How to Get Out of Disinformation?

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Our society is not wired to cope with instant draggings and dog piles on social media. Media has done a far better job of resisting russian style disinformation than it did in two thousand 16. Employers have turned out to be the soft under belly of cancil culture. Too often, the real activist who's trying to improve the world by pushing snowflakes is being silenced. You can break the chilling effect if you don't let yourself be silenced.

Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.

In episode 190, Michael Shermer speaks with Jonathan Rauch as he reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge” — our social system for turning disagreement into truth. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.