Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era

by Daniel J. Levitin

The Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2016 was post-truth, which they define as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

A Stanford University study of civic online reasoning tested more than 7,800 students from intermediate school through college for eighteen months, ending June 2016. The researchers cite a “stunning and dismaying consistency. Overall, young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak.” They were horrible at distinguishing high-quality news from lies.