Post-truth politics
Based on Wikipedia: Post-truth politics
When Truth Became Exhausting
In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries noticed something strange. The phrase "post-truth" had exploded in usage—appearing twenty times more often than the previous year. They named it their word of the year, almost always paired with another word: politics.
But here's what makes the concept genuinely unsettling. Post-truth doesn't mean that people have stopped caring whether things are true. It means something more complicated and, in some ways, more troubling.
It means we're anxious about truth. Obsessed with it, even. We just can't agree on what counts anymore.
The Problem Isn't Lying—Lying Is Ancient
Politicians have always lied. This is not news. The pamphlet wars of the 1600s, which arose alongside the printing press and growing literacy, were absolutely vicious. Slanderous, vitriolic documents were printed cheaply and spread widely. The dissent they fomented helped spark the English Civil War and, over a century later, the American Revolution.
In 1957, the British scientist Kathleen Lonsdale observed that "for many people truthfulness in politics has now become a mockery." She noted the deep cynicism of anyone who listened to the radio in mixed company. This was decades before the internet existed.
So what's different now?
The difference is systemic. It's not that politicians lie more—though some certainly do—it's that the entire information ecosystem has transformed. The tools we once used to sort true from false have broken down, and we haven't replaced them with anything that works.
The Gatekeepers Left the Building
For most of the twentieth century, a relatively small number of institutions decided what counted as news. Major newspapers, network television broadcasts, wire services like the Associated Press and Reuters—these organizations employed journalists who, whatever their flaws, operated under professional norms about verification and accuracy.
You might not have trusted them completely. But they provided a shared reference point. When Walter Cronkite ended his evening broadcast with "And that's the way it is," most Americans accepted that it more or less was.
That consensus infrastructure has collapsed.
Today, anyone with a phone can create content that looks like news. The visual grammar of journalism—the serious tone, the graphics, the confident assertions—can be perfectly mimicked by someone operating from a basement with an agenda and no accountability whatsoever. The technical barriers that once separated professional media from amateur commentary have vanished.
This isn't entirely bad, of course. Those gatekeepers sometimes got things spectacularly wrong. They sometimes colluded with power. They often ignored stories that mattered to marginalized communities. The democratization of information has genuine value.
But it has also created a problem with no obvious solution: when everyone can broadcast, no one has special authority to adjudicate competing claims.
The Trust Crisis Runs Deeper Than You Think
Here's a fact that should make you uncomfortable: you cannot personally verify almost anything you believe about the world.
You have never been to most of the places you think exist. You have not met most of the people you believe are real. You have not witnessed most of the events you consider historical fact. Your entire understanding of the world beyond your immediate sensory experience—which is nearly all of it—depends on trusting other people to tell you the truth.
This has always been true. But in the past, trust was easier. You trusted the newspaper because your parents trusted it, because your neighbors trusted it, because it had been around for a hundred years and seemed mostly reliable. You trusted the evening news because the anchor had been in your living room every night for two decades. Trust was inherited, automatic, unreflective.
Now trust has become a conscious choice, which means it has become a site of conflict.
And this is where it gets politically dangerous. Distrust has become polarized. People who identify with one political party don't just disagree with people from the other party—they actively distrust them. They assume bad faith. They believe the other side is not merely wrong but deliberately deceptive.
When you can't agree on basic facts, you can't have the kinds of arguments that democracy requires. You're not debating what to do about climate change; you're debating whether climate change exists. You're not debating immigration policy; you're debating whether the statistics are fabricated. Every policy discussion becomes a meta-discussion about whose sources are legitimate.
The Machinery of Manipulation
There's another layer to this, and it's uncomfortable because it implicates people who consider themselves professionals.
Modern political communication is a sophisticated industry. It employs specialists in public relations, marketing, data analytics, and cognitive science. These people are not amateurs spreading misinformation for ideological reasons. They are professionals whose job is to influence public perception.
The political scientist Colin Crouch described this phenomenon in his 2004 book Post-democracy. He argued that while elections still exist and can change governments, public debate has become "a tightly controlled spectacle, managed by rival teams of professionals expert in the techniques of persuasion."
These techniques work. They exploit documented features of human cognition—our tendency to believe things that feel right, our susceptibility to repetition, our tribal instincts about in-groups and out-groups. The industry exists because it is effective.
This creates a cynical dynamic. Voters suspect they're being manipulated, which makes them distrustful. Their distrust makes them susceptible to alternative sources that claim to tell "the real truth." Those alternative sources are often themselves running influence operations. The cycle continues.
The Algorithm Doesn't Care
Social media platforms are not designed to spread truth. They are designed to maximize engagement.
