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Journalist and author Steven Brill (whose company, NewsGuard, aims to identify and rate the credibility of online news and information sources) has written “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“ (Knopf).

It explores how misinformation and conspiracy theories, spread via social media, destroy the common thread of facts and shared truths that holds a democracy together.

Read an excerpt below, and don’t miss Ted Koppel’s interview with Steven Brill on “CBS Sunday Morning” September 8!

“The Death of Truth” by Steven Brill

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This is a book about how facts—truths—have lost their power to hold us together as a community, as a country, and globally. The diminishing belief in truths, in favor of “alternative facts” or even conspiracy theories, has massively eroded trust around the world—in institutions, in political leaders, in scientists, in doctors and other professional experts (even that word is suspect), and in our own ability to solve our communities’ problems. As a result, civil society is unraveling.

If different people believe in different versions of the truth, there is no real truth shared by all. Truth shrivels away and dies—and what binds us together shrivels away, too. Mistruths, invented “reality,” manipulation, distortion, and paranoia replace truth. Chaos replaces reason and civility. Power comes not through ideas debated civilly in democratic processes but to those who generate the most distrust for their own purposes.

This crisis is not inevitable or irreversible. There are a variety of specific, practical steps … that we can take to reverse this devastating erosion of trust. But first we have to confront its magnitude and understand how it happened.

There has always been an instinct on the part of some people not to want to face facts or at least to try to paper them over. I remember parents’ visiting day thirty years ago, when my daughter’s grade school teacher answered “I disagree” when a student said that six times seven was forty-one. Yet even at this progressive school most parents rolled their eyes. We all seemed to agree that it’s a fact, not an opinion, that six times seven is not forty-one, just as we believed that the 1969 moon landing was not faked.

Those who preferred alternative facts or to demote facts to matters of opinion were a relative few, and the issues they focused on were not nearly as abundant. That has changed. Newer myths, invented “facts,” and conspiracy theories have much greater followings, boosted, as we will see, by the amazing reach and power that social media and other technology now have to target and convince susceptible believers. We thought these were communications innovations that would bring the world together. Instead, we have seen them split us apart into an infinite 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 what were once trusted sources of information—is unprecedented.

There is nothing new about people being whipped into a frenzy and turned against each other with misinformation or disinformation. Cleopatra was smeared by her and Mark Antony’s enemies two thousand years ago. There were the religious wars of the Crusades in the eleventh century, the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, and, of course, the twentieth century horrors of Hitler’s propaganda and killing machine in Europe. There were Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China, Stalin’s political repression in the Soviet Union, and the Red Scare and Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt in the United States. More recently, American politicians have frequently misled their constituents, notably about progress in the Vietnam War and proof of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And, of course, yellow journalism and religious extremists around the world often pushed people and countries into wars throughout the last two centuries.

But now the power to create that frenzy—the power to communicate—has gone from the slingshot age to the nuclear age.

       
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 by permission of Knopf, an imprint of the 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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