The Death of Truth: How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World--And What We Can Do

Also by Steven Brill

Tailspin:

The People and Forces Behind America’s Fifty-Year Fall—

and Those Fighting to Reverse It

America’s Bitter Pill:

Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix

Our Broken Healthcare System

Class Warfare:

Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools

After:

How America Confronted the September 12 Era

The Teamsters

This Is a Borzoi Book

Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Copyright © 2024 by Steven Brill

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Brill, Steven, [date]author.

Title: The death of truth : how social media and the internet gave snake oil salesmen and demagogues the weapons they needed to destroy trust and polarize the world—and what we can do about it / Steven Brill.

Description: First edition. | New York : Knopf, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023054427 (print) | LCCN 2023054428 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525658313 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525658320 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Misinformation—Social aspects—United States. |

Truthfulness and falsehood—Social aspects—United States. | Social media and society—United States.

Classification: LCC HM851 .B7418 2024 (print) | LCC HM851 (ebook) | DDC 302.23/10973—dc23/eng/20240131

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2023054427

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2023054428

Ebook ISBN 9780525658320

Cover design by Keenan

ep_prh_7.0_148355206_c0_r0

CONTENTS

Dedication

Chapter One

Six Times Seven Is Not Forty-One

Chapter Two

The Liberation of the Good Samaritans

Chapter Three

What’s Up with Your Recommendation Engine?

Chapter Four

We’re Sorry

Chapter Five

Millions of Papers Flying Around

Chapter Six

ER Doctors or Tobacco Company Shills?

Chapter Seven

Buying Blind

Chapter Eight

A Vaster Wasteland

Chapter Nine

Attacking the Referees

Chapter Ten

Infodemic

Chapter Eleven

Down the Rabbit Hole

Chapter Twelve

America’s Shameful Export

Chapter Thirteen

We Are Going to Burn You Down

Chapter Fourteen

When You Can’t Believe Your Own Eyes

Chapter Fifteen

Resurrecting Truth—What You Can Do

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Credits

A Note About the Author

_148355206_

To Alice and Sylvie

CHAPTER ONE

SIX TIMES SEVEN IS NOT FORTY-ONE

This is a book about how facts—truths—have lost their power to hold us together as a community, as a country, and globally. The diminishing belief in truths, in favor of alternative facts or even conspiracy theories, has massively eroded trust around the world—in institutions, in political leaders, in scientists, in doctors and other professional experts (even that word is suspect), and in our own ability to solve our communities’ problems. As a result, civil society is unraveling.

If different people believe in different versions of the truth, there is no real truth shared by all. Truth shrivels away and dies—and what binds us together shrivels away, too. Mistruths, invented reality, manipulation, distortion, and paranoia replace truth. Chaos replaces reason and civility. Power comes not through ideas debated civilly in democratic processes but to those who generate the most distrust for their own purposes.

This crisis is not inevitable or irreversible. There are a variety of specific, practical steps, outlined in Chapter 15, that we can take to reverse this devastating erosion of trust. But first we have to confront its magnitude and understand how it happened.

There has always been an instinct on the part of some people not to want to face facts or at least to try to paper them over. I remember parents’ visiting day thirty years ago, when my daughter’s grade school teacher answered I disagree when a student said that six times seven was forty-one. Yet even at this progressive school most parents rolled their eyes. We all seemed to agree that it’s a fact, not an opinion, that six times seven is not forty-one, just as we believed that the 1969 moon landing was not faked.

Those who preferred alternative facts or to demote facts to matters of opinion were a relative few, and the issues they focused on were not nearly as abundant. That has changed. Newer myths, invented facts, and conspiracy theories have much greater followings, boosted, as we will see, by the amazing reach and power that social media and other technology now have to target and convince susceptible believers. We thought these were communications innovations that would bring the world together. Instead, we have seen them split us apart into an infinite collection of warring tribes with infinite fears and grievances.

