The Stakes: When Nothing Can Be Trusted
Two weeks before the 2024 election, a fake robocall mimicking President Biden's voice urged voters to skip the New Hampshire primary. According to AP News, it was an instance of AI-enabled election interference. Within hours, thousands had shared it. Each fake like this erodes confidence in the very possibility of knowing what is real.
The RAND Corporation refers to this phenomenon as "Truth Decay," where facts become blurred with opinion and spin. Its 2023 research warns that Truth Decay threatens U.S. national security by weakening military readiness and eroding credibility with allies. But the deeper crisis isn't that people believe every fake—it's that they doubt everything, including authentic material.
What's Really Dividing Us: The Liar's Dividend
Here's what we're missing in the AI deepfake debate: researchers found that "cheap fakes"—misleading cuts, mislabeled clips, or altered speed—were used seven times more often than AI deepfakes in 2024. AI's real danger is the "liar's dividend": the erosion of confidence that any evidence can be trusted.
This loss of shared reality fractures society; climate action stalls when manufactured doubt overwhelms the scientific consensus. Democratic institutions weaken when citizens question basic election facts. Public health suffers when misinformation spreads faster than accurate guidance. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and co-founder of FactCheck.org, warns that what's at stake is not only accuracy but the very idea that facts matter.
The Psychology Behind Our Vulnerability
Why are we so susceptible? As Daniel Kahneman explained in Thinking, Fast and Slow, our brains default to "System 1" thinking—fast, instinctive, and emotional. This is precisely what disinformation targets. AI-driven lies are designed to trigger immediate emotional reactions —fear, anger, outrage —that bypass our slower, more careful "System 2" thinking. When we're in System 1 mode, we share first and verify later, if at all.
Most of us don't have time for the careful verification that democracy requires. We're sun-dazed and expensively caffeinated, as one democracy researcher puts it, insulated by privilege from the immediate consequences of misinformation—until, suddenly, we're not.
The Verification Toolkit: Four Moves That Work
Digital literacy expert Mike Caulfield developed the SIFT method that anyone can use:
- Stop before sharing
- Investigate who is behind the information
- Find better coverage
- Trace claims to their origin
Professional fact-checkers practice lateral reading—opening multiple tabs to see what other outlets say about a claim. Tools like AllSides and Ground News help break echo chambers by showing how stories are covered across the political spectrum.
Browser extensions and bias-rating sites such as NewsGuard, Media Bias/Fact Check, and emerging provenance standards like C2PA that aim to certify media authenticity provide additional context.
Beyond Tools: Mental Hygiene for the Digital Age
But technical solutions aren't enough. We need better practices to address the emotional impacts of information overload:
Time-boxing media consumption—checking news at set intervals rather than continuously prevents artificial urgency while improving comprehension.
Diversifying inputs—reading across disciplines, listening to long-form debates such as those at Open to Debate, and seeking perspectives that challenge assumptions.
The 24-hour rule—giving claims time before reacting or sharing prevents emotional manipulation.
Living with uncertainty—perfect information is impossible, but reasonable decisions can still be made with incomplete data. The American Psychological Association documents how unfiltered media exposure contributes to stress and decision fatigue.
Individual and Institutional Responsibility
Cynics argue that personal verification is futile against industrial-scale disinformation. They're half-right—individuals can't solve this alone. But individual action still creates collective defenses when combined with institutional responsibility.
Democracy requires both. Individuals must take responsibility for thoughtful engagement with information, especially when the stakes are high or before sharing widely. Institutions, schools, newsrooms, agencies, and workplaces must treat the risk of misinformation with the same seriousness as cybersecurity.
Communities with strong media literacy programs and diverse information diets tend to be more resistant to manipulation. We need to cultivate a culture where truth-seeking is valued and where we collectively reject the amplification of blatant falsehoods.
The tools exist. The question is whether we'll use them when democracy needs us to.
Democracy requires citizens who can navigate complexity, not retreat from it. Protecting information integrity is now as essential to the survival of democracy as safeguarding elections themselves.
What's Next: Three Immediate Actions
- For individuals: Use fact-checking sites (AllSides, Ground News, NewsGuard), practice the SIFT method, try lateral reading, and adopt the mental hygiene solutions—time-boxing news, the 24-hour rule, and living with uncertainty.
- For institutions: Implement media literacy programs with the same rigor as cybersecurity training.
- For communities: Support local journalism and fact-checking initiatives that serve as shared information infrastructure.
The stakes couldn't be higher. In an age when anyone can manufacture convincing lies, our democracy depends on citizens who choose the harder path of verification over the easier path of confirmation bias.
Edward Saltzberg is the Executive Director of the Security and Sustainability Forum, writes the Stability Brief, and leads a professional education program at George Washington University.
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.