In Los Angeles this summer, immigration raids sparked days of street protests and a heavy government response — including curfews and the deployment of National Guard troops. But alongside the demonstrations came another, quieter battle: the fight over truth. Old protest videos resurfaced online as if they were new, AI-generated clips blurred the line between fact and fiction, and conspiracy theories about “paid actors” flooded social media feeds.
What played out in Los Angeles was not unique. It is the same dynamic Maria Ressa warned about when she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. She described disinformation as an “invisible atomic bomb” — a destabilizing force that, like the bomb of 1945, demands new rules and institutions to contain its damage. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world created the United Nations and a framework of international treaties to prevent nuclear catastrophe. Ressa argues that democracy faces a similar moment now: just as we built global safeguards for atomic power, we must now create a digital rule of law to safeguard the information systems that shape civic life.
Her analysis runs deeper still. Ressa often cites a 2018 MIT study showing that false news spreads “farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly” than the truth online — not because of bots, but because people are drawn to shock and novelty. What makes this more alarming, she argues, is that platforms profit from the distortion. As she put it, Russian bot armies and fake accounts generated “more engagement — and higher revenue,” turning disinformation into a business model.
The same incentives were visible in Los Angeles, where AI-generated protest clips and recycled footage spread quickly because outrage was rewarded more than accuracy. In the Philippines, Maria Ressa documented how Facebook became the primary battleground for disinformation: coordinated networks of fake accounts pushed false narratives to silence journalists and smear critics, all while boosting platform engagement and ad revenue. Russian disinformation campaigns followed a similar logic, using bot armies and troll farms to flood social media with polarizing content, especially during elections abroad. In both cases — as in Los Angeles — truth had to fight against algorithms designed to reward virality and profit, rather than accuracy.
However, in Los Angeles, fact-checkers and journalists worked quickly to trace clips back to their sources, local outlets published clear comparisons, and officials corrected false claims in real-time. These actions didn’t erase the misinformation, but they showed that resilience is possible.
Still, relying only on journalists, nonprofits, or volunteers is not enough. The burden of defending truth should not fall on underfunded newsrooms or a handful of civic groups scrambling during crises. If democracy is to withstand the “invisible atomic bomb” of disinformation, these defenses must be institutionalized — built into the very framework of governance.
Other countries offer lessons. In the European Union, for example, the Digital Services Act requires platforms to be more transparent about algorithms and to respond quickly to harmful disinformation. During elections, EU regulators can require platforms to report on how they monitor and address manipulation campaigns and impose fines for failures. While imperfect, it shows what institutional accountability can look like: not ad-hoc firefighting, but clear rules backed by enforcement.
The U.S. has yet to take such comprehensive steps. But the experience of Los Angeles suggests why it matters. Without institutional rails, communities will be forced to fight disinformation slowly, while platforms continue to profit from the chaos. With them, we could shift from reactive fixes to a sustainable digital rule of law.
And there is reason for hope. Studies show that media literacy programs can help citizens spot falsehoods more accurately. Community fact-checking has helped reduce the spread of misinformation online. Local collaborations among journalists, educators, and civic groups are already laying the groundwork for a more resilient democracy. These efforts prove that Americans are not powerless in the face of disinformation.
Maria Ressa’s metaphor was stark, but her message was not despair. The atomic bomb analogy was also about response — about building new institutions to meet an undeniable threat. If Americans can make a digital rule of law with the same urgency, then the age of disinformation need not be democracy’s undoing. It could become the moment when democracy reinvents itself for the digital age.
Maria Eduarda Grill is a student from Brazil studying Global Affairs and Economics at the University of Notre Dame. She is a fellow with Common Ground Journalism and a researcher with the Kellogg Institute, where she studies digital governance and media freedom in Latin America.
The Fulcrum's Executive Editor, Hugo Balta is an instructor with Commmon Ground Journalism. He is an accredited solutions journalism and complicating the narratives trainer.
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.