The decline of truth—the level of distrust in what should be accepted facts, conveyed by what were once trusted sources of information—is unprecedented. For example:

The October 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, was not a false flag staged by pro-gun-control groups. But less than twenty-four hours after the shooting, that false flag story began to spread widely on the internet’s array of conspiracy theory websites and on social media platforms. An October 26, 2023, article on the conspiracy website TheBurningPlatform.com, titled Maine Manhunt: Back to the Staged, False Flag, Mass Shooting Psyops, blamed the shooting on the New World Order globalist cabal. On X, a post by a man who has 135,000 followers and who had paid X $8 a month to get a verified account with a check mark reported that the FBI just staged another shooting. All major shooters end up having connections to the FBI. The post got 96,900 views within twenty-four hours.

The measles vaccine works and is safe. It does not cause autism, ADHD, or any other illness. That’s a fact. But skepticism about this long-proven science now abounds. In the United States, as misinformation about the vaccine has proliferated online, measles vaccination rates have dropped, and measles outbreaks, unheard of for decades, have occurred in communities where that skepticism prevails. European countries have seen a similar trend.

5G cell technology doesn’t cause cancer, nor did it cause COVID-19, but those twin myths—which were promoted, beginning in 2019 by Russian disinformation operations because Russia was behind on the technology and wanted to discredit it—spread so virally that technicians in the U.K. working on phone lines were attacked by angry mobs.

The riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was not a false flag operation engineered by the FBI. But a poll conducted by The Washington Post in January 2024 found that 25 percent of Americans, including 34 percent of Republicans and 30 percent of Independents, believe that that is probably or definitely true.

Ukraine did not sell weapons donated by the United States to Hamas for it to use in its October 2023 attack on Israel. But users of X saw multiple versions of that false story promoted by people including the former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev—who posted that the weapons handed to the nazi regime in Ukraine are now being actively used against Israel—and the U.S. representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who wrote, We need to work with Israel to track serial numbers on any U.S. weapons used by Hamas against Israel. Did they come from Afghanistan? Did they come from Ukraine? Highly likely the answer is both. Her post was then quoted by the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti in an article titled The US Congress Said That Kyiv Could Have Armed Hamas to Attack Israel.

The deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez did not engineer Joe Biden’s election. Nor was the election rigged in any other way. Yet as of 2023, 29 percent of Americans believed the election was stolen from Donald Trump, including 61 percent of Republicans. And 66 percent of those who voted in the January 2024 Republican caucus in Iowa did not believe Biden won the election legitimately. For them, the vote tallies—certified by Democratic and Republican election officials and civil servants—are a matter of opinion.

COVID vaccines work and are safe, as the real data from all reputable sources proves. Yet in the United States in 2023, 36 percent of all Americans and 60 percent of all Republicans didn’t believe that the benefits outweighed the supposed risks. As a result, vaccination rates were lower, and COVID-related deaths per capita were higher, in states that Donald Trump won in 2020. As hard as it is to believe, vaccines of all kinds are now a political issue, another matter of opinion.

Barilla pasta was not withdrawn from the market in Italy because it was found to be infested by insects. Nonetheless, a video promoting those claims enjoyed more than a million views on TikTok in 2023, prompting a social media campaign to boycott the popular pasta.

The embarrassing material found on Hunter Biden’s laptop was real and not planted by the Russians. Yet a 2023 poll found that 41 percent of Americans, including 59 percent of Democrats, believe it was not real and was Russian disinformation.

The April 2022 presidential elections in France were not rigged. But in the month prior to the election, 14 percent of surveyed French voters believed the election would be illegitimate, while another 31 percent were unsure whether the official results could be trusted.

President Donald Trump and his postmaster general did not concoct a plot to remove mailboxes from the streets in swing states just before the 2020 election in order to suppress mail-in ballots. But an August 2020 photo of a mailbox being removed as part of a routine program, meant to replace boxes that were going unused as snail mail volume declined, went viral across the Facebook and Twitter accounts of Democratic politicians and others opposing Trump, buttressed by popular left-wing activist websites like the Daily Kos and popular liberal cable television programs like MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show.

