘You’d be in jail.’ Like, that’s great timing. But it’s like that kind of stuff was unheard of as a politician. Like, no one had done that.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe podcast host compared Trump’s behavior to the more “rehearsed” speech of other politicians – possibly implying Harris.“When you see certain people talk, certain people in the public eye, you don’t know who they are. You have no idea who they are. It’s very difficult to know,” Rogan said. “You see them in conversations. They have these pre-planned answers, they say everything. It’s very rehearsed. You never get to the meat of it.”Rogan ultimately endorsed Trump on the eve of the election after hosting another interview with Musk, who told him that X – the social media platform that the Space X and Tesla entrepreneur owns – would not be allowed to exist if Harris won the election.After being criticised early in her candidacy for avoiding challenging interviews, Harris sat for several television interrogations, including with CBS’s 60 Minutes and Bret Baier on Fox News, a pro-Trump network where she was subjected to multiple interruptions and hostile questions on rightwing talking points.Trump held more interviews but generally chose friendly settings, including Fox and Newsmax, where his views went largely unchallenged. He pulled out of an interview with 60 Minutes, which has been interviewing presidential candidates for more than half a century, after objecting to the programme’s plans to factcheck him.Shannon C McGregor, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina, told the Hill that podcast appearances gave voters a better insight into the candidates as people than regular television interviews.“It gives listeners a better sense of what the candidates are like than the CNN interview with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, especially for people who aren’t super interested in politics,” she said. More

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      Here’s how the American press can survive four years of Trump | Margaret Sullivan

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      Everything we know about the next US president suggests that the press in America will be under siege in the next four years as never before.After all, Donald Trump has portrayed the media as the “enemy of the people”, has suggested that he wouldn’t mind seeing journalists get shot, and, in recent months, has sued CBS News and the Pulitzer prize organization.Now, with what he considers a mandate, he’ll want to push harder.“He’ll use every tool that he has, and there are many available to him,” predicted Marty Baron, the former executive editor of the Washington Post and the author of Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post, published last year.Baron told me on Wednesday that the president-elect had long been on a mission to undermine the mainstream media, and that he would be more empowered in a second term.Every would-be autocrat sees to it, after all, that an independent press doesn’t get in his way. Often, it’s one of the first democratic guardrails to be kicked down as a nation moves in an authoritarian direction.“Trump is salivating at the chance to sue a journalist for a leak of a classified document,” Baron said, perhaps using the century-old Espionage Act to exact a harsh punishment, even a prison term.With an aggressive attorney general – more combative than Jeff Sessions, whom Trump criticized for not being tough enough – that may be doable.And if even more source material is deemed classified, almost any story based on a leak can be depicted as a threat to national security.Another tactic: Trump’s allies will bankroll legal actions against the press, as the tech investor Peter Thiel did in a lawsuit against Gawker in 2016, forcing the media company into bankruptcy while portraying himself as a champion of quality journalism.Baron also sees Trump and friends threatening advertisers whose revenue keeps media companies in business – “and they will run for cover”.Then, if media outlets become sufficiently weakened, his allies may buy them and turn them into propaganda arms.Another likely move is to stonewall the press, making the job of informing the public much harder.Trump’s true believers, installed throughout the government, from the intelligence agencies to the IRS to the defense department, will anticipate what Trump wants and be hostile to reporters, Baron predicted. “Journalists will hit roadblocks constantly.”Toward the same end, legislation that weakens the Freedom of Information Act – which allows the press and the public the right to see much of what their government is doing – would be easy enough to enact with a Trump-friendly Congress.How to defend against all this?Baron hopes that media lawyers are already working on contingency plans to combat these moves, and that the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press will have the resources it needs to help as challenges arise. The non-profit provides pro bono legal representation to news organizations, reporters, documentary film-makers and others; and often contributes court documents to support journalists’ fights to protect their newsgathering.On Wednesday, the Reporters Committee sent out a fundraising email with a dire message beginning: “We won’t mince words – the next Trump administration poses a serious threat to press freedom.”I spoke on Thursday with Bruce Brown, the non-profit’s longtime executive director, who told me it will be important “to separate the daily indignations from the true legal threats” that are likely on their way. But, he said: “We have to prepare and be clear-eyed and get ready to act.”The organization is ready, though, with 20 lawyers on staff, many who worked on these issues during the first Trump administration. “In 2016, we were a third the size we are now, and we have lawyers with vastly more experience.”Major media organizations, he said, “need to stick together and not let him peel them off one by one”.More broadly, Marty Baron believes that the mainstream press needs to work on its trust problem.It needs to improve how it presents itself to the public, given that so many people are willing to believe that today’s journalism is part of the problem rather than a pillar of democracy.Bezos’s decision to quash a Post endorsement of Kamala Harris certainly didn’t help with enhancing trust, though the owner claimed he was motivated by wanting his paper to appear non-partisan; about 250,000 subscribers disagreed, cancelling in anger or disgust.Baron (who was critical of the decision to yank the editorial) urges the press to be “radically transparent” with the public.For example, journalists should provide access to full versions of the audio and video that their stories are based on, and should allow people to examine original documents or data sets.“The message,” he said, “should be ‘check my work’.”Baron also believes “the press has a lot to learn about what people’s genuine concerns are,” and should try harder to reach audiences of all political stripes.Trump’s messages about immigration, he believes, have found such fertile ground partly because of people’s worries, whether evidence-based or not, about jobs and salaries.Rebuilding trust is a long-term project. But the Trump-induced challenges are immediate.To survive them, the press needs to get ready now.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      ‘What have they done…Again?’: What the UK papers say after Trump’s momentous political comeback

