Two days after Elon Musk said he would lift Twitter’s permanent ban on Donald Trump if his acquisition goes through, more than 100 organizations called on social media companies to combat disinformation during the 2022 midterm elections.
In a letter sent to the CEOs of the biggest social media companies on Thursday, the leaders of civil rights and democracy reform groups requested the platforms take a series of steps, including “introducing friction to reduce the spread and amplification of disinformation, consistent enforcement of robust civic integrity policies; and greater transparency into business models that allow disinformation to spread.”
The letter – whose signatories include Common Cause, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Campaign Legal Center, the League of Women Voters and the NAACP – praised the companies for instituting plans to combat disinformation while demanding the platforms do more and do it consistently.
Meanwhile, Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet intends to offer a bill Thursday to establish a federal commission to regulate tech companies. According to The Washington Post, the bill would give the government authority to review platforms’ algorithms and to create rules governing content moderation.
“We need an agency with expertise to have a thoughtful approach here,” Bennet told the Post.
But for now, the companies receiving the letter (Facebook, Google, TikTok, Snap, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram) make their own rules. And in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection fueled by unfounded claims that Joe Biden stole the presidential election from Donald Trump, the groups behind the letter fear further damage to democratic institutions.
“Disinformation related to the 2020 election has not gone away but has only continued to proliferate. In fact, according to recent polls, more than 40 percent of Americans still do not believe President Biden legitimately won the 2020 presidential election. Further, fewer Americans have confidence in elections today than they did in the immediate aftermath of the January 6th insurrection,” they wrote.
The letter lays out eight steps the companies can take to stop the spread of disinformation:
- Limit the opportunities for users to interact with election disinformation, going beyond the warning labels that have been introduced.
- Devote more resources to blocking disinformation that targets people who do not speak English.
- Consistently enforce “civic integrity policies” during election and non-election years.
- Apply those policies to live content.
- Prioritize efforts to stop the spread of unfounded voter fraud claims, known as the “Big Lie.”
- Increase fact-checking of election content, including political advertisements and statements from public officials.
- Allow outside researchers and watchdogs access to social media data.
- Increase transparency of internal policies, political ads and algorithms.
“The last presidential election, and the lies that continued to flourish in its wake on social media, demonstrated the dire threat that election disinformation poses to our democracy,” said Yosef Getachew, director of the media and democracy program for Common Cause. “Social media companies must learn from what was unleashed on their platforms in 2020 and helped foster the lies that led a violent, racist mob to storm the Capitol on January 6th. The companies must take concrete steps to prepare their platforms for the coming onslaught of disinformation in the midterm elections. These social media giants must implement meaningful reforms to prevent and reduce the spread of election disinformation while safeguarding our democracy and protecting public safety.”
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.