The Russians did commit atrocities in Bucha and elsewhere throughout Ukraine, and Ukrainian generals did not wear swastika armbands. Nor did Ukraine start a war with Russia on orders from Washington, use the country’s children as human shields, or spread radiation throughout Poland. Yet the Russian propaganda machine—flourishing on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and on 453 high-traffic websites controlled by Moscow and directed at Russians, Ukrainians, and the rest of the world—has effectively boosted all of those myths. Such is the reach and aggressive posture of the Russian disinformation apparatus that when a company I co-founded[*] issued a report that mentioned one such disinformation video running on YouTube, which YouTube then removed, the Moscow-based operative who had made the video began a disinformation and harassment campaign against me and my family. It included hiring a drone to film my home for a new YouTube video.

The baseball great Hank Aaron did not die from a COVID vaccine, nor did the actor Matthew Perry. But a barrage of tweets spread that misinformation to hundreds of thousands of people around the world within days of their deaths.

Colloidal silver, a liquid containing silver particles, does not cure cancer, AIDS, or diabetes. Yet multiple websites, including one with sixty-two times more online engagement than the website of the famed Mayo Clinic, say that it does. These websites have a thriving business of selling these cures to those it convinces that oncology and chemotherapy are scams. As we’ll see, sites like these also get financial support from all kinds of blue-chip advertisers, including celebrated cancer care hospitals. This support is not intentional. It’s the jaw-dropping result of another tech innovation, called programmatic advertising, that places their ads by algorithm, with no regard for the misinformation their ads are financing.

NATO troops were not secretly fighting in Ukraine, but a twenty-second-long video, uploaded by a pro-Kremlin TikTok account declaring that World War 3 was already starting and purporting to depict them in battle, was seen more than six million times on TikTok before making its way to Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter. (The video was actually filmed two years before at Kabul Airport in Afghanistan.)

The CIA did not stage protests in Hong Kong against the Chinese Communist Party’s crackdown there. Nor did it stage the Arab Spring protests or the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan. But an elaborate online campaign was launched by China’s propaganda machine in the spring of 2023 to tie the CIA to these and other worldwide movements that threaten China and Russia. It received widespread coverage across Chinese and Russian broadcast and social media platforms.

A gas leak at a polling center did not rig the November 7, 2023, election in favor of Democratic Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, but within a day of his reelection in the heavily Republican state three popular X users had posted versions of that false claim, and it had received more than 2.5 million views and been reposted more than 15,000 times.

—

There is nothing new about people being whipped into a frenzy and turned against each other with misinformation or disinformation. Cleopatra was smeared by her and Mark Antony’s enemies two thousand years ago. There were the religious wars of the Crusades in the eleventh century, the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, and, of course, the twentieth century horrors of Hitler’s propaganda and killing machine in Europe. There were Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China, Stalin’s political repression in the Soviet Union, and the Red Scare and Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt in the United States. More recently, American politicians have frequently misled their constituents, notably about progress in the Vietnam War and proof of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And, of course, yellow journalism and religious extremists around the world often pushed people and countries into wars throughout the last two centuries.

But now the power to create that frenzy—the power to communicate—has gone from the slingshot age to the nuclear age. And it is continuing to accelerate as new generative AI models go far beyond the harm caused by social media by spreading false narratives at greater scale and more persuasively. Technology has given disinformation—the deliberate spreading of falsehoods to advance political interests or a cause, or to con people into parting with their money—unlimited reach and speed to create a contagion of believers. The believers then use the same technology, particularly social media postings, to create a plague of misinformation—falsehoods spread by those who may not know or care that what they are promoting is untrue.

After the printing press was invented in the fifteenth century, there were efforts to regulate who could have access to one. It was celebrated as a breakthrough in advancing learning and knowledge, but also seen as a powerful weapon if used by the wrong people. Ultimately, those hoping to control these new tools of mass communication were regarded, correctly, as fearing free speech and the free exchange of ideas that might shake their hold on power.