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      Donald Trump’s sweeping victory in the US presidential election saw the former president securing an unexpected majority in the popular vote, control of the Senate, and at least 295 electoral college votes – defeating vice-president Kamala Harris in a contest that dominated UK front pages on Thursday.The Guardian led with two words: “American Dread”, a play on the American dream, alongside a close up portrait of the president-elect.Americans awoke to a “transformed country and a rattled world” as the realisation of Trump’s stunning return to power started to sink in, wrote the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington, summing up the mood.The Mirror highlighted a question lingering on many minds around the world about what Trump 2.0 might bring, with the headline: “What have they done…Again?Trump’s victory, it said, had ushered in fears the Republican leader would be even “more divisive and brutal than in his first spell in the White House”.“A comeback to Trump all comebacks” ran the Daily Mail, noting that in the end “it wasn’t even close”.Trump’s electoral victory is unprecedented in many ways. For one, he is the first convicted felon to win the US presidency, a point highlighted by the front page of the Express, and one that did not stop Americans choosing him to lead once more.“He’s been shot, convicted of a crime and branded a fascist… but he’s still the people’s choice.”The Times opted for a different tone, choosing the headline: “Trump promises Golden Age after sweeping Harris aside.”Trump was returning to the White House more “powerful than ever” the Times said.The paper also included on its front page the headline of an opinion piece, titled: “Face it, liberals, this is what millions wanted.”The Sun riffed off one of Trump’s signature lines from his reality TV show The Apprentice, running with the snappy headline: “You’re Rehired”.“Trump’s back for Season 2”, the paper wrote, despite being “shot, sued, tried, insulted and written off”.“Trump is back”, echoed the Financial Times on its front page, adding that American democracy and alliances were “poised for turmoil”, with stocks opening at new highs despite fresh fears over tariffs.Featuring an arresting photo of a confident-looking Trump pointing his finger at the viewer, an image that mirrors the iconic Uncle Sam cartoon, the Telegraph said Trump had won with a powerful mandate, as he took control of the Senate, popular vote and “every swing state”.“Trump’s clean sweep”, its headline read.In Scotland, the Daily Record, featured a smirking Donald Trump alongside the line “The star-spangled spanner”.The paper summed up his forthcoming second term in a witty pun, dubbing it: “A Grave New Don”. More

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      Trump calls media ‘the enemy camp’ in speech declaring victory

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      On stage in West Palm Beach in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Donald Trump thanked his supporters, his family and his campaign team as he declared victory in the US presidential race. One group not on the former president’s thank-you cards: the media, whom he referred to as “the enemy camp”.Introducing his running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance, Trump said: “I told JD to go into the enemy camp. He just goes: OK. Which one? CNN? MSNBC? He’s like the only guy who looks forward to going on, and then just absolutely obliterates them.”Trump has had an antagonistic relationship with the US press for years, often labeling them as the “crooked media” and calling them the “enemy of the people”. But as the Republican candidate in recent weeks ramped up his rhetoric against his perceived opponents, he’s intensified his attacks on reporters as well.The comment during Trump’s victory speech come less than a week after he joked during a campaign rally he would have no concerns about reporters being shot at if there were another assassination attempt against him.During meandering comments at a rally in Pennsylvania last week, Trump complained about gaps in the bulletproof shields surrounding him after a gunman opened fire on him at a rally in July.“To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news and I don’t mind that so much,” he said.The press, he added, were “seriously corrupt people”.Trump’s communications director later claimed in a statement the comments were supposedly an effort to look out for the welfare of the news media.Trump on Wednesday morning claimed victory over his Democratic opponent in the presidential race, Kamala Harris, and pledged to bring a “golden age” to the United States.“This was a movement like nobody’s ever seen before, and frankly, this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time. There’s never been anything like this in this country, and maybe beyond,” Trump said. More

