February 10 arrives with the ceremonial optimism of Safer Internet Day, a day that asks us to believe the web can be domesticated with better habits and brighter posters. It is an earnest invitation to tidy up the digital living room while the house itself is on fire. The trouble is not merely that misinformation exists; it always has. The trouble is that the most powerful figures in the world now model the behavior Safer Internet Day warns against and do so with gusto, applause and reach.
Consider the strange pedagogy of the modern presidency. When a president traffics in falsehoods, repeats them, amplifies them, dresses them in the emotional costume of certainty, the lesson is not subtle. It teaches that truth is optional, that volume can substitute for evidence and that virality is a form of validation. In the age of Donald Trump the internet did not simply host misinformation; it watched misinformation be rewarded. Platforms learned it. Audiences learned it. The lesson metastasized.
We have become fluent in a new dialect, the plausible lie. It arrives wearing the clothes of authenticity, grainy video, an overheated caption, a screenshot ripped from context. Artificially generated images and videos now add another layer of mischief, the digital equivalent of forged fingerprints. The effect is not confusion alone but fatigue. When everything can be faked, skepticism curdles into cynicism and cynicism is a solvent. It dissolves the very idea that verification is worth the effort.
Safer Internet Day asks us to pause and practice good citizenship online, think before you share, protect your data, be kind. These are not wrong. They are simply insufficient. Telling individuals to be careful while leaders behave recklessly is like handing out umbrellas during a hurricane and calling it preparedness. Responsibility flows downhill but example flows faster.
The American political tradition once treated lying as a scandal. The internet age reframed it as content. Lies became sticky because they were entertaining, indignant and algorithmically nourishing. Trump did not invent this ecosystem but he exploited it with an intuitive showman’s sense of timing. He understood that outrage is a renewable resource and that repetition, not accuracy, is what the feed rewards. Each post was less an argument than a spark tossed into dry brush.
The cost is not abstract. Misinformation corrodes institutions by hollowing out shared reality. Democracies require a minimum agreement about what happened yesterday in order to argue about what should happen tomorrow. When leaders muddy yesterday on purpose, tomorrow becomes ungovernable. The internet, once hailed as a democratizing force, becomes a hall of mirrors where power belongs to those loud enough to shatter glass.
There is a temptation to frame this as a technological problem, solvable with better filters and smarter moderation. Technology matters, but it cannot substitute for norms. A society that shrugs at lies from the top will not become discerning at the bottom. The reverse is more plausible: a society that demands honesty from leaders makes honesty contagious. Culture is upstream of code.
Safer Internet Day would be braver if it said this plainly. Safety is not only about passwords and privacy settings; it is about power and example. It is about refusing to normalize deception even when it flatters our side or entertains us. Free journalism has a role here, too, not as a referee tallying false statements like fouls, but as a storyteller insisting that reality still has a narrative spine. Facts alone do not travel far; meaning does.
The uncomfortable truth is that the internet mirrors us. It amplifies our incentives and our indulgences. When a president posts a misleading video, the scandal is not only the video but the applause it receives. The crowd matters. Attention is a currency and we spend it carelessly, then act surprised when inflation follows.
February 10 should not be a day of digital finger-wagging. It should be a day of adult conversation about leadership, accountability, and the price of treating truth as optional. Safety, in the end, is not the absence of risk but the presence of standards. Without them, the screen keeps burning and we keep calling the glow a sunrise.
If this sounds severe, it is because the moment demands severity without hysteria. The internet will not be saved by nostalgia or by pretending we can scroll our way out of responsibility. It will be steadied, imperfectly, by consequences that reach upward and expectations that travel downward. Leaders who lie should lose trust, not gain clicks. Platforms that profit from confusion should feel friction, not praise. And citizens should recover the unfashionable habit of saying no, not sharing, not laughing, not rewarding the performance. That refusal, multiplied, is the quiet infrastructure of a safer internet. It is boring work but boredom can be virtue itself.
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