It was just a rumor on Facebook. Then a militia showed up. | Technology News

Nightly news broadcasts played on living room televisions. Copies of local newspapers lined doorsteps on Sunday mornings. The town even had two media outlets dedicated to rodeo and horse-roping news.

But that version of Oakdale is a thing of the past.

First, the nearby newspapers shrank, and hundreds of local reporters in the region became handfuls. Then came the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, and the pandemic; suddenly, cable networks long deemed trustworthy were peddlers of fake news, on the right and the left.

By the 2024 election, when its county, Stanislaus, was among the 10 in California that President Donald Trump flipped red, it wasn’t just trust in traditional media that had vanished from Oakdale — it was the media itself.

Now, in place of longtime TV pundits and radio hosts, residents turn to a new sphere of podcasters and online influencers to get their political news. Facebook groups for local events run by residents have replaced the role of local newspapers.

Of the 80 Oakdale residents whom The New York Times spoke to for this article, not one subscribed to a regional news site, the Times, The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post.

Oakdale is not alone: Between news deserts expanding in rural areas and a growing distrust of national outlets, the town’s shift toward new sources of information is becoming commonplace in small communities across the country.

But seeking truth in a postjournalism world of Facebook groups and online influencers has left some Oakdale residents feeling less informed than before. And efforts to manage misinformation that culminated in an armed militia storming the town in 2020 have changed the very nature of the community.

The Feel of Another World

Tucked between mountain ranges and rivers in the heart of California’s Central Valley, Oakdale is only 100 miles east of the San Francisco Bay Area, but it has the feel of another world.

It’s a place where the highways are dotted with fruit stands and where neighbors leave baked goods on one another’s porches, with a large community of Latino immigrants and a proud cowboy history, memorialized in two separate museums. During the pandemic, the town became especially tight-knit.

As local news outlets shrank throughout the Central Valley in the 2010s, Facebook groups dedicated to local events started popping up in their place. And for years, they were harmless. But that changed in 2020.

With residents stuck at home during the pandemic, the groups thrived. But as new members joined by the thousands, conspiracy theories and political debates overtook posts about school board meetings and local elections.

Then, the militia incident happened.

Julie Logan, an in-home health care worker in Oakdale, can still remember the scene: It was a weekend morning in June, and the downtown farmers market had been replaced by a scene resembling a military operation.

Gunmen patrolled the sidewalks dressed head to toe in brown camouflage; store windows were boarded up; some of the men perched from the rooftops in tactical gear, brandishing rifles.

The militia was prepared to defend against an imminent threat: Black Lives Matter protesters, they believed, were plotting to invade the town and would be arriving on buses from the Bay Area at any moment.

But the protesters never came.

The men were drawn to Oakdale by a false rumor spread in a Facebook group called All Things Oakdale, which over the years had become the town’s primary forum for local news. Started in 2015 by Logan, the group had amassed more than 17,000 members by 2020.

“That was the moment we knew something had to change,” she said.

The militia was hired by the owner of a downtown bar called the H-B Saloon, police said. The scene confused even local authorities, and Jeff Dirkse, the sheriff of Stanislaus County, took to Facebook to decry “rumors that are running rampant on social media,” but assured residents there was no threat of an attack.

Logan made the Facebook group private and banned political discussions altogether.

But the new focus on moderation had an unintended effect: Frustrated residents whose comments were removed began to create their own groups in protest, with names such as Oakdale Incident Feed First Amendment Approved and Oakdale Incident Feed UNFILTERED.

Toni Ahrens, a wood-carving artist, started Oakdale Incident Feed DOUBLE UNFILTERED after “experiencing the filtering first hand,” when a moderator removed a political comment of hers.

But Ahrens acknowledged that certain administrators have prioritized the kinds of misinformation and political discussions that caused them to be banned in the first place. And, more often than not, these residents lean conservative.

Among the largest of these Facebook groups is Stanislaus News, which has 75,000 members and has become the go-to source of information for crime in the area.

The group was founded by Mark Davis, a former bail bonds salesperson in the nearby city of Modesto who was banned from a different group dedicated to local news in 2019.

The group has also become a repository for Davis’ personal musings about Trump and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, to the frustration of many residents who just want to read about local happenings.

The group is aligned with the Modesto Police Department, which uses it to make daily posts of its own.

Some residents say Davis’ rules have hurt their efforts to spread important news, as in December, when surveillance footage posted to the group of a fatal shooting at a convenience store appeared to contradict the sheriff’s report of how the altercation began. Members of the group began to post new details about the case — until Davis stepped in to ban them.

Working alongside Fred Smith at his gun store is Jimmy Freeman, 50, who is known around the shop as a newshound. But whatever trust Freeman had in the mainstream media disappeared while watching the last presidential debate between Trump and then-President Joe Biden.

Watching Biden struggle to string together complete sentences, he couldn’t help thinking that the press corps in Washington that was supposed to keep the country informed had let him down.

“It felt like a failure,” Freeman said. “How could the media not tell us what we were seeing?”

His solution to what he saw as media bias was a website called Ground News, which aggregates reports from different news outlets and gives them each a bias score on the spectrum of left, center and right, along with a “factuality” rating.

“You grab both sides, bring them toward the middle, and that’s usually where the truth is,” Freeman said.

Some Old News Diets Remain

Liberal residents in Oakdale say their news diets haven’t changed as much as those of their conservative counterparts. Harvey Melgoza, 67, still listens to MSNBC on the radio while working at his shoe-repair store downtown. And he will sometimes read The Oakdale Leader.

Since the start of the pandemic, he has watched some of his neighbors embrace conspiracy theories, or grow suddenly fearful of Mexican immigrants coming across the border.

MSNBC “might sometimes have a bias,” he said, “but at least it gives me a good sense of what’s happening in the world.”

On April 5, dozens of Oakdale residents prepared to protest Trump and Musk in Modesto.

Flyers with details of the event were being deleted from Facebook groups, so they turned to email threads to share information instead.

Marjorie Sturdy, a therapist in Oakdale and the leader of the town’s progressive club, drove to the protest that day with a pit of anxiety in her stomach, remembering the militia five years ago.

Then came some relief: Modesto police assured her, that it was monitoring Facebook for dangerous threats. The rally drew hundreds and went on as planned.

“It gave me some optimism,” Sturdy said, “that things could change.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.