It’s too easy to say that the opposite of truth is lies/falsehood. This isn’t the case, however, in a world where bullshit is so thoroughgoing and taken-for-granted as a factor of public life. In a course objectively about propaganda and misinformation, we take seriously the prevalence of bullshit, the communication byproduct of “fakers and phones who are attempting by what they say to manipulate the opinions and the attitudes of those to whom they speak” (Frankfurt, 2018, p. 4). And bullshitters take a very pragmatic (re. flexible) view of the truth. They obfuscate and bend facts in pursuit of their objective, indifferent to whether what they say is true or whether it is false” (Frankfurt, 2018, p. 4). But this is only a bad thing if one considers that “being indifferent to truth is an undesirable or even a reprehensible characteristic, and bullshitting is therefore to be avoided and condemned” (Frankfurt, 2018, p. 5). It would seem that this is not necessarily a universally agreed-upon sentiment.

“What is truth? How can we know it? Does truth refer to reality or is it merely a social construction? Do we possess objective knowledge of the world or is knowledge always subjective? These unresolved philosophical questions create uncertainty in our approach to truth. After all, if there are no objective facts and if truth is always relative to a perspective, does it follow that there are alternative conceptions of reality? Those who think that truth is relative and socially constructed cannot complain when post-factualists like Trump take a different view of truth” (Zoglauer, 2023, p. x).

The waning of the truth due to the increased contestation of it occurs alongside the rise of its traditional opposite, falsehood: “There is a growing body of research pointing to falsehoods diffusing significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in nearly all studied categories of information” (O’Hara, 2022, p. 3). To be frank, we live in a world where the phrase “being economical with the truth” no longer means to be judicious with the amount of detail one gives in order to not disadvantage oneself in a situation or to be prudent/diplomatic. Now it stands in for bold-faced lies (often delivered with the pretence of irony) or mis/disinformation.

“People have a more-nuanced view of misinformation than the binary distinction between ‘fake news’ and ‘real news’ implies. We distinguish between the truth of a statement’s verbatim details (i.e., the specific, literal information) and its gist (i.e., the general, overarching meaning), and suggest that people tolerate and intentionally spread misinformation in part because they believe its gist. That is, even when they recognize a claim as literally false, they may judge it as morally acceptable to spread because they believe it is true ‘in spirit’” (Langdon et al., 2024, p. 1). Belief in the gist of things (turning blatant falsehoods into truthy falsehoods) increases based on prior knowledge, imagination, and partisanship (when false claims are consistent with participants’ prior knowledge, when people imagine how falsehoods could have been or might become true, and when falsehoods are told by a political ingroup) (Langdon et al., 2024, p. 3). Thus, even when people know misinformation is false, it can be excused when it communicates a ‘truthful gist’.

There is a widespread sense of crisis fuelled by fundamental shifts in our media and communication landscape. It’s commonplace to encounter stories based in a crisis of belief (what to believe), crisis of authority (who to believe), or even crisis of faith (whether we can believe). Together, these might be termed a “crisis of truth” whereby “certainties have increasingly become questionable in a time of falsified images and videos, hired trolls, secret service activities, forged profiles, social bots and perfectly orchestrated propaganda.” This world no longer depends upon “more hierarchically structured knowledge and media … shaped by comparatively powerful gatekeepers and a certain stability of materials and documents, and thereby implicitly supported classical concepts of truth” (Poerksen, 2022, p. 9). In a world where everything is epistemologically uncertain, we can’t look to truth as an arbiter of common sense or an anchor of objectivity. With such a pervasive sense of crisis where truth is under threat and trust is also withdrawn from traditional sources of authority, “truth is lost in a black hole of human experience, ever present but unable to be seen in a collapsing informational field of dark matter” (Macnamara, 2020, p. 131). This sounds bad (d’uh). 

In this environment, truth isn’t something equally accessible to all (or agreed upon by all). It becomes partial, partisan, and polarizing. “Some have even argued that truth itself has been weaponised” (Morris, 2021, p. 320). And this is where we pick up the narrative thread as we look ahead and shift our focus to “post-truth” …

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