University of Kwazulu-Natal

The Truth In Crisis Navigating The Post Truth Age

Bonisiwe Shabane
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the truth in crisis navigating the post truth age

In an age where information is available at the touch of a button, the world finds itself facing a crisis of truth. In an age where information is available at the touch of a button, the world finds itself facing a crisis of truth. The rise of post-truth politics has blurred the line between fact and fiction, leaving citizens, governments, and institutions struggling to navigate a landscape where emotions often outweigh reason and misinformation is rampant. Across the globe, from developed democracies to nations like Pakistan, this phenomenon is reshaping how we understand reality, engage in politics, and maintain trust in our leaders and systems. In the heart of the post-truth era lies a fundamental shift in how people form their beliefs. Facts, once the cornerstone of informed decision-making, have become secondary to personal beliefs and emotions.

The digital age has supercharged this transformation. Social media platforms, designed to engage and entertain, often prioritize sensationalism over truth. As algorithms prioritize content that triggers emotional reactions, misleading information spreads faster than ever before, creating echo chambers that reinforce what people already believe. In this environment, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between reliable information and dangerous falsehoods. The consequences of this shift are far-reaching. When truth becomes malleable, so does the trust people place in their institutions.

The media, once viewed as the gatekeeper of objective reporting, has become an arena for political battles, with facts often taking a backseat to agendas. People no longer rely on traditional sources of information; instead, they turn to social media, where misinformation and disinformation run rampant. The result is a divided public, with opposing groups unable to agree on basic facts. Political polarization deepens as citizens begin to live in separate realities, each fortified by their preferred sources of news. The stakes are especially high in countries like Pakistan, where political instability and social tensions have made the consequences of misinformation even more severe. In such an environment, political leaders and interest groups can easily exploit the post-truth landscape to further their agendas, distorting the public’s perception of national issues.

This fuels disillusionment, apathy, and distrust in democratic processes, creating a breeding ground for extremism and social unrest. With fake news spreading unchecked, the potential for social harm increases exponentially, further dividing communities and heightening fears. Assistant Professor Gabriele Cosentino examines how the post-truth era, driven by eroding trust and the rise of misinformation, is reshaping societal beliefs and transforming how we perceive information Post-truth” has gone from buzzword to full-blown force in reshaping politics, media and public trust. Gabriele Cosentino, assistant professor in AUC’s Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, explores how this phenomenon has been reshaping our understanding of truth and its influence on society over the past decade. Through extensive research, Cosentino has found that the post-truth era is related to a broad decline of trust in institutions, including media and political bodies.

“As trust in these entities has eroded, it has become harder for them to present information that a majority of people will believe and rely on,” he says. This loss of trust has created a new landscape where emotion and belief often trump fact, allowing misinformation to take hold and influence public opinion. “In the age of the internet, social media has allowed misinformation to spread faster and wider than ever before, disrupting traditional forms of political communication and leading to serious consequences,” Cosentino adds. The bulk of Cosentino’s research on post-truth has culminated in two books — Social Media and the Post-Truth World Order (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and The Infodemic. Geopolitics, Disinformation, and the Covid-19 Pandemic (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). The first draws on case studies from around the world to demonstrate post-truth as a global phenomenon, and the second examines how the pandemic played out in the era of misinformation.

We are living in an age in which clandestine technologies exploit big data and social media, manipulating, polarizing and entrenching opinion. A climate has arisen where trust has evaporated, conspiracy theories thrive, the authority of the media has wilted away, emotions and bogus opinions matter more than facts. All this is the result of what the Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich calls post-truth. He is credited to have coined this term in his 1992 essay published in ‘The Nation’. The word post-truth was declared by Oxford Dictionary as an international word of the year, 2016. Since then “post-truth” has become a ubiquitous buzzword, but what exactly post-truth means?

In easy parlance, the post-truth era signifies a shift in focus from objective facts to emotions and personal beliefs when evaluating information. Oxford Dictionary defines post-truth as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Facts, once the cornerstone of public discourse, are increasingly dismissed in favor of narratives that thrive on emotions and foolish sensationalism. In other words, post-truth era refers to a time when objective facts hold less weight in public discourse compared to emotions and personal beliefs. People are more likely to accept information that aligns with their existing views, even if it’s overtly false and bogus. The phenomenon of post-truth is fueled by several factors.

Some of the factors are explained as under: Get the latest CounterCurrents updates delivered straight to your inbox. STEPS TO NAVIGATE THE TROUBLED WATERS OF POST-TRUTH We are repeatedly told these days that we have entered the terrifying new era of post-truth, in which not just particular facts but entire histories might be faked. But if this is the era of post-truth, when, exactly, was the halcyon age of truth? And what triggered our transition to the post-truth era?