Unfortunately, outrage is extremely engaging. So is fear. So is content that confirms what you already believe. The algorithms that determine what you see in your feed are optimized to keep you scrolling, and they have discovered—through billions of experiments on real human behavior—that certain emotional triggers work remarkably well.
The result is what researchers call "filter bubbles" and "echo chambers." You are shown content similar to content you've engaged with before. You are connected to people who share your views. The algorithms don't intentionally create epistemic isolation, but they do create it.
Inside your bubble, claims that would seem outrageous to outsiders appear normal. They're repeated by everyone you interact with. Counter-evidence doesn't reach you, or when it does, it's framed by hostile sources that your community has taught you to dismiss.
This fragmentation of the public sphere is historically unprecedented. In the past, even when people disagreed, they were often exposed to the same basic information. The same newspapers, the same broadcasts, the same conversations at the general store. Now it's possible—common, even—to construct an informational diet composed entirely of content that reinforces your existing beliefs.
When Did This Start?
Scholars argue about origins. The Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich may have coined the term "post-truth" in a 1992 essay for The Nation. He was reflecting on how Americans responded to political scandals.
Watergate, he noted, was shameful. It damaged Richard Nixon, drove him from office, and for a moment seemed to vindicate the press and the public's demand for accountability. But then came the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s, where the Reagan administration secretly and illegally sold weapons to Iran and funneled the proceeds to right-wing rebels in Nicaragua. The coverage was gentler. The consequences were lighter.
"We, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world," Tesich wrote.
Others point to the 2003 invasion of Iraq as the real turning point. The Bush administration claimed that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The claims were presented with great confidence. They turned out to be false. The war happened anyway.
The academic Moustafa Bayoumi has argued that this was qualitatively different from previous episodes of government deception. The apparatus of lying, he contended, became institutionalized. It wasn't a few rogue actors exaggerating intelligence—it was an entire bureaucratic structure oriented around producing the desired conclusions.
Still others emphasize the 2016 elections—both the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States. These campaigns featured claims so brazenly disconnected from verifiable reality that they forced journalists and scholars to grapple with something new. Not spin. Not exaggeration. Something more fundamental: a mode of political communication that seemed indifferent to whether statements could be fact-checked at all.
The Emotion Question
Oxford's original definition emphasized that in post-truth circumstances, "appeals to emotion and personal belief" are more influential than "appeals to objective facts."
This framing is controversial among scholars. It can sound dismissive—as if the problem is that stupid people are too emotional to think straight. That's not quite right.
Emotion has always played a role in politics. It should. Political questions are not merely technical puzzles to be solved by experts consulting data. They involve values, identities, and deeply held beliefs about what kind of society we want to live in. Expecting politics to be purely rational is neither realistic nor entirely desirable.
The problem isn't emotion itself. The problem is that when shared facts disappear, emotion and tribal identity are often the only things left. If I can't verify claims about policy outcomes and I don't trust the institutions that could verify them for me, I fall back on other decision-making methods. Does this feel right? Does my community believe it? Do I trust this person?
These aren't stupid questions. They're the questions you ask when the information environment has failed you.
A Global Phenomenon
Post-truth politics is not an American phenomenon, though Americans often assume it is.
By 2018, researchers had documented its ascendance across numerous countries: Australia, Brazil, Ghana, India, Russia, the United Kingdom, and others. The specific manifestations differ. The underlying dynamics—institutional distrust, fragmented media, professional manipulation, algorithmic amplification—appear across borders.
This suggests that post-truth is not primarily about any one leader or any one country's political culture. It is a structural feature of how twenty-first-century information environments interact with democratic politics. The same technologies that enable unprecedented access to information also enable unprecedented access to misinformation. The same platforms that connect us also divide us. The same tools that empower ordinary citizens also empower bad actors.
What Philosophers and Communication Scholars Disagree About
Academic researchers don't agree on what post-truth really is or where it comes from.
Media and communication scholars tend to emphasize technological change. The internet, social media, smartphones, algorithmic curation—these developments have fundamentally altered how information flows through society. Old gatekeeping institutions have weakened. New ones haven't emerged. The result is not that truth has died but that we lack shared mechanisms for establishing it socially.
Philosophers often point to intellectual movements. Some blame postmodernism—the academic tradition that questioned universal truths and emphasized that knowledge is socially constructed. If truth is just a matter of perspective, the argument goes, why should anyone defer to experts or institutions claiming to know what's real?
This diagnosis is contested. Postmodern philosophy was never really about denying that facts exist. It was about examining how power shapes what counts as knowledge, who gets to speak authoritatively, whose perspectives are marginalized. But ideas have unintended consequences. When sophisticated academic arguments about the social construction of knowledge filter through popular culture, they can mutate into something simpler and more destructive: the idea that my truth is as good as your truth.
