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By Steven Brill
In 2024, I published a book, “The Death of Truth,” which described what I believed to be a massive failure of people in our country and around the world to agree on basic facts — truths that should unite us even as we debate issues.
My thesis was that multiple toxic forces — such as social media’s greed in encouraging the most polarizing inflammatory content, general cynicism because our political and economic systems are failing so many people, and huckster politicians eager to take advantage of that — have divided people so much that belief in basic facts related even to non-political issues like a measles vaccine has all but vanished. The experts and referees whom we count on to make our world work — doctors, judges, poll workers, journalists, scientists, office holders, the police, teachers — are depending on the issue doubted by one side and instinctively followed by the other. A healthy dose of skepticism, accompanied by an instinctive inclination to trust in the good faith of these people used to be the rule, but is now the exception.
I was reminded of this yesterday when we received this note from one of our Reality Check subscribers after we reported on the massive spread of the conspiracy theory that the shooting at the...
KEY EVENTS The EU has imposed sanctions on Euromore and Pravfond for influence operations targeting European audiences. Pro-Kremlin disinformation recasts Ukraine as a terrorist and NATO as an ag...