We DO have power to change this! Let’s uplift truth, not feed the outrage. #TruthBrigade

  • The Value of Truth– “Indeed, a striking feature of our current political landscape is that we disagree not just over values (which is healthy in a democracy), and not just over facts (which is inevitable), but over our very standards for determining what the facts are. Call this knowledge polarization, or polarization over who knows—which experts to trust, and what is rational and what isn’t…Why does that happen? One possibility is that our psychological frailties—certain attitudes of mind—get baked into our ideologies. And perhaps no attitude is more toxic than intellectual arrogance, the psychosocial attitude that you have nothing to learn from anyone else because you already know it all.”
  • The real stakes of the war for your attention: How the attention economy is reshaping our world– “So this problem is old, but I think it’s so sheer right now. Overcoming the compulsions, the siren’s call, the lowest-common-denominator, tabloid, casino effect of everything in a very competitive attention environment where we’re driven toward the lowest common denominator…It malforms the public’s ability to reason collectively, to think of issues independent of what just sustains our attention from moment to moment. Because what sustains our attention from moment to moment is distinct from what is important.”
  • The right dominates the online media ecosystem, seeping into sports, comedy, and other supposedly nonpolitical spaces – “Our analysis — which looked entirely at shows with an ideological bent — found over a third self-identify as nonpolitical, even though 72% of those shows were determined to be right-leaning.”
  • What We Get Wrong About Creators – “The right-wing media machine doesn’t just use creators; it finds them and empowers them, giving them platforms, resources, and legitimacy…The Left must do more than just counter right-wing narratives—it must build its own. To do that, the Democratic Party–and left and progressive organizations–need to find centers of alignment and amplification. That means embracing digital culture, empowering new voices, engaging their base, and over time becoming a coalition that actually embraces the changes people want to see. The future belongs to those who shape the narrative, and right now, the left is playing by rules dictated by the right. It’s time to change the game.”
  • How Social Media Rewards Misinformation – By constantly reinforcing sharing—any sharing—with likes and comments, platforms have created habitual users who are largely unconcerned with the content they post. And these habitual users, the research shows, spread a disproportionate share of misinformation. “It’s not that people are lazy or don’t want to know the truth,” Ceylan says. “The platforms’ reward systems are wrong.”

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