Living in a post-factual age: Katharine Viner’s c.5,700 word essay published in the Guardian yesterday seeks to capture the current predicament of the modern age: High-quality information is more widely available than ever, but many people are hopelessly, desperately stupid in sharing and perpetuating falsehoods without first attempting to validate the information. While that’s always been the case, the advent of the internet and social media has helped to turn this relatively old problem into an exponential burst of myth posing as fact, with nasty and often damaging consequences.

Viner is on to something when she weaves together how cynical politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are using social media to amplify untruths, as well as relying on the gullibility, laziness, and confirmation biases of their constituencies to perpetuate their own ignorance. One of the largest donors behind the Leave campaign admitted to the Guardian: “It was taking an American-style media approach. What they said early on was ‘Facts don’t work,’ and that’s it. The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.”

This was most recently highlighted, (and perhaps served as the inspiration for Viner’s article) ironically enough, by a comment left on a Financial Times article days after Brexit, and which many of our readers may have previously read on social media as it went viral, reading in part: “We now live in a post-factual democracy. When the facts [of Brexit] met the myths they were as useless as bullets bouncing off the bodies of aliens in a HG Wells novel. When Michael Gove said, ‘The British people are sick of experts,’ he was right. But can anybody tell me the last time a prevailing culture of anti-intellectualism has led to anything other than bigotry?” Since the publication of the comment, the Financial Times commissioned the author of the comment to expand on his thoughts in an article.

Viner couples this with parallel negative developments in journalism around the world — the slashing of newsroom workforces and the resulting deleterious effect on fact-checking and hard journalism. (Read How technology disrupted the truth)