Anti-Trumpers Are So Worried About Misinformation They’re Spreading It Themselves
In the four days since President Donald Trump was sworn in to his second term, he’s signed dozens of executive actions targeting birthright citizenship, the TikTok ban, and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in government. It’s a tidal wave of information — one online communities have been struggling to digest, react, and stand up against at the same time. The answer so far has been an odd mix of avoiding doom scrolling and periodically checking in to rail against injustice, but the myriad reactions have delivered the same result: misinformation. And it’s not from the groups people might expect.
The resurrection of the Trump administration has been heavily covered across social media platforms, dominating timelines on X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. But the sheer volume of news — and the popularity of aggregation accounts that summarize summaries of primary sources — means some of the biggest headlines from popular accounts (i.e not reputable and/or fact checked news sources) are either mistaken or blatantly wrong. Add that to the general anger at Trump’s clear goal of erasing any trace of the civil rights movement, and online spaces are filled with both frustration from left wing users and celebratory antagonization from Trump supporters. People are mad and upset and furious — but a lot of the things they’re railing against simply aren’t true. In fact, many liberal accounts are so worried about misinformation under Trump’s presidency that they’re inadvertently spreading it themselves.
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One perfect example was a tweet from popular aggregate account PopCrave. The profile has 1.9 million followers on X (formerly Twitter) and posts small summaries of everything from entertainment and culture to executive-level politics. On Jan 22. Pop Crave posted that Trump revoked “the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1965” which “prohibited discrimination in hiring and employment based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” It was retweeted 52,000 times, had over 78 million views, with people railing at Trump’s clear disregard for civil rights progress and discrimination laws. But that’s not what Trump did. Trump revoked Executive Order 11246, which was put into place by President Lyndon B Johnson and prevented federal contractors from discriminating against employees by race. It’s still bad — but not at all what PopCrave said. Not only is the Equal Employment Opportunity Act a federal level civil rights law, but it was actually passed in 1972. A fact checking Community Note is currently up on the PopCrave tweet, but the information spread for almost nine hours before it was corrected by users — and PopCrave itself still hasn’t issued a correction. (PopCrave did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment.)
Dr. Jess Maddox, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama and digital culture expert, tells Rolling Stone she’s not surprised that misinformation is coming from liberal accounts, mostly because
“We as a culture have failed at understanding how false information spreads,” Maddox says. “People who are spreading misinformation believe what they’re spreading. But this is not a partisan issue. As we’ve seen over the past couple days online, progressive leftists are just as susceptible to this as the people they chastise on the right.” So in the case of Trump’s executive orders and PopCrave, people share it because they hear the President revoked the Equal Employment Opportunity Act and think, “likely thing for him to do.”
There’s also a clear sense of disillusionment following the all-day coverage of Trump’s courting session of American billionaires, especially around the return of TikTok. The app was only dark for about 14 hours before it returned with a promise from Trump to give the company a 75 day extension to find an American buyer for 50 percent of the company. “We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive,” TikTok said at its return. But TikTok users quickly began spreading rumors that the app returned because an American company had already bought it. And as the news came right on the heels of Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Meta would be removing fact-checking — which they saw as him essentially fully bowing to Trump’s rule — people blamed Meta.
Thousands of posts and comments claimed that the TikTok ban wasn’t a ban at all, but an IT update to allow Meta to merge its data with TikTok. After Meta announced it was releasing its own version of an editing app, similar to ByteDance’s CapCut, people claimed it was the app under a new name. Some said that Meta was already working with TikTok to shadow ban or straight-up suppress content about the election, free speech or abortion rights, and a hack to fix it was to block Meta properties on TikTok. There’s no evidence that any of these words have been banned or suppressed on the app. In fact, the one instance where the word “democrat” and “republicans” were unable to be searched on Instagram, which people claimed was post-election suppression, was quickly resolved by Meta.
Others said TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew had removed his title of CEO from his TikTok page because it was Zuckerberg’s now, even though Shou’s description has remained the same since 2020. But as creator Hank Green helpfully posted in a debunking video, that’s simply not how company purchases work, especially considering any merger of this size would require significant regulatory input from the U.S. government — something Meta is already facing in an active suit from the Federal Trade Commission.
Very few people are probably comforted by the adage that surviving Trump’s administration — and the legal battles for human rights that it brings — will be a marathon and not a sprint. And what’s clear is that many of these viral — and incorrect — snippets of news are coming from a place of people wanting to be informed, to not let decisions from the Trump administration go unnoticed. But spreading misinformation about what’s actually becoming law in the U.S. doesn’t help everyday citizens understand what’s going on; it just muddies the water. Maddox tells Rolling Stone that she understands people might have done so much doom-scrolling that they feel too emotionally drained or triggered to dive deep into the specifics of Trump’s proclamations. But she notes that while processing those emotions, people should still make sure to to verify the info they’re sharing.
“This is a moment that requires a lot of nuance and a lot of care. We shouldn’t look away from horrors and atrocities. We need to witness them, to act and resist and protest, but at the same time, we also do have to take care of ourselves,” Maddox says. “It’s important to either engage or don’t engage, but be careful of engaging halfway, because when you’re consuming just snippets, it contributes to misinformation.”
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