Abstract
Arming Americans to defend the truth from today's war on facts
In what could be the timeliest book of the year, Rauch aims to arm his readers to engage with reason in an age of illiberalism.Newsweek
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
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 2016 Russian trolls and bots nearly drowned the truth in a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories, and Donald Trump and his troll armies continued to do the same. Social media companies struggled to keep up with a flood of falsehoods, and too often didn't even seem to try. Experts and some public officials began wondering if society was losing its grip on truth itself. Meanwhile, another new phenomenon appeared: cancel culture. At the push of a button, those armed with a cellphone could gang up by the thousands on anyone who ran afoul of their sanctimony.
In this pathbreaking book, Jonathan Rauch reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the Constitution of Knowledgeour social system for turning disagreement into truth.
By explicating the Constitution of Knowledge and probing the war on reality, Rauch arms defenders of truth with a clearer understanding of what they must protect, why they must doand how they can do it. 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.
Schlagworte
truthfulness self censorship war on facts war on truth outrage diet the constitution disinformation free speech on campus freedom of speech fake news fallibilism gay rights movement kindly inquisitors liberalism conservative media conspirac- 265–266 Acknowledgments 265–266
- 267–288 Notes 267–288
8 Treffer gefunden
- „... suppressing moderate voices), they created a paranoid alternative reality in which a vast Northern conspiracy ...” „... have made it this far.27 If we go in for quackery or conspiracy theories, that is often because the ...”
- „... in fact journalism. A crackpot, a loner, a conspiracy theorist will engage in the same steps, yet is ...” „... governments, conspiracy mongers, and a conservative media ecosystem which was increasingly detached from ...”
- „... . Conspiracy theo-ries. Cancel culture. These recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in ...” „... of the flight from fact.” — Jon MeachaM Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracy theo-ries. Cancel ...”
- „... dangerous. One of the first uses of the new technology was for what today we call conspiracy the-ories or ...” „... conspiracy theories posted a video deceptively edited to suggest that former vice president Joe Biden made ...” „... and conspiracy theories spread faster than the virus itself, prominent digital- media companies took a ...”
- „... , 160conspiracy theories: audience complicity in, 183–84; conserva-tive media and, 177–79; digital media ...” „... COVID-19 pandemic: conspiracy theories on, 177–78, 184; digital media and, 149, 153–54, 168; Fauci and ...” „... : advertising shift to, 137; conspiracy theories and, 135; content regulation and, 144–47, 150–51, 240 ...”
- „... as conspiracy theorists. They could use their visibility to get on TV, hawk T- shirts, sell clicks to ...” „... society itself, to journalists, to activists, to freelance conspiracy theorists, and, to a lesser degree ...” „... socialist future, the newer model focused on sowing confusion and disseminating conspiracy theories ...”
- „... can-celers, denounced from the left for racism and colonialism and from the right as a deep- state conspiracy ...” „... conspir-acists and bots and U.S. presidents spew misinformation; when social media make shaming and shunning a ...”
- „... , 2020).57. Andrew Romano, “New Yahoo News/YouGov Poll Shows Corona-virus Conspiracy Theories Spreading on ...” „... , 2019.63. Ryan Broderick, “Republicans’ Conspiracy Theory–Ridden Counter-programming to Impeachment Is ...”