How did we become a world where facts—shared truths—have lost their power to hold us together
as a community as a country globally? How have we allowed the proliferation of alternative
facts hoaxes even conspiracy theories to destroy our trust in institutions leaders and
legitimate experts? Best-selling journalist Steven Brill documents the forces and people from
Silicon Valley to Madison Avenue to Moscow to Washington that have created and exploited this
world of chaos and division—and offers practical solutions for what we can do about it. "A
precise description of the punishment cell we have built around our minds and the first few
steps back towards light and air." –Timothy Snyder Author of On Tyranny and Professor of
History Yale University “A seminal ground-breaking documented and honest examination of two
of the central dilemmas of our time—what is truth and where to find it.” —Bob Woodward
associate editor at The Washington Post As the cofounder of NewsGuard a company that tracks
online misinformation Steven Brill has observed the rise of fake news from a front-row seat.
In The Death of Truth with startling often terrifying clarity he explains how we got
here—and how we can get back to a world where truth matters. None of this—conspiracy theories
embraced expertise ridiculed empirical evidence ignored—has happened by accident. Brill takes
us inside the decisions made by executives in Silicon Valley to code the algorithms embedded in
their social media platforms to maximize profits by pushing divisive content. He unravels the
ingenious creation of automated advertising buying systems that reward that click-baiting
content and penalize reliable news publishers and describes how the use of these ad-financed
misinformation platforms by politicians hucksters and conspiracy theorists deceives ordinary
citizens. He documents how the most powerful adversaries of America have used American-made
social media and advertising tools against us with massive disinformation campaigns—and how
with the development of generative artificial intelligence everything could get exponentially
worse unless we act. The stakes are high for all of us including Brill himself whose
company's role in exposing Russian disinformation operations resulted in a Russian agent
targeting him and his family. Crucially Brill lays out a series of provocative but realistic
prescriptions for what we can do now to reverse course—proposals certain to stir debate and
even action that could curb the power of big tech to profit from division and chaos tamp down
polarization and restore the trust necessary to bring us together.
