CNN’s Jake Tapper warned on Monday that the country was about to enter an “era of deepfakes and all sorts of disinformation” under President Trump, while discussing the Big Tech presence at his inauguration.
“We‘re about to enter an era of deepfakes, and all sorts of misinformation and the degree to which those five gentlemen play a role or do not play a role, will be pivotal in terms of where the American people are four years from now, in terms of understanding what is true and what is false,” Tapper said before Trump took the oath of office.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla founder Elon Musk, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai were among the tech giants attending the inauguration.
Tapper said those five people “control so much of the information that we receive, so much is in their hands when it comes to ascertaining, monitoring, or refusing to monitor what is real, what is not real.”
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CNN’s Anderson Cooper extended Tapper’s warning to the entire world.
“Not just talking about we, the United States, you’re talking about the world. All the human beings on the planet, they control access to information. They’re the gatekeepers in many ways to information for the entire planet,” he said.
CNN’s Van Jones noted the historical nature of the photos picturing the five tech executives, and pointed out that most of them supported the Democratic Party not long ago.
“Look, that picture is going to be historic. I call it the revenge of the nerds. Don‘t forget, all four of those gentlemen, four years ago, were supporting the Democratic Party,” he said.
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“An untold story here is how the Democrats go from four years ago to having the White House, the Senate, the House and Silicon Valley to now all four are in the hands of Donald Trump,” Jones said, arguing that the Biden administration pushed them away by not introducing cryptocurrency regulations and by pushing the idea that all big business was bad.
“Elon Musk was an Andrew Yang Democrat. But when Joe Biden did his EV summit, he left Elon out. There were so many unforced errors on the part of the Biden Administration,” Jones continued. “Those four are all our folks who got pushed out of our party because we didn‘t have an innovation first approach from the Biden White House and we’re now paying the price. It’s not just that we lost the White House, the House, the Senate. We lost Silicon Valley in the past four years, and you got nobody to blame but us.”
Zuckerberg notably announced the end to Facebook and Instagram’s fact-checking program at the beginning of January and said they would be using a system similar to X’s community notes.
