On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy

by Lee McIntyre

Throughout history, autocratic leaders and their wannabes have understood that the quickest way to control a population is to control their information sources.

The post-truth playbook goes like this: attack the truth tellers, lie about anything and everything, manufacture disinformation, encourage distrust and polarization, create confusion and cynicism, then claim that the truth is available only from the leader himself. The goal is not merely to get people to believe any particular false claim, but to so demoralize them with a tsunami of falsehoods that they begin to give up on the idea that truth can be known at all, outside a political context.

another Holocaust historian, Timothy Snyder, put it even more succinctly: “post-truth is pre-fascism.”2

It is crucial to distinguish between ordinary misconceptions and targeted manipulation—between misinformation and disinformation.

The truth does not die when liars take power; it dies when truth tellers stop defending it. So let’s expose and name the truth killers. Reveal their tactics and their financial ties, and wake up as many of their believers as we can. Boycott the social media companies and anyone else who is enabling them to carry out their dirty mission.