Post-truth politics, also described as post-factual politics or post-reality politics, is a widely recognized historical period where political culture is marked by public anxiety about what claims can be publicly accepted facts, heightened concern over the honesty of public figures, and public's tendency to accept claims that elicit an emotional response and confirm pre-existing beliefs over professionally accepted evidence. Indeed most research demonstrates an increasing disconnect between public opinion and scholarly consensus, which is thought to exemplify the core of the era.
The term is often used pejoratively to describe a dystopian political discourse in which empirical truth is irrelevant, and is forced to compete with false ideas which are given unjust credibility.
The proposed beginning of this period has been subject to discussion, the term post-truth had been used by authors as early as the 1990s, but modern resurgent usage of the term places the beginning of the period during Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. This is often attributed to the political strategies employed by Trump's campaign advisors during the period, in addition to the incorporation and acceptance of conspiracy theories in mainstream political discourse, which was at the time, unprecedented. Many felt disturbed by the large influence Trump's atypical campaign amassed, which led to the widespread popularity of the term post-truth in the increasingly pessimistic American public.
While related, and sometimes used interchangeably, post-truth politics is a distinct concept from the culture war.
Americans seem to be aware of their biases and tendency towards misinformation when evaluating claims made by political figures, regardless of partisanship, which results in self-identified democrats being more likely to accept lies told by Trump than his supporters. Similarly, self-identified pro-Trump republicans are more likely to deny truths told by Trump than his opponents. Researchers have suggested that this is due to people overcorrecting for their biases in an effort to remain impartial. This effect may result in a positive feedback loop, further increasing distrust and misinformation.
The term broadly refers to the idea that the lay public has become unable to determine what is true and what is false, often due to malicious orchestrators, an idea which has become increasingly entertained by political commentators, as well as psychologists and sociologists. It is regarded as especially being influenced by the arrival of new communication and media technologies. Recognized as a term in the press and various dictionaries, post-truth has also become a pejorative phrase referring to misleading or false claims made by politicians.
Post-truth politics are studied as a media and communication studies phenomenon with particular forms of truth-telling, including intentional rumors, lies, conspiracy theories, and fake news. In the context of media and politics, it often involves the manipulation of information or the spread of misinformation to shape public perceptions and advance political agendas. Deceptive communication, "disinformation, rumor bombs, and fake news have mass communication era antecedents in both war and security (gray propaganda) and commercial communication (advertising and public relations). All can be said to be forms of strategic communication and not mere accidental or innocent misstatements of facts."
Oxford Dictionaries declared that its international word of the year in 2016 was post-truth, citing a 20-fold increase in usage compared to 2015, and noted that it was commonly associated with the noun post-truth politics.
, political commentators and academic researchers have identified post-truth politics as ascendant in many nations, notably Australia, Brazil, India, Ghana, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, among others.
History of terminology The term post-truth politics appears to have developed from other adjectival uses of post-truth, such as post-truth political environment, post-truth world, post-truth era, post-truth society, and very close cousins, such as post-fact society and post-truth presidency. According to Oxford Dictionaries, the Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich may have been the first to use the term post-truth in a 1992 essay in The Nation. Tesich writes that following the shameful truth of Watergate (1972–1974), more assuaging coverage of the Iran–Contra scandal (1985–1987) and Persian Gulf War (1990–1991) demonstrates that "we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world." However, as Harsin (2018) notes, the term was in academic circulation in the 1990s. The media studies scholar John Hartley used the term post-truth as the title of a chapter, "Journalism in a Post-truth Society", in his 1992 book The Politics of Pictures.