The internet? Social media? The rise of Putin and Trump? A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new. In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, who conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions.

We are the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and convince millions of others to believe in them. As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws and can thereby cooperate effectively. Please note that I am not denying the effectiveness or potential benevolence of religion — just the opposite. Fiction is among the most effective tools in humanity’s tool kit. Centuries ago, millions of Christians locked themselves inside a self-reinforcing mythological bubble, never daring to question the factual veracity of the Bible, while millions of Muslims put their unquestioning faith in the Quran. We have zero scientific evidence that Eve was tempted by the serpent, that the souls of all infidels burn in hell after they die, or that the creator of the universe doesn’t like it...

I am aware that many people might be upset by my equating religion with fake news, but that’s exactly the point. When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion, and we are admonished not to call it “fake news” in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful (or... Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit... The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from...

To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. This article is a critique of the notion of post-truth. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, I argue that the epistemological crisis suggested by the notion of post-truth is epiphenomenal to a more general crisis of authority, a crisis that is poorly understood... I also argue that revisiting Arendt’s account of authority can help us elucidate the vexed dynamics of authority in modern society, as well as the dynamics behind its current crisis. The post-truth situation is a loss of authority that is political before it presents as epistemological. Effectively addressing this situation, I conclude, is a much more challenging and complex proposition than what is suggested in the literature on post-truth.

Keywords: Post-truth, Authority, Crisis, Hannah Arendt, Populism Whenever the prefix “post” insinuates itself into our thinking, there is good reason to think again. This ubiquitous latinism is conspicuously void of information. “Post” simply suggests that something is following upon, and supposedly surpassing, something else, without telling us anything specific about the nature of what follows, or the nature of what it follows upon, or how... “Postmodernism” is a famous case in point (cf. Foucault, 1984: 39).

A more recent case in point is the notion that these are “post-truth” or “post-factual” times (see, e.g., d’Ancona, 2017; Block, 2019; Hyvönen, 2018; Kalpokas, 2019; McIntyre, 2018; Newman, 2019; Sim, 2019). In the deluge of academic, journalistic, and hybrid writing that has brought this notion to the fore, it has been suggested that we are in the midst of a “new war on truth” (d’Ancona,... Among the notable casualties in the new war we find, in addition to “truth,” “facts,” and “reason,” also “the Enlightenment,” which is now, we are told, “really dead,” since the Enlightenment “displaced the primacy... This article is a critique of the notion of post-truth, and a reconsideration of the situation to which this notion inadequately refers. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, I argue that the epistemological crisis suggested by the misnomer “post-truth” is epiphenomenal to a more general crisis of authority, the nature of which has so far... Revisiting Arendt’s account of authority can help us elucidate both the general dynamics of authority in a modern democracy and the specific dynamics behind its current crisis.

My main errand in this piece is thus to change perspectives on post-truth, hopefully for the benefit of our understanding of what is ailing us. This amounts to a look at what I take to be the big picture from which the purported post-truth situation is a cut-out and a blow-up. What follows is a zooming-out from the epistemological notions that dominate the literature and a proposal to approach the post-truth situation differently, analytically as well as politically. Sarah Lee AI generated Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct-FP8 6 min read · May 27, 2025 The concept of truth has been a cornerstone of philosophical inquiry for centuries. However, in recent years, the notion of truth has become increasingly complex and contested.

The rise of the 'post-truth' era has led to a reevaluation of how we understand and navigate truth in contemporary society. This article will explore how philosophical theories of truth intersect with contemporary issues, such as misinformation and the erosion of trust in institutions, to better understand the challenges of navigating truth in today's world. The post-truth era is characterized by a disregard for objective facts and a reliance on emotional appeals and personal opinions. This has led to a situation where truth is often seen as relative and subjective, rather than objective and absolute. Some key features of the post-truth era include: Technology has played a significant role in shaping the post-truth era.

Social media platforms, in particular, have created an environment in which information can spread quickly and easily, often without being fact-checked or verified. This has led to the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation, as well as the creation of 'echo chambers' in which individuals are only exposed to information that confirms their existing biases. The post-truth era has significant consequences for democracy and public discourse. When truth is seen as relative and subjective, it can be difficult to have informed and nuanced discussions about important issues. This can lead to the erosion of trust in institutions and the polarization of public discourse. In today's digital age, where identity can be self-defined and truth is often viewed as subjective, individuals are experiencing a quiet but profound mental health crisis—an identity confusion driven by cultural relativism and the...

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