Last week, Craig and I reviewed the year in digital deception. Our outlook was pretty bleak. Enabled by a favorable political environment and supercharged by the race to AI supremacy, Big Tech has put off or rolled back measures to protect online information quality.
This week, we turned to 53 experts — folks from around the world who know about fact-checking, influence operations, information science, media literacy, political science, public health, tech policy, and more — to see how they rated this year’s key figures and notable moments in digital deception. We also asked them for their top reads of 2025 and one thing that makes them hopeful for 2026.
Here’s what they said.
Elon Musk caused the most harm
Asked to pick the CEO who had the most detrimental effect on online information quality this year, 23 out of 53 opted for Elon Musk, whom we had nominated for his attacks on Wikipedia and reckless deployment of Grok.
Meta CEO and fact-checking terminator Mark Zuckerberg came second with 11 votes. OpenAI’s Sam Altman got 9, for choosing to allow impersonation of public figures on ChatGPT and then making that the main selling point of a social media app.
A quarter of experts declined to pick among the three options we provided or nominated an additional candidate. (Google’s Sundar Pichai got two write-in votes.)
As is appropriate when you ask a loaded question to a group of experts, we got some pushback on our framing. Felix M. Simon said, “I struggle with the premise of the question as it focuses only on one set of actors (excluding, for example, politicians) and also assumes that a degradation of quality is a given.”
Some problems are bigger than others
We asked our expert group to rate their level of concern about five socio-technical challenges.
The top concerns were AI-enabled impersonation and political elites’ indifference to factual accuracy, with a net +42 difference between the group of respondents that called the phenomena “very concerning” or “concerning,” and the group that said they were either “somewhat concerning” or “not concerning” at all.
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