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In 2016, Oxford Languages announced “post-truth” as its word-of-the-year. It seems ironic that a typical reader of this statement might doubt the truth that “post-truth” is the word-of-the-year or that a venerated source such as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) even makes such pronouncements. How is one to know when anyone can create a webpage anointing a word with such imprimatur? As it turns out, the OED’s 2018 word-of-the-year was “toxic,” and its 2019 selection was “climate emergency” (Oxford University Press, n.d.). The rationale offered for post-truth, which was an adjective defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief,” was the extent to which post-truth politics had been recently “spiking in frequency” after “simmering for the past decade” (Oxford Languages, 2020).

Increasingly, it seems that “in no other place is instability and post-truth more apparent, than within social media” (Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2019, p. 584). This nascent post-truth zeitgeist early in the new millennium has already produced a variegated landscape of signposts, including fake news, fake websites, junk news, deep fakes, trolling, rumor bombs, hoaxes, computational propaganda, pseudoscience, and high-tech plagiarisms. Some scholars have treated fake news as a rhetorical ploy to create moral panics (e.g., Carlson, 2020). Other scholars celebrate the opportunity for deconstructing traditional “truth regimes” that seem increasingly malleable in their instability (Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2019) in the pursuit of an idealized open society fostered by such theories (Clarke, 2002). Others still might consider such narrative diversity a guard against the hegemonic ideological regime of science (Feyerabend, 1980). Still other scholars view fake news as a sign and vehicle of a new paradigm of post-truth.

The whole essence of the theory of empiricism, which is anchored on the acquisition of knowledge through the use of human senses has now been challenged with a new reality in which information via enabling technologies can make people see, hear and touch what never existed.

(Durodolu & Ibenne, 2020, p. 1)

Certainly, it is reasonable to ask if belief in conspiracy theories serves beneficial functions for their believers (Douglas et al., 2019). Further, in regard to conspiracy theories, history tragically demonstrates that not all conspiracies are false (Pigden, 1995). However, fake news, ironically, is real, as are its consequences. It is not necessary to view it as some seem to, as intrinsically dystopic (Guarda et al., 2018), but its net effects on society need to be considered carefully. The increasing generation of dismisinformation, or “truth decay” (Kavanagh & Rich, 2018), represents a significant threat to open societies, as “it erodes civil discourse; weakens key institutions; and poses economic, diplomatic and cultural costs” (p. ix). “Rumors and conspiracy theories about the pandemic pose a significant threat not only to democratic institutions such as a free, open and trusted press, but also to the physical well-being of the citizenry” (Shahsavari et al., 2020, p. 1). In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, such dismisinformation poses a threat to life itself (Romer & Jamieson, 2020).

There are glimmers of hope. A global survey by 3M indexes public attitudes toward science. The 2020 survey found a trend of decreasing agreement with the statement "I am skeptical of science" from pre- (35%) to post- (28%) pandemic, and a corresponding increase in trust of science. Scientists are normatively trusted as sources (67% to 84%) compared to friends or family (60%), colleagues (48%), company websites (47%), social media posts (27%), politicians (27%), or celebrities (25%). Much of these trends appears directly attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic. Research indicates that, at least on Facebook, the amount of user interactions with fake news recently decreased, even if such interaction was unchanged on Twitter (Allcott et al., 2019). Such optimism needs to be qualified, however, by the fact that this decrease represented a shift from 160 million engagements per month by the end of 2016 to 60 million, compared to 200–250 million engagements with more traditional news sources (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox News, etc.). Similarly, “on Twitter, shares of false content have been in the 3–5 million per month range since the end of 2016, compared to roughly 20 million per month for the major news sites” (Allcott et al., 2019, p. 4). That is, false information is still engaging tens of millions of people through social media, even after both media platforms instituted various internal algorithmic and surveillance changes intended to contend with such false information.

There is a plenty of space for critical and interpretive theory to contribute to managing such crises. However, implying that there are no immutable truths to such crises is not only untenable but dangerous. Diminution of fake news as mere trope, or celebrations of fake news as evidence of informational pluralism, must be tempered by the actual crises that increasingly threaten the human species, including climate change, despeciation, hunger, and, of course, diseases. Given that malignant actors and information distortion in social media can threaten democratic institutions, norms (Bradshaw & Howard, 2018; Brody & Meier, 2018; Nimmo et al., 2020; Pomerantsev & Weiss, 2014), and reforms (Jolley et al., 2018), disinformation cannot be presumed to produce net benefits in society. Some information can misinform and disinform in ways that exacerbate such crises, and in so doing, directly cause actual forms of cultural and institutional collapse along with widescale morbidity and mortality. There are those who infect media forums with toxicity in ways to disrupt, alienate, or control the narrative (Salminen et al., 2020). “Already we have seen people damage 5G infrastructure, assault people of Asian heritage, deliberately violate public health directives, and ingest home remedies, all in reaction to the various conspiracy theories active in social media and the news” (Shahsavari et al., 2020, p. 17). In the domain of economic systems, “digital misinformation has become so pervasive in online social media that it has been listed by the WEF [World Economic Forum] as one of the main threats to human society” (Del Vicario et al., 2016, p. 558). It may be only slightly ironic that climate change and pandemics are potential existential threats to our species’ survival, which makes the dystopic uses of information and communication that propel or sustain such threats their own kind of enabling existential threat.