The cure for misinformation is not more information or smarter news consumers

Way back in 2010, for Grist, I started writing about what I called “post-truth politics” (one, two, three), the rise of nonsense and conspiracy in the mainstream information diet, along with increasingly explicit pressure on the institutions meant to distinguish truth from nonsense to cease doing so.

In 2017, I called it an epistemic crisis, or, alternatively, the rise of tribal epistemology. In 2018, I talked with Chris Hayes on his podcast about it, and then returned to it in 2019. After launching Volts, though, I turned my professional work toward other things, even though I never quit ranting about “the information environment” on social media.

Anyway, I recently came across a post from political science professor Samuel Bagg at the University of South Carolina that sketched out what I was never quite able to achieve, which is something like a coherent theory about all this. He acknowledges the epistemic crisis but argues that it is a mistake to seek “epistemic solutions [like] better fact-checking, more deliberation, improved education, [or] greater media balance.” The problem runs deeper, he says: “decades of research have demonstrated that our political beliefs and behavior are thoroughly motivated and mediated by our social identities.”