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Journalist and author Steven Brill (whose company, NewsGuard, aims to identify and assess the credibility of online news and information sources) wrote: “The Death of Truth: How Social Media and the Internet Gave Charlatans and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World—and What We Can Do” (Button).
It explores how misinformation and conspiracy theories, spread through social media, destroy the common thread of facts and shared truths that hold a democracy together.
Read an excerpt below and Don’t miss Ted Koppel’s interview with Steven Brill on “CBS Sunday Morning” on September 8!
“The Death of Truth” by Steven Brill
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This book shows how facts, truths, have lost their power to unite us as a community, as a country, and globally. The loss of trust in truths, in favor of “alternative facts” or even conspiracy theories, has dramatically eroded trust in institutions, political leaders, scientists, doctors, and other professional experts (even that word is suspect), and in our own ability to solve the problems of our communities. As a result, civil society is collapsing.
If different people believe different versions of the truth, there is no real truth shared by all. The truth shrivels and dies, and what binds us together shrivels as well. Untruths, invented “reality,” manipulation, distortion, and paranoia replace the truth. Chaos replaces reason and civility. Power comes not from ideas debated civilly in democratic processes, but from those who arouse the most suspicion for their own interests.
This crisis is neither inevitable nor irreversible. There are a number of concrete, actionable steps we can take to reverse this devastating erosion of trust. But first we must confront its magnitude and understand how it happened.
There has always been a tendency for some to not want to face reality or at least to try to hide it. I remember a day of visiting parents thirty years ago when my daughter’s teacher responded “I disagree” to a student who had said that six times seven was forty-one. Yet even in that progressive school, most parents rolled their eyes. We all seemed to agree that it was a fact, not an opinion, that six times seven was not forty-one, just as we believed that the 1969 moon landing was not a hoax.
Those who preferred alternative facts or who relegated facts to the status of opinions were relatively few, and the topics on which they focused were far fewer. That has changed. New myths, invented “facts,” and conspiracy theories have a much larger following, fueled, as we shall see, by the astonishing reach and power that social media and other technologies now have to target and convince susceptible believers. We thought these innovations in communication would bring the world together. Instead, we have seen them divide us into an endless collection of warring tribes with infinite fears and grievances.
The decline of truth – the level of distrust in what should be accepted facts, conveyed by once-trusted sources of information – is unprecedented.
There is nothing new in people being whipped into a frenzy and turned against each other by misinformation. Cleopatra was slandered by her enemies and those of Mark Antony two thousand years ago. There were the religious wars of the Crusades in the 11th century, the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in the 17th century, and of course the horrors of Hitler’s propaganda and killing machine in 20th century Europe. There was Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China, Stalin’s political repression in the Soviet Union, Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare and Communist witch hunts in the United States. More recently, American politicians have frequently misled their voters, particularly about the progress of the Vietnam War and the evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And, of course, sensationalist journalism and religious extremists around the world have often driven peoples and countries to war over the past two centuries.
But today, the power to create this frenzy – the power to communicate – has shifted from the age of the slingshot to the nuclear age.
Excerpted from “The Death of Truth: How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World—and What We Can Do” by Steven Brill. Reprinted with permission from Knopf, a subsidiary of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Steven Brill.
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“The Death of Truth” by Steven Brill
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