In 2004 Ralph Keyes used the term post-truth era in his book by that title. In it he argued that deception is becoming more prevalent in the current media-driven world. According to Keyes, lies stopped being treated as something inexcusable and started being viewed as something acceptable in certain situations, which supposedly led to the beginning of the post-truth era. The same year American journalist Eric Alterman spoke of a "post-truth political environment" and coined the term the post-truth presidency in his analysis of the misleading statements made by the Bush administration after 9/11 in 2001. More specifically, the American academic Moustafa Bayoumi argued that it was the 2003 "Iraq War that ushered in the post-truth era and that the United States is to blame". Bayoumi believes that there existed differences compared to the times, for example, of the Spanish–American War and of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Starting from 2002–2003, through the formation of the Office of Special Plans and supported by the neocons' noble lie ideology, the greatest difference from previous time periods of all existed and "the apparatus of lying became institutionalized". In his 2004 book Post-democracy, Colin Crouch used the term post-democracy to mean a model of politics where "elections certainly exist and can change governments", but "public electoral debate is a tightly controlled spectacle, managed by rival teams of professionals expert in the techniques of persuasion, and considering a small range of issues selected by those teams". Crouch directly attributes the "advertising industry model" of political communication to the crisis of trust and accusations of dishonesty that a few years later others have associated with post-truth politics. More recently, scholars have followed Crouch in demonstrating the role of professional political communication's contribution to distrust and wrong beliefs, where strategic use of emotion is becoming key to gaining trust for truth statements.
The term post-truth politics may have originally been coined by the blogger David Roberts in a blog post for Grist on 1 April 2010. Roberts defined it as "a political culture in which politics (public opinion and media narratives) have become almost entirely disconnected from policy (the substance of legislation)". Post truth was used by philosopher Joseph Heath to describe the 2014 Ontario election. The term became widespread during the campaigns for the 2016 presidential election in the United States and for the 2016 "Brexit" referendum on membership in the European Union in the United Kingdom. Following this, some scholars use the term post-truth situation to refer to such "a situation in society and politics, in which the boundary between truth and untruth is erased, facts and related narratives are purposefully produced, emotions are more important than knowledge and the actors of social or political life do not care for truth, proof and evidence".
Contributing Factors Distrust in major social institutions, political parties, government, news media, and social media, along with the fact that anyone today can create and circulate content that has generic characteristics of news (fake news) creates the conditions for post-truth politics. Distrust is also politically polarized, where those identifying with one political party dislike and distrust those of another. Since distrust also stems from a feeling of lacking truth, the primary factor that contributes to the post-truth era is anxiety surrounding an inability to obtain truth confidently. This is in line with what some argue: that post-truth politics is not truly driven by misinformation, but anxiety over misinformation.
Overall, a variety of factors have been proposed as the primary contributors to the post-truth era.
Increased Access to Information The information age has rendered many traditional sources of news or facts inefficient or comparatively expensive. The pros and cons of this have been subject to much discussion, especially in regards to the post-truth era. Many believe that the internet's unique ability to present information created by anybody, to anybody with an internet connection has allowed for greater misinformation to spread.
Another contributing factor to misinformation in the digital age has been the change from long form to short form social media content. On social media platforms such as YouTube, a user will browse a selection of curated content, complete with titles and thumbnails describing the content in the video. This process allows the user to only watch what they volunteer to see. In addition to this, the length of a YouTube video is much greater than other social media, which promotes nuanced explanation and evidence analysis. This contrasts with increasingly popular social media services like TikTok, which presents videos without the discretion of the viewer, and promotes videos which receive interaction in the shortest amount of time possible. These factors promote a lack of production quality in videos, as production value promotes long term attention and initial click through rates rather than immediate engagement with a pre-selected video. This presentation of content causes all videos to feel equally credible, and fosters misinformation.
The Illusory Truth Effect The illusory truth effect is the tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure.
Sensational Journalism Sensationalist media has become the primary way through which even credible news organizations interact with the world. The primary drive behind this has likely been intense competition for attention in the information age.
Normalization of Conspiracy Theories Conspiracy theories have seen a mainstream recognition unprecedented in modern times. Conspiracy theories are definitionally an assertion of a conspiracy, and are sold as appealing narratives regardless of their truth.
The majority of Americans believe in at least one conspiracy theory. With 75% percent of self identified republicans believing in a conspiracy theory, and 56% of self identified democrats believing in a conspiracy theory.
Echo Chambers Echo chambers have seen unprecedented propagation in the digital age, with social media being the driving factor. Social media algorithms have allowed people to be exposed to less and less information contradicting their beliefs.
Poor Education The poorly educated fall victim to falsehoods more often than highly educated people.
Monetary Value in Promoting Disinformation