Initially, the internet enjoyed the same reception. It was celebrated almost unanimously as a wonderfully liberating force. And it is. The internet allows anyone and everyone to be a publisher and to publish instantly to anyone in the world. That’s the good news. But it turns out that the bad news is also that the internet allows anyone and everyone to be a publisher and to publish instantly to anyone in the world.

A Chinese propaganda video in which a Russian Defense Ministry spokesman claimed Americans had a bioweapons lab in Ukraine that created the COVID pandemic wasn’t a pamphlet handed out on a street corner. It was seen by people around the world on Facebook and no doubt by even more people in China, who saw the video on Chinese state television.

Today’s media tools can be used not just to distort the truth for millions of people. They can also do it in a way that hides the damage from the rest of us so that we cannot counter it effectively. As we shall see, international disinformation campaigns like this bioweapons hoax—and even campaigns aimed at distorting reality related to local issues or local politicians—are targeted using social media groups and forums that have lured people into joining based on what the platforms’ algorithms signal are their susceptibility to these messages. As a result, they can go unnoticed by others who would want to counter them. For example, the United States was caught flat-footed when the Ukrainian weapons lab conspiracy theory went viral, just the way doctors were initially dumbfounded when parents in California and in Germany started resisting measles vaccines for their children.

These subject-specific myths and hundreds more spreading online at any given time gain strength from, and contribute to, a continuous loop in the erosion of trust in the institutions that people would otherwise rely on to steer them to the truth. Trust in the U.S. federal government to do the right thing all or most of the time declined from about 73 percent in 1958 to 16 percent in September 2023, according to the Pew Research Center. The Wall Street Journal made headlines in 2023 when it reported on a poll that showed belief in standard American values was on the decline. Interest in patriotism, religion, having children, and community involvement all declined, while interest in money increased. The 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual global survey, reported that 46 percent of people say that the government is a source of false or misleading information, while 42 percent say the same about the media. A year before, the report found that concern over fake news being used as a weapon [to sow division and undermine democracy] has risen to an all-time high of 76 percent.

It’s not that everyone has become paranoid. These institutions have indeed become less dependable. It was not a long leap to believe that Donald Trump’s post office was plotting to suppress mail-in votes given his administration’s actual abuses of power. In this case and many others, leaders in charge of governments, businesses, media operations, and other key organizations have realized that they can get away with peddling their own snake oil.

Moreover, innovations in media technology have made it difficult to tell which institutions to trust, leaving people wary of them all. Seen in a Google search or linked to in a tweet, a website that promotes false cancer cures looks exactly like the website of the American Cancer Society. A website or TikTok post from a Russian propaganda operation promoting an elaborate conspiracy theory about the United States aiding Ukraine because it’s a way for the Biden family and/or the Democratic National Committee to launder money can be made to look just as legitimate as a dispatch from Reuters or The Economist. And a significant subset of people are likely to believe it. As the scholar Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2023,

In times like these, people hunger for explanations—for a way of connecting the dots to make sense out of the cascade of events. This is why we live in an age of conspiracy theories. Those theories are often desperate attempts to make sense of an unpredictable and terrifying world. It might be depressing to think that the world is controlled…by the Elders of Zion, the Deep State or a grand corporate conspiracy, but at least one has the comfort of knowing who the singular enemy is. Knowledge gives power, and even the illusion of knowledge that comes from embracing a conspiracy theory can feel empowering, at least for a while.

It’s about to get much worse. We are beginning to see generative AI give people pushing misinformation or disinformation the ability to make phony websites or social media posts at exponentially greater scale that are also much more convincing and can target their victims even more precisely.

The snake oil isn’t just a tool of the right. As we will see, liberals have also perfected the tools of undermining facts and truth. In the United States, liberal political action committees have secretly financed websites posing as independent news start-ups. Their organizers piously claim to have created these sites to fill the news desert caused by the decline of legacy local newspapers. Instead, they publish articles on websites and on social media platforms that support Democratic candidates in swing election districts while attacking their opponents. And with generative AI they have a new weapon that multiplies their reach, using bot-written websites to present alternative versions of the truth. It’s another especially insidious step at undermining trust in institutions—in this case local news, which has long been regarded as the most trusted news medium.

