When I co-founded NewsGuard in 2018, Stephen Brill “We thought we were right in the middle of this perfect storm of misinformation,” he recalls. But that was before the 2020 election, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war between Israel and Hamas, and another presidential race taking place in a highly polarized America. “We were really in the calm before the storm even though we thought it was the storm,” Brill told me in an interview. “With generative AI, it will get much worse before it gets better.”
It can seem like bleak times to try to live in a fact-based world, where false and conspiratorial claims flow freely across the internet and social media, a topic Brill explores in his new book. The death of truth. Brill, a veteran journalist and businessman, was fired American Lawyer, Brill content, and Court TV — diagnose the infodemic of our time, while also offering solutions, from reforming Section 230, the law that protects internet companies from liability for content on their platforms, to suing social media companies for violating their terms of service, to reining in advertising. Automated, where the algorithm places automated ads based on users' demographic data. A consequence of such advertising is that major brands may inadvertently help support purveyors of misinformation. (One of the services NewsGuard offers, besides providing reliability ratings for news outlets, addresses programmatic advertising.)
In installation Vanity gallery In an excerpt published this week, Brill recounted how his work at NewsGuard led to him being targeted John Duggan– American, like the The New York Times He was reported last week spreading disinformation from Russia, where he was granted asylum — and from House Republicans, led by Rep. Jim Jordan. “We received an email from President Jordan accusing us of the same thing that Dugan accused him of, which is that we were just symbols of the deep state,” Brill said. “The irony is not lost on me. It is a tragicomedy, but it is not funny.”
“Their priority, basically, is to destroy the idea that there is truth in the world, that there are actually truths,” Brill added. “What The death of truth “What it's really about is the idea that everything has become a matter of opinion.”
In an interview edited for length and clarity, Brill discusses his motivations for the book, how artificial intelligence is accelerating the disinformation crisis, and where he sees some hope for news media.
Vanity gallery: I'd love to start with your motivation for the book. She wrote: “If we can understand how truth has been eviscerated to this extent, we can see how to restore it.” For me, that kind of captured it.
Steven Brill: This is exactly it. I've been living in this world, you know, and what I started thinking about a year and a half ago is that all these forces seem to be coming together in a perfect storm…. A combination of social media algorithms and [programmatic advertising], who unwittingly funds all of these things. Together they have created an ecosystem where no one believes anything. When you go online, if you're a regular person, you don't know what to believe. I wanted to dissect how this happens, explain its consequences, but also explain what we can do about it.
Along the way, I've realized that it's a much more serious problem than I thought, and that there are some actors like the Russians, who are much more serious about this and more progressive about this, and much more of a way to use this as a way to turn the world order upside down than I realized. .
You've been looking critically at our information ecosystem for a long time, and you founded a media monitoring publication, [Brill’s Content], in addition to the NewsGuard organization. Even since 2018 – that is, before the rise of mis/disinformation about the coronavirus, Stop the Steal, and the war between Ukraine and Russia – it feels like things are accelerating. But what is your experience?
This is absolutely true. When we started NewsGuard, in 2018, we thought we were in the middle of this perfect storm of misinformation, and yet that was before the coronavirus, before Stop the Steal, before the vaccine misinformation, before January 6, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, before The war between Israel and Hamas, and before what is now known as the current elections. So we were really in the calm before the storm, even though we thought it was the storm. With generative AI, it will get much worse before it gets better.
