The Death of Truth: How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World – and What We Can Do About It
by Steven Brill
View on GoodreadsCourt TV founder and NewsGuard founder Steven Brill's argument that the collapse of trust in shared information is the load-bearing problem of contemporary democracy, and that the social-media business model is the proximate cause.
Core ideas
- The local-news collapse and the social-media rise are treated as a single phenomenon — the same digital advertising shift that destroyed local-journalism economics fed the platforms with the attention they needed to dominate.
- Section 230 immunity is the load-bearing legal asymmetry: platforms benefit from publisher-like reach without publisher-like liability, which produces a structural incentive to amplify whatever engages, including the worst stuff.
- The reform program — selective Section 230 reform, news-content rating systems (NewsGuard is Brill's own business), media-literacy education — is pragmatic rather than utopian; Brill is trying to make the system work, not replace it.
Published2024
Pages336
ISBN9780525658313
ReadDec 2024