Greed is central to the story, too. It has driven social media outlets to develop products that do not put safety and a civil society first—as they take advantage of being largely immune from liability under laws dating from the dawn of the internet, before these platforms were invented and before the harms they cause became clear. Money has also distorted policy making more broadly to favor the rich, further disenfranchising and alienating the non-rich so that they are increasingly easy prey for the conspiracy theorists and snake oil salesmen.

That growing alienation is a key point. This is not just about bad people. It is about how the death of truth, and, therefore trust, has caused so many normal people to be derailed into acting badly by predators or by people who have themselves been deluded. And it’s about the new tools that technology has given them to spread distrust.

This toxic mix that has caused so many people to behave so far outside any community’s social norms is gathering steam. We are living in a world in which once law-abiding citizens stormed the Capitol in Washington to overturn what they were convinced was a rigged election, or attacked utility workers installing 5G equipment in London in order, they were told, to prevent the spread of COVID.

Facts are twisted so often and spread through such potent online media platforms that no one knows what or whom to believe. Maybe that reputable company’s pasta is infested. That nice woman on TikTok seemed to know what she was talking about. Aid to Ukraine really could be a plot by the Biden crime family. Who knows? I’ve sure read and heard a lot lately about Biden and his son. The popular website with the guy in a lab coat saying oncologists are ripping off cancer patients who should instead buy the website’s package of colloidal silver seems to be making sense. It’s worth a try. Besides, I can never understand what my doctor is saying, let alone decipher or pay his bills.

Living together fruitfully and happily is about trust. Enough people must trust the same facts and trust each other to rely on facts for societies to make decisions based on those facts. That means that they have to trust the leaders and institutions that are responsible for those facts to be telling them the truth, not their version of the truth: businesses, legislatures, government agencies, the courts, doctors, teachers, religious leaders, climate scientists, and the media that purports to be providing reliable news and information. If we trust little or nothing because we can’t tell the snake oil from the facts, everything breaks down. We cannot have a democracy. Ultimately, we cannot expect a civil society. But if we can understand how truth has been so eviscerated, we can see how to restore it.

Skip Notes

* The company, NewsGuard, rates the reliability of online news sources.

CHAPTER TWO

THE LIBERATION OF THE GOOD SAMARITANS

On August 4, 1995, a three-paragraph amendment was offered to a much-heralded 128-page bill pending in the U.S. House of Representatives. The goal of the legislation was an overhaul of telecommunications law in the United States, spurred by the bipartisan recognition that the booming twenty-year-old cable television industry was becoming a major force that required sweeping changes to a regulatory scheme that had been put in place sixty-one years earlier. That was when the Federal Communications Commission had been created to regulate the telephone, telegraph, and radio industries. These 1995 revisions were intended to establish a framework for deregulating phone service and for enabling cable’s continued growth. The goal was to encourage competition and outlaw anticompetitive practices while protecting important legacy video providers, including over-the-air broadcasters and public service television.

To most members of the House, the three-paragraph amendment presented on August 4 was an afterthought. It was added on the morning of the same day that the House would vote on the overall bill, and it had nothing to do with telephones or cable television. Rather, it was focused on a far more embryonic communications technology—the internet, to which 14 percent of American households had access in 1995, almost all of it via telephone dial-up.

The leading internet service was America Online, or AOL, which had approximately one million members in 1995. Its two competitors were Prodigy and CompuServe. All three charged a usage fee that entitled users to dial via their telephone line onto the internet, which then allowed them to send email and have access to a variety of subject-area web pages, or portals, so that people with common interests could congregate around the same content offerings. These portals also contained message boards or comment sections, where users could post their own content and engage in discussions with other participants in that community. The ability of users—rather than only the proprietors of AOL, CompuServe, or Prodigy—to add their own content marked the beginning of what became the interactive internet. With a simple click, users could be contributors, not merely passive readers.

