Eight months after Inauguration Day, one-third of Americans told pollsters they still believed Donald Trump actually won the election and that Joe Biden stole it away from the incumbent. A new report offers a mix of government and corporate reforms to limit the spread and influence of such election disinformation.
The Common Cause Education Fund, an affiliate of the democracy reform advocacy group Common Cause, issued a report in late October reviewing the state of disinformation campaigns and a series of recommendations designed to stem the tide.
"Just as we came together last year, rising up to vote safely and securely in record numbers during a global pandemic, we must now rise up to stop election disinformation efforts in future elections," the researchers wrote.
The report groups its 14 recommendations in three categories: statutory reforms, executive and regulatory agency reforms, and corporate policy reforms for social media businesses.
"There is no single policy solution to the problem of election disinformation," according to the report. "We need strong voting rights laws, strong campaign finance laws, strong communications and privacy laws, strong media literacy laws, and strong corporate civic integrity policies."
While many of the solutions require some mix of legislative activity, increased civic education and media literacy, and grassroots advocacy, others are easier to achieve — particularly self-imposed corporate reforms, said Jesse Littlewood, vice president of campaigns for Common Cause. For example, he suggested it would not be complicated for social media platforms to consistently enforce their own standards.
"They're not taking any action on disinformation in the 2020 campaign," said Littlewood, referring to ongoing claims that the election was stolen, claims that would have been addressed last year. "When you let your enforcement lax, it allows false narratives to grow."
Littlewood also identified the need to spend more time on civic integrity.
"We learned a lot through the Facebook Papers about the disbanding of the civic team right after the 2020 election, and the historic underinvestment in content moderation particularly in civic integrity issues," he said.
The statutory recommendations focus on five areas:
- Voter intimidation and false election speech, including state and federal legislation prohibiting the spread of election disinformation.
- Campaign finance reforms, such as passing federal and state disclosure laws to expose "dark money" and strengthening the Federal Elections Commission.
- Passing media literacy legislation at the state level.
- Enacting state privacy laws that include civil rights protections.
- Approving federal legislation to curb some online business practices, such as banning discriminatory algorithms, limiting and protecting the data collected online, and supporting local and watchdog journalism.
Some aspects of these proposals already exist in federal legislation that has stalled in Congress.
The regulatory recommendations fall into four buckets:
- Demonstrating state and federal leadership through executive action to stop the spread of election disinformation.
- Stepping up enforcement of state and federal laws that ban voter intimidation and other election interference efforts.
- Empowering the Federal Trade Commission to step up its privacy protection work.
- Use the FEC and state agencies to update and enforce disclosure requirements and rules against disinformation.
Finally, Common Cause suggests five areas of improvement for social media corporations:
- Directing users to official state and local sources of information about voting and elections.
- Maintaining and improving their self-imposed disinformation rules, throughout election and non-election years.
- Developing technology, such as artificial intelligence and algorithms that limit the spread of disinformation.
- Granting journalists and researchers more access to social media data.
- Increasing investment in efforts to stop non-English disinformation.
Littlewood said access to the data is one of the most important recommendations, as it influences the potential to achieve others.
"It's going to be hard to make progress from a regulatory process if there isn't transparency," said Littlewood. "We're trending in the other direction now, which is really problematic.
"Without access to the data, it's very hard to understand what's happening. It's very difficult to come up with recommendations that balance the private interests of the platform and the public interest. That's got to be our starting point."
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.