Steven Brill’s new book, The Death of Truth, offers a sobering account of how America’s media and political systems went wrong. His essential thesis can be condensed as follows: Things were basically fine, but then the social-media platforms came along and ruined everything. The phenomena he describes are urgent and serious, but I am not so sure that he has correctly diagnosed the underlying problem.
In Brill’s telling, there was a time when people respected institutional norms and the rule of law. Politicians were held in check by watchful news organizations. The media industry held itself to a high standard of objective reporting, imparting relevant facts to an attentive citizenry which, in turn, held public officials to account.
But then social-media platforms inserted themselves into the agora. Advances in digital-advertising technology let Google, Facebook, and Twitter (now X) bankrupt the news media by intercepting practically all the advertising revenues that funded journalism. Advances in algorithmic curation sent people down partisan rabbit holes, undermining the shared objective truths that are the bedrock of an accountable civil society. And [End Page 160] section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (1996) meant the platforms were not held to the same standard of truthfulness and accuracy as the traditional media they were displacing.
We are living amidst the results now: Antivaxxers revel in social-media fame by spreading lies and inuendo about covid-19 czar Anthony Fauci. Grassroots conservatives have become convinced of the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, so much so that hundreds of them participated in an assault on the seat of government, driven into a frenzy by the anger and mis- and disinformation they ingest on social media. And with advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI), the situation is poised to get much worse. We will soon be awash in synthetic media, wherein you cannot trust the words you read or hear or the people you see, because they could be artificially generated for power and profit. Truth itself is dying; the big-tech platforms are killing it.
Brill is an old-school journalist—a deep believer in the critical role played by the fourth estate, and in the sacred duty of journalists to prize objective facts over partisan politics. He is also a cofounder of the well-respected media-monitoring service NewsGuard. Through his admirable work with that organization, he has devoted himself for the past six years to combating fake news and political propaganda. He can tell that something has gone askew in our political system, and this book articulates his commitment to fixing it.
I am a professor of strategic political communication. I study how campaigns, organizations, and political elites make use of digital technologies to build and exert power. Prior to joining academia, I worked in social-movement politics. I suppose I am less attached than Brill to the ideal of just-the-facts objective journalism as a lynchpin of civil society. I say this not to defend Facebook or Google—Brill is clearly right that these companies have been vectors for and accelerants of strategic disinformation campaigns—but to flag that the pre–social-media decades were not nearly as stable as he suggests. The social-media platforms are not the primary villains of the tale we are living through. They are mere members of an ensemble cast, engaged in a grand misadventure, accepting not nearly enough responsibility for the harms they engender in pursuit of profit.
There is an especially revealing passage in chapter 11 (“Down the Rabbit Hole”) of Brill’s book. The chapter explores what drove some of the January 6th rioters to attack the Capitol. Brill writes:
Compare 2020 with the last contested presidential election, the Bush v. Gore fight, which happened in a pre–social-media, pre–hyper-polarization age. People on both sides protested, but they did not try to block the process. Neither side was lured into believing that sinister forces were arrayed against them—that their opponents were evil and had stolen the election. The 2000 battle was bitterly fought—in the courts. And then it was over. [End Page 161]
He is certainly right that no Gore supporters…