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      The candidates’ closing campaign messages could not be more different | Margaret Sullivan

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      In recent days, the Republican nominee for president of the United States has driven around in circles in a garbage truck, pretended to work at McDonald’s and presided over a rally in which Puerto Rico was called a floating island of garbage.Outrageous, of course – but then it got worse. On Thursday, talking on stage with Tucker Carlson in Arizona, Donald Trump went after the former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who opposes his re-election and has campaigned with Kamala Harris: “Let’s put her with a rifle with nine barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it when the guns are trained on her face.”Cheney characterized this as “how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death.”Meanwhile, in the final days of her campaign, Harris continued to call for unity, progress and inclusion. In a sweeping speech at the Ellipse in Washington DC before a huge and appreciative crowd, she warned of Americans losing their fundamental freedoms if they submit to the will of the “petty tyrant” mentioned above.With only a few days left of this exhausting campaign, the candidates’ closing statements could not be more different. There’s violent, hateful rhetoric and threats of retribution from one side. There’s inclusion, sanity and promises of good will on the other. Autocracy on the one hand; the preservation of democracy on the other.And yet, according to the polls – if you choose to believe them – the presidential race is tied.The oft-cited Cook Political Report issued its final projection: “Too close to call. Harris heads into Election Day with 226 electoral votes in Likely or Solid Democrat, and Trump with 219 in Likely or Solid Republican. Seven states and their 93 electoral votes are too close to call, with neither candidate having a lead larger than one or two points in any state.”You’d think, then, that these final days would matter. That mysteriously undecided voters would finally figure things out, or that some last-minute political bomb would explode – like the Access Hollywood audio followed by the FBI’s reopening of the Hillary Clinton emails investigation in the last days of the 2016 campaign.But no one should have bothered to wait.At this point, nothing can make a bit of difference. For some observers, this is not a new realization.“That’s where I’ve been ever since 2015: feeling like language is pointless,” wrote David Roberts, formerly of Vox, who writes the Volts newsletter about clean energy and politics. “Like the reality I inhabit is so far from the reality Trump supporters inhabit that discourse between us is impossible or at least futile. The divide is unbridgeable.”And this is the background as voters make their way to their election sites, with many of them voting early to avoid chaos or danger on Tuesday. Each side is claiming the early voters as theirs.And right to the end, the most powerful of the mainstream press keeps trying to equalize the unequal.Both the New York Times and the Washington Post led their websites with Joe Biden’s verbal fumble in which he may, or may not, have referred to Trump supporters as garbage.And both placed that story above the fold on Thursday’s print front pages. The Post’s hefty two-column headline dominated the lead position: “Biden’s ‘garbage’ remark has Harris seeking distance.” The Times struck the same note: “Biden Misstep Delivers Grist to Harris Foes.”The headlines themselves demonstrate the flawed news judgment. “The news hook is literally that it provided ‘grist’ to Republicans,” and this in effect “outsources the judgment about the newsworthiness of the event to bad faith actors,” wrote Greg Sargent of the New Republic.Sure, Biden’s untimely gaffe is a legitimate story. But this important? Certainly not when you consider how the Times handled its own scoop – that the former Trump chief of staff John Kelly, a retired Marine general, believes Trump is a fascist and a danger to the nation. That one went to page A12.Meanwhile, Trump drives around in a garbage truck, issues death threats and says he’s planning to protect American women from their own healthcare decisions “whether the women like it or not”.No October surprise could have superseded the media’s reflexive false equivalence or the cult-like adoration of Trump’s followers.But, as my father used to urge, keep the faith.If there’s any justice or decency left – and I trust there is – Harris will leave the pollsters and the pundits scratching their heads after a November surprise. Her historic victory.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      The BBC’s Gary O’Donoghue: ‘I knew those were gunshots, and then realised Trump had stopped talking’

