Post-truth

In 2019 I read To Kill the Truth by Sam Bourne, a pseudonym of Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland. It's a thriller about a plot to erase the past. Holocaust survivors die in suspicious circumstances, historians are murdered, archives go up in flames. The bad guy isn't actually spreading lies; he's destroying evidence, so that nothing can be proven at all. I think the author was inspired by current affairs, and loosely by Fahrenheit 451: in that book firemen burned stories, this man burns proof. At the time I wouldn't have known how often it would come back to me. The book wasn't particularly groundbreaking, but the resemblance to the misinformation and disinformation campaigns we've seen since is hard to ignore. One idea from the book stuck with me: if you can't prove the past, the past is not relevant.

I don't think the book actually uses this word, but what it describes is post-truth. Post-truth became Oxford's word of the year in 2016, the year of Brexit and Trump's first election win, and it describes a society where facts carry less weight than emotion and belonging. The word itself feels recent, but researchers who study it trace the condition back many years. What they concluded was that facts didn't suddenly stop mattering in 2016. People didn't stop hearing or listening to facts. They stopped letting facts win.

I keep coming back to how differently news used to reach us. In a very linear way, either via newspapers, or TV bulletins. We, as consumers of the news, were downstream of the same gatekeepers. I have to confess that this system was far from perfect (especially in non-democratic societies). But there was a chain of verification between an event and the consumer, and it gave everyone a shared baseline. You could argue and disagree about what the news meant, because you agreed on what the news was. It came from sources that were considered truthful.

That model is mostly gone. This year's Digital News Report found that social media and video platforms have overtaken news websites and traditional media as the main way people get their news. News arrives in a non-linear way now: in a feed, between posts shared by friends and (way too many) adverts, stripped of everything that tells you where it came from. We all kinda know that this is a problem. In the same report, 62% of people say they worry about what's real online. However, we scroll on anyway, because consuming the news via algorithms is more convenient.

Convenience only explains half of it though. Plenty of people didn't suddenly drift away from the news; they gradually moved on. Trust in mainstream media has been falling for years, and research shows that the more people sense misinformation in traditional outlets, the more they move towards alternative ones. A generation ago, distrusting the paper meant complaining at the paper. There was nowhere else to go. Now the alternative is one tap away: podcasters, YouTubers, Substacks, Facebook Groups, each promising the version the mainstream won't tell you. Some of that distrust was in fact earned. The mainstream has had true failures. But notice what changed in the transaction. The old system asked you to trust a process, with its editors, verification and corrections. The new one asks you to trust a person (and an algorithm).

You don't need a PhD to see what is happening. But when MIT researchers followed true and false news on Twitter, the false stories travelled further and faster, and reached far more people than the true ones. Bots weren't the reason. People were. People share what feels novel and what stirs something, usually fear, disgust or surprise, and falsehoods are simply better at being novel. So the thing that decides what reaches you, and what you half-believe when it shows up in your feed, is not accuracy. It's who shared it, which platform it landed on, and what an algorithm chose to amplify. Truth used to hang on what was said. Now it hangs on who says it, where they say it, and how loudly it gets repeated.

The damage runs deeper than people believing wrong things. A recent study found that when people sense misinformation everywhere, they don't become more careful readers. They switch off entirely, from all news, including the accurate kind. Which brings me back to the book. Bourne's bad guy goes to enormous lengths to burn every archive. In real life you actually don't need to use fire to achieve this. Convince people that everything might be fake, and the real facts do not matter anymore. A society that believes nothing is just as easy to steer as one that believes the wrong things.

I've changed the question I ask when reading news through social media. Not just "is this true?" but "who is telling me this, and why did it reach me now?" That helps, but it defends one reader at a time. The wider defence is people: teachers, librarians, historians, journalists, the fact-checkers quietly doing unglamorous work. And that work still works. For example, community notes on X measurably slow the spread of misleading posts. It's telling that these are exactly the people the bad guy in the book goes after first. Facts don't defend themselves. Someone has to keep them, and someone has to keep repeating them. The least we can do is keep backing the people who do.

Bigger questions should be asked of the (private) companies that built this world. The platforms' algorithms decide how far misinformation travels, and they've already shown they can slow it down when they choose to. That should be a core obligation. Also, AI companies actually sit one step higher, making synthetic images and video so cheap that anyone can flood a feed with convincing fakes. If your product feeds the post-truth world, you should also tackle the side effects.

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