5 Sharing such misinformation - at least by private citizens - is not necessarily intended to harm others or even deliberately deceive. This is not only a problem with public figures: fake news, more recently termed “viral deception” by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, is sweeping social media, shared by ordinary citizens. Instead, they attack those who point out their deceptions, undermining public trust in credible experts and reliable news sources. Unlike previous politicians who backed away when caught lying, post-truth politicians do not back away from their falsehoods.
On the other, post-truth politics involves a new model of behavior when caught lying. On the one hand, post-truth political methods have to do with the quantity of lies. The 2016 presidential campaign in the United States and the Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom have led the venerable Oxford Dictionary to choose as its 2016 word of the year “post-truth,” defined as “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” campaign proved to be even worse, including the post-election denial and attacks on a clear election result, culminating in the Januattack on the U.S. While politicians have made use of disinformation to push their political agendas in the past, this problem has intensified in recent years. 2 Given the extensive scholarship on the key role of trust in the public sphere, especially in the political arena, these numbers should alarm officials, policy experts and analysts, and academics concerned with public policy. Analysts, commentators, and other media figures suffer from decreasing levels of trust, with a drop from 55 percent in 1996 to 40 percent in 2020. 1 It is not only elected and appointed officials who suffer from the trust gap. Pew Research Center polling suggests that Americans’ trust in the government has fallen by nearly two-thirds in the last two decades, down to 20 percent in 2020.
Officials and policy makers have to grapple with historically low levels of citizen trust in the U.S.
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