These editor-less content platforms presented a new legal peril—which was the subject of the little-noticed amendment. If someone who chimed in on one of those discussion groups said something libelous about someone else, could the victim sue not only the commenter but also the platform that had enabled the libel to be sent out to thousands or millions of others?

Four years before the amendment was introduced, a federal court in New York had ruled that CompuServe should not be held responsible for a comment that a publisher called Rumorville had uploaded onto CompuServe’s subject-area forum where journalists gathered. The Rumorville publisher’s comment accused a rival publisher of unethical practices. Arguing that it exercised absolutely no control over what its users posted, CompuServe quickly won a summary judgment. The judge ruled that the requirement that a distributor must have knowledge of the contents of a publication before liability can be imposed for distributing that publication is deeply rooted in the First Amendment.

The interactive platforms’ apparent immunity from responsibility did not last long. In May 1995, two months before the amendment to the Telecommunications Act was proposed on the House floor, a New York state trial court had held that Prodigy could be liable for publishing third-party content. The difference between this and the CompuServe case, the judge ruled, was that one of Prodigy’s selling points to consumers was that it did make efforts to remove inappropriate content. Therefore, it should be responsible for the content that was allowed to appear on the platform. The plaintiff, a Long Island over-the-counter brokerage house that had been accused on Prodigy’s Money forum of illegal conduct by an unnamed contributor, was able to negotiate a damages settlement with Prodigy.

Taken together, the two rulings seemed to be penalizing responsible business practices and rewarding the opposite. Doing nothing to screen online content would keep the platforms safe from legal consequences, but taking steps to screen it would put the platforms in jeopardy. This seemed to invite the infant industry to grow into a no-man’s-land of pornography, misinformation, and disinformation.

It was against that backdrop that a new section, called the Communications Decency Act, or CDA, had been added to the Telecommunications Act. The CDA’s additions mostly related to making it illegal to use a telephone or the internet to communicate lewd, obscene, or indecent content. (Most of those provisions would later be declared unconstitutional restrictions on speech.) The three-paragraph amendment added to the CDA section of the Telecommunications Act—Section 230—was written to deal with the way CompuServe had been able to avoid a libel suit, while Prodigy had not.

The sponsors of the amendment were Christopher Cox, a Republican from California, and Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon. Cox took the House floor on the morning of August 4 to assert that the content bans included in the proposed Communications Decency Act were unlikely to work. No army of bureaucrats could enforce it because there is just too much going on on the Internet for them to get there in time, he argued. Instead, the California Republican said, the platforms should do the screening.

However, he added, the existing legal system provides a massive disincentive for the people who might best help us control the Internet to do so. He then described the Prodigy and CompuServe cases, saying that the decisions had produced a backward result. We want to encourage people like Prodigy, like CompuServe, like America Online…to do everything possible for us, the customer, to help us control the portals at the computer, Cox explained. He also noted that because of the large volume of content flowing through these portals, the platforms already had plans to buttress their own screening for harmful content by providing software and other tools to help consumers make their own choices about what content they would receive.

At the time, the flood of content flowing through these platforms and the rest of the internet that Cox said was too much for an army of bureaucrats to handle was approximately 2.5 terabytes. In 2020, the fire hose of content flowing through Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other social media platforms was such that overall internet content had reached an estimated 59 zettabytes—approximately a 2 billion percent increase.

Calling the internet the shining star of the information age, Wyden echoed his Republican colleague, explaining, Our amendment will…protect computer Good Samaritans, online service providers, anyone who provides a front end to the Internet,…who takes steps to screen indecency and offensive material for their customers. It will protect them from taking on liability such as occurred in the Prodigy case in New York that they should not face for helping us…solve this problem.

Section 230 was no big deal, Reed Hundt, who was chairman of the FCC at the time, told me twenty-seven years later. "It was just