Sanfilippo is an assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and book series editor for Cambridge Studies on Governing Knowledge Commons. She is a public voices fellow of The OpEd Project.
Deepfakes of celebrities and misinformation about public figures might not be new in 2024, but they are more common and many people seem to grow ever more resigned that they are inevitable.
The problems posed by false online content extend far beyond public figures, impacting everyone, including youth.
New York Mayor Eric Adams in a recent press conference emphasized that many depend on platforms to fix these problems, but that parents, voters and policymakers need to take action. “These companies are well aware that negative, frightening and outrageous content generates continued engagement and greater revenue,” Adams said.
Recent efforts by Taylor Swift’s fans, coordinated via #ProtectTaylorSwift, to take down, bury, and correct fake and obscene content about her are a welcome and hopeful story about the ability to do something about false and problematic content online.
Still, deepfakes (videos, photos and audio manipulated by artificial intelligence to make something look or sound real) and misinformation have drastically changed social media over the past decade, highlighting the challenges of content moderation and serious implications for consumers, politics and public health.
At the same time, generative AI — with ChatGPT at the forefront — changes the scale of these problems and even challenges digital literacy skills recommended to scrutinize online content, as well as radically reshaping content on social media.
The transition from Twitter to X — which has 1.3 billion users — and the rise of TikTok — with 232 million downloads in 2023 — highlight how social media experiences have evolved as a result.
From colleagues at conferences discussing why they’ve left LinkedIn and students asking if they really need to use it, people recognize the decrease in quality of content on that platform (and others) due to bots, AI and the incentives to produce more content.
LinkedIn has established itself as key to career development, yet some say it is not preserving expectations of trustworthiness and legitimacy associated with professional networks or protecting contributors.
In some ways, the reverse is true: User data is being used to train LinkedIn Learning’s AI coaching with an expert lens that is already being monetized as a “professional development” opportunity for paid LinkedIn Premium users.
Regulation of AI is needed as well as enhanced consumer protection around technology. Users cannot meaningfully consent to use platforms and their ever changing terms of services without transparency about what will happen with an individual’s engagement data and content.
Not everything can be solved by users. Market-driven regulation is failing us.
There needs to be meaningful alternatives and the ability to opt out. It can be as simple as individuals reporting content for moderation. For example, when multiple people flag content for review, it is more likely to get to a human moderator, who research shows is key to effective content moderation, including removal and appropriate labeling.
Collective action is also needed. Communities can address problems of false information by working together to report concerns and collaboratively engineer recommendation systems via engagement to deprioritize false and damaging content.
Professionals must also build trust with the communities they serve, so that they can promote reliable sources and develop digital literacy around sources of misinformation and the ways AI promotes and generates it. Policymakers must also regulate social media more carefully.
Truth matters to an informed electorate in order to preserve safety of online spaces for children and professional networks, and to maintain mental health. We cannot leave it up to the companies who caused the problem to fix it.
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.