Trump’s anti-truth crusade is not just an attack on facts – it’s an unravelling of the Enlightenment
The US president, JD Vance and Nigel Farage seem to believe that checking facts is a form of censorship. Nonsense: speech is only free when it is anchored in truth
Facts are becoming less sacred by the day in Donald Trump’s US, where many of his supporters now deny the very existence of truths. To them, inconvenient evidence is by definition “bias”. His followers and those who fear his fist are falling into line: media, universities and that infamous regiment of tech zillionaires who stood right behind him on inauguration day. The day after Trump’s election victory was certified by an electoral vote tally in Congress, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg announced that, starting with the US, the company would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.
A similar hammer blow has just struck Full Fact, the exceptionally valuable UK factchecker whose word is a gold standard for honesty. Google has pulled its £1m funding. Along with the ending of sizeable donations from Meta, the charity tells me this amounts to a loss of a third of its funding.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading…Related Knowledge Center: Free speech and public protest
The First Amendment is facing challenging times: Crackdowns on campus protests prompted both-sides claims of intolerance. Attempts to head off dangerous health misinformation have been characterized as violations of free speech. Donald Trump is publicly punishing news outlets that deviate from his administration’s version of events while privately suing some outlets into submission.
The White House vs. the press | Voiceless America
Related Knowledge Center: Information integrity
In an increasingly fractured media landscape, truth has been a casualty in the public discussion. Coverage has been warped by the business needs of struggling news organizations, and a significant segment of the public relies on bad-faith outlets that are little more than propagandists. While fact-checking has become routine, some organizations are exploring other ways to combat the trends. And misinformation spewed by AI-driven chatbots has become more of a feature than simply a bug.
Fact-checking and its detractors
Related Knowledge Center: Fact-checking and its detractors
Fact-checking has become a familiar tool for political reporters to hold office-holders and candidates accountable. But critics ask if fact-checkers sometimes miss the forest for the trees, and if the practice often struggles with false equivalency the way conventional political coverage does.