The Brutal Post-Truth Reality of the Internet Age

Bo Kuhn

bk135717@ohio.edu

 

In 2016, the Oxford Dictionary made "post-truth" their word of the year. They define it as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief." This word, I believe, is defining of that catalytic year, and propels us further into an age where truth means whatever you want it to mean.

2016 was the year where the United Kingdom shocked the world and voted to leave the European Union in June, and just a few short months later, the United States took their turn at shocking the world and elected Donald Trump as president. Brexit, in particular, was seen as a done deal by the odd-calculating professionals, even up until the days before the vote.

So, what do these two events have to do with post-truth? Well, relative to their dates this Oxford graph shows that their usage peaked, and then regressed before rising massively as the election approached. 

Picture source: Oxford Dictionary

In fact, around the time of the election, publications like the Economist began to use the phrase as a descriptor for the new age we were entering, and said: "there's no going back". Though experts disagree on what exactly is the cause of the embrace of "post-truth politics", I believe it has to do with the rise of the internet, and the ease of access to comfortable information. 

Comfortable information, as it sounds, is simply any information, true or false, that does not challenge one's preconceived notions of the world or information that oppositely reinforces those preconceived notions. With the ability to rapidly share vast quantities of information to one's friends and family via platforms like Facebook without much in the way of fact-checking (a feature that was added in 2016), its no wonder people would start swaying toward inaccurate beliefs that are more comfortable to them. 

In fact, the preference for early information is already a well-documented form of cognitive bias. I think that this combined with the aforementioned ability to spread misinformation has lead to the rise of things like QAnon, a conspiracy theory that alleges that Donald Trump is a messianic figure who is battling a deep state cabal of satanist pedophiles who run a global sex-trafficking ring, which is based largely on messages posted to infamous internet message board 4chan. 

QAnon has become so popular in fact, that it currently sits equal with (and has gone higher than) the phrase "climate change" on google trends.

Picture screenshot: Google Trends

 

Though Google Trends is not exactly the same as a poll with great methodology, I think it is somewhat pertinent how popular the QAnon conspiracy has become. In the age of the internet, any and all information is just a click away, but with abundance comes lethargy, and nothing online is more abundant than information.