The Truth about Post-Truth

Rembrandt’s Night Watch mesmerizes the viewer: the painter’s play with light and shadow pulls your gaze into the two frontmen in the centre of the vast canvas. As the US elections next Tuesday will mark the tenth anniversary of the alleged ‘post-truth era’, we are all mesmerized by political untruths, spurring their virality.

Yet these untruths constitute the exceptions – hence the attention they attract – that prove the rule: truth still matters. We need to zoom out to appreciate the bigger picture, otherwise we allow these untruths to become our reality and to undermine our trust in democracy – and then the modern propagandists will have won.

In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries famously declared ‘post-truth’ Word of the Year, after voters had supposedly been duped into voting for Brexit and Trump. International media gleefully observed that, in the hours after the Brexit result had been announced, Google searches for ‘what happens if we leave the EU?’ had spiked by 250 percent, followed by ‘what is the EU?’ Yet in the month preceding the referendum, only about 261 Britons a day had searched for ‘what is the EU?’, so even a tripling would amount to fewer than 1,000 people – 0.001 percent of the population. And there is no evidence that any of these searches were conducted by remorseful Leave voters.

To understand the 2016 US elections, we all directed our eyes at social media. Yet 98% of Russian-influenced tweets were viewed by only 10% of Twitter users – 70% seen only by 1% of users. Dubious sources constituted only 6.7% of political weblinks on Twitter. Headlines decried that 126 million Americans had been exposed to Facebook content produced by Russia’s Internet Research Agency trolls before the election, but this is estimated to have been only 0.004% of the Facebook content Americans viewed.

Harvard researchers concluded that 2016 disinformation did not primarily come from the ‘usual suspects’ of Russian bots, fake news entrepreneurs, Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, or echo chambers, but from a domestic niche network of conservative commentators on the (deregulated) traditional media of radio and television – while most of the media system had remained loyal to journalistic norms of objectivity and fact-checking.

What about the next years? In the 2016-2019 period, less than 0.5% of YouTube videos watched were far-right or far-left in origin, and less than 1% of Americans consumed 85% of the media content that was critical of vaccines. Headline news announced an estimated 70% increase in traffic to dubious websites compared to 47% to trusted websites in the US between 2019 and 2020. But in absolute numbers this picture looks very different: only 30 million extra visits to dubious sites compared to two billion extra visits to trusted sites. For the 2017-2021 period, average traffic to dubious websites constituted only 0.1-4.4% of the total online traffic across the US, UK, Germany, and France.

Initial research also made a wave with the finding that misinformation spreads six times faster than the truth, but it had only looked at ‘contested issues’ while most truthful news is uncontested – and even more viral (think celebrity weddings and pro sports). Follow-up research found that, during the Covid pandemic, scientific facts and evidence were retweeted more than misinformation. Overall, misinformation constituted only 0.15% of Americans’ media consumption.

Of course, in both the Brexit referendum and US elections, politicians bent the truth in their campaign promises – but what else is new?

Misinformation can be compounded by misrepresentation. Our spotlight focus on the untruthful fits within our general media attention for the abnormal – the sensational and scandalous. The suffering in Gaza and Ukraine is horrendous and should stop, but years of sustained media attention for these epicentres also means there has been relative peace and prosperity in much of the rest of the world. Trump is often compared to Wilhelm II, but while we usually associate the bombastic German Kaiser with the First World War, he initially reigned over Imperial Germany in relative peace for twenty-six years, at a time of militaristic imperial rivalry between the Great Powers. Both geographically and historically, we zoom in on the crises, losing sight of the bigger picture.

Disinformation is a threat to democracy that we must address through media literacy and regulation, fact-checking, and – most importantly – tackling its underlying sociopolitical causes. But by exaggerating disinformation’s volume and impact we create a society in which we do not trust anything or anyone anymore – and then the propagandists will have already won. Let us step back from the canvas together and see not just the highlighted spots of untruth, but the much bigger picture of truth.