Beyond the tipping point is the slippery slope of willful ignorance.
https://www.bespacific.com/chaos-in-minneapolis-exposes-an-internet-at-war-with-truth/
Chaos in Minneapolis Exposes an Internet at War With Truth
The New York Times, Gift Article – “…Experts fear that Americans are losing their ability to distinguish between fact and fiction — and that fewer people seem to care about the difference. The online churn that now accompanies any major news event obscures the common reference points that once helped guide the country forward. With technology, impudence and apathy all colliding at once, the shock to American attitudes toward reality — and the public consensus required by the democratic experiment — may be a permanent one, experts said. “In moments past, we thought that this online fever would break, and now it is a systemic feature rather than a bug,” said Graham Brookie, the senior director of the Digital Forensic Research Lab, which studies online communities. “This is just how it is right now — we’re all collectively navigating that for the worse.” Although these volatile forces have been amassing for years, the collective threat they posed remained largely theoretical. Even compared with the informational chaos of 2020, which included Covid-19 conspiracy theories and baseless claims of election fraud, facts and truth now face a far more hostile environment. Disinformation watchdogs are under increasing political pressure from Republicans, and researchers have lost funding.
The audience for fact checks is far outstripped by interest in false and misleading posts. Initiatives at social media platforms such as X and Facebook to limit or remove such content have been slashed or abandoned, leaving the digital sewage to flow directly to users. Social media is flooded with so much dubious content, such as The result: an “authenticity collapse,” said Alon Yamin, the chief executive of Copyleaks, which offers tools to detect the presence of A.I. in content. “The internet is lying by default, and the media ecosystem is just flooded with content that you know looks real, sounds real but is definitely not real,” he said. “There is a danger here of almost losing touch with reality.”…
(Related)
https://www.bespacific.com/nearly-half-of-americans-believed-top-false-claims-in-2025/
Nearly Half of Americans Believed Top False Claims in 2025
NewsGuard: “Over the first seven months of Reality Gap Index reports — from June to December 2025 — NewsGuard found that an average of nearly half of Americans believed at least one false claim about major claims spreading in the news. For the first six months after the launch of the NewsGuard Reality Gap Index in June, the average percent of Americans who believed false claims was 50 percent. A dip in December reduced the average to 46 percent for the seven months of 2025. The monthly variations, of course, may have less to do with changes in Americans’ gullibility than with changes in the velocity, spread, and overall appeal of a particular false claim. For example, in July and August, when the Reality Gap Index reached a high of 64 percent, two particularly viral false claims dominated the news: that U.S. President Donald Trump declared martial law to address the crime problem in Washington D.C., and that Florida’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ immigrant detention center was surrounded by an alligator-infested moat.
NewsGuard’s Reality Gap Index is the nation’s first ongoing measurement of Americans’ propensity to believe at least one of the top three false claims circulating online each month, sourced from NewsGuard’s False Claims Fingerprints data stream. Through a monthly survey of a representative sample of Americans conducted by YouGov, the Reality Gap Index measures the percentage of Americans who believe one or more of the month’s top three false claims…”