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      Born in Norfolk in 1968, and becoming blind by the age of eight, Gary O’Donoghue studied philosophy and modern languages at Oxford University. After graduating he joined the BBC as a junior reporter on the Today programme, later becoming Radio 4’s chief political correspondent. Now the BBC’s senior North America correspondent, O’Donoghue was in attendance at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania where Donald Trump was hit by a bullet; his interview with eyewitness Greg Smith subsequently revealed astonishing security lapses. With election day on Tuesday and Americans worried there could be more violence to come, O’Donoghue spoke to us from the corporation’s Washington DC bureau. He divides his time between Washington DC, London and Yorkshire with his partner and their daughter.Where will you be when America goes to the polls?I’ll be covering election day and night, and the fallout afterwards, from Mar-a-Lago, Trump HQ.You’re just back from swing state Michigan. Any sense of which way things will go?We always laugh when people ask us this. I have no idea. It’s a cliche but it really is decided in these swing states. In Michigan, the phrase “the lesser of two evils” was said dozens of times – and by the way, when people say that, they’re usually voting Trump.A recent poll found that a quarter of Americans fear civil war following the election. Does that seem a credible threat to you?The idea of America is under enormous strain. The divides are everywhere – between the coasts and the centre, the north and the south, the urban and the rural, the religious and the unreligious. They are so entrenched that there is very little crossover communication, very little empathy. I find that incredibly sad. Do I think there could be civil war? I don’t but you’d be a fool to rule out violence. I mean, we’ve already had violence, haven’t we?View image in fullscreenRight. What went through your mind as you dived for cover at Butler?I knew immediately that those were gunshots, and then suddenly realised Trump had stopped talking. That’s the “Oh shit!” moment. Your mind is working at a million miles an hour – you have no idea whether it’s over or not, and then you hear the screaming start and you think, we’re in a pretty exposed position.You ended up getting a vital interview – with a man wearing a Trump visor topped with fake hair and holding a beer can.I don’t know what prejudices I’d have brought to it if I could see. One of the advantages of being blind and in journalism is that you can focus on the words. I’m a listener. If we’d put someone on air live who was lying or got it wrong, it could have really inflamed the situation, but Greg Smith was consistent.Advances in technology must have made your professional life simultaneously easier and still more challenging.Keeping up with information and the world as it is now, I feel like I’m paddling furiously under the surface the whole time. You’re listening to things mainly on audio, so it’s all linear, you can’t skim in the way you can when you can see. I rely on the wonderful Iona [Hampson, O’Donoghue’s senior producer] to let me know what’s trending and what I’m missing, but I must spend 70% more time than my colleagues just trying to keep up.Does it ever get you down?Sometimes it takes its toll because you’re obviously dealing with the same kind of life stuff that everyone has. I was in Chicago to report on Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech at the DNC when my mother died. I had a bit of a wobble recently because I realised I hadn’t thought about her once in four or five days. The guilt was just awful.How has broadcast journalism changed over the course of your career?When I started out, there were no anti-discrimination laws. People could say: “You can’t be a reporter, you’re blind.” Now they can’t say that, which makes it harder to spot, but there are still dinosaurs around who believe it. Fortunately the key people at the BBC get it and they’re kind of chuffed – I mean, I am the first ever disabled foreign correspondent. We’re publicly funded, we need to walk, talk, look, sound, smell like the country who pays our salaries, right?View image in fullscreenWhere does your resilience come from?I lost my sight when I was eight and was sent away to boarding school, because that’s where blind children were educated in those days. It was actually the best thing that ever happened to me because I ended up with a Rolls-Royce education. But the other thing that happens is you’re forced to build some resilience because a thousand times a day there are micro-aggressions, as they call them nowadays.You’ve spoken about how your mother once confided that things were so hard in your childhood, she’d thought of killing you both. Presumably she betrayed none of that at the time?None at all. It was really tough and my parents weren’t educated people, but they were incredibly foresightful: they knew that getting me an education would give me some independence in life. It must have broken their hearts sending me away but they did the right thing.What’s the most distressing news story you’ve ever had to report on?The Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. I’d done other mass shootings but there was so much horrible detail about what happened, every sinew in me was screaming. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to losing it on air.Is there a story you’re especially proud of?The Trump conviction. I basically did the whole 10 o’clock news with Clive Myrie. The drama was magnificent but the thing I was particularly pleased with is that the years of working hard to understand America meant I could sustain something as high profile as that, for all that time.What do you do to decompress?I’m continually rereading the multi-volume Oxford History of the United States, but fiction is the thing that calms me down. I love Colson Whitehead, Claire Keegan, Henry James.Is there anything you miss about the UK?London, mince pies and proper chocolate. American chocolate sucks, as they say. More