Scholars in science and technology studies have their own perspective. They study how scientific knowledge is produced and communicated, and they've documented a long-running erosion of scientific authority in public discourse. Disputes about evolution, climate change, vaccine safety, and other topics have become battlegrounds where established scientific consensus faces organized opposition. The techniques pioneered in these battles—doubt creation, cherry-picking data, appeals to alternative experts—have spread into broader political life.
The Promotional Culture
There's one more piece of this puzzle that rarely gets discussed but matters enormously: we live in a culture saturated with promotion.
Advertising is ubiquitous. Marketing techniques have colonized nearly every domain of life. We are encouraged to build "personal brands," to curate our social media presence, to present ourselves strategically. Public relations is a massive industry whose entire purpose is to shape perception rather than inform.
This has consequences for how we understand communication. When most of the messages we encounter are trying to sell us something—a product, a candidate, an identity—we become cynical about all communication. We assume everyone has an angle. We look for the hidden agenda.
This cynicism is rational. Most public communication is promotional. But it also makes sincere truth-telling harder to recognize. When someone actually does communicate in good faith, presenting accurate information without hidden motives, they may not be believed. They look naive. The sophisticated response is to assume manipulation.
Post-truth politics exists partly because the culture of promotion has trained us to distrust everything. That distrust is not irrational given our media environment. But it also makes democracy difficult, because democracy requires that citizens be able to receive accurate information about public affairs and trust it enough to act on it.
What Post-Truth Is Not
It helps to be clear about what post-truth politics is not.
It is not simply lying. Politicians have always lied. What's new is not the presence of lies but the breakdown of shared mechanisms for calling out lies and holding liars accountable.
It is not stupidity. The people susceptible to misinformation are not necessarily less intelligent or less educated. Some research suggests that certain types of misinformation spread most effectively among the highly educated, who are better at constructing sophisticated rationalizations for what they want to believe.
It is not one side's problem. Though partisans on each side are convinced the other side is uniquely guilty of post-truth politics, the structural conditions affect everyone. Filter bubbles exist across the political spectrum. Distrust is bipartisan. The techniques of manipulation are used by campaigns of all stripes.
And it is not necessarily permanent. The pamphlet wars of the 1600s eventually gave way to more stable media institutions. The yellow journalism of the late 1800s eventually gave way to professional journalism norms. It is at least possible that the current crisis is a transitional period—that new norms, new institutions, and new technologies will eventually emerge to restore some shared epistemic foundation.
Whether that happens depends on choices we make now.
Living With Epistemic Anxiety
Perhaps the most important thing to understand about post-truth politics is that it creates a particular emotional condition: anxiety about what we can know and whom we can trust.
This anxiety is exhausting. It takes cognitive effort to evaluate every claim skeptically, to investigate sources, to resist the pull of tribal certainty. Most people don't have the time or energy to do this for every piece of information they encounter. So they take shortcuts. They trust their community. They distrust outsiders. They believe what feels right.
These shortcuts are not character flaws. They are survival mechanisms in an impossible information environment. The problem is not human irrationality but a system that makes rational evaluation of information prohibitively costly.
Understanding this is important because it shifts how we think about solutions. If the problem were simply that people are too stupid or too tribal, education might fix it. But if the problem is structural—if the information environment itself is broken—then individual education is not enough. We need to change the environment.
That might mean reforming social media platforms. It might mean rebuilding trust in journalism. It might mean developing new institutions for certifying claims. It might mean something no one has thought of yet.
What it probably does not mean is expecting individuals to become perfectly rational information-processors in a world designed to exploit their cognitive limitations. That is not a realistic plan. It is a way of blaming victims for their circumstances.
The Stakes
Democracy requires a shared world. Not agreement—disagreement is healthy and necessary—but a shared reality within which disagreement can happen. If we cannot agree on basic facts, we cannot have genuine political arguments. We can only have power struggles, conducted through mutual manipulation, with whoever controls the information environment at the moment gaining temporary advantage.
That is not democracy. That is something else. And we are closer to it than most people realize.
Post-truth politics is not a distant academic concept. It is the daily reality of political life in dozens of countries, including the most powerful democracies on Earth. It shapes elections, policies, and the basic texture of public discourse. It makes it harder to address collective problems—climate change, pandemics, economic inequality—that require coordinated responses based on shared understanding.
Understanding how we got here is the first step toward figuring out where to go next. The pamphlet wars eventually ended. The yellow journalism era eventually ended. This era will eventually end too.
The question is what comes after.