"American society is more polarized than ever before. We are strategically being pushed apart by disinformation--the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth--and it comes at us from all sides: opportunists on the far right, Russian misinformed social media influencers, among others. It's endangering our democracy and causing havoc in our electoral system, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and in our Capitol. Advances in technology including...

In this age of intense political conflict, we sense objective fact is growing less important. Experts are attacked as partisan, statistics and scientific findings are decried as propaganda, and public debate devolves into personal assaults. How did we get here, and what can we do about it? In this sweeping and provocative work, political economist William Davies draws on a four-hundred-year history of ideas to reframe our understanding of the contemporary...

"A sociotechnical society must consider how data-driven and algorithmic systems impact decision-making at both the macro-level, such as policy and culture, and the micro-level, such as voting and purchasing. Tripodi applies social theory to her empirical research on how communities make meaning and engage with data-driven and algorithmic systems in everyday life. Her data reveal that conservative elites use media platforms in unintended or unanticipated...

In What's the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank pointed out that a great number of Americans actually vote against their own interests. In The Political Mind, George Lakoff explains why.

"If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine respectable journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, you would make something a lot like Facebook. Of course, none of that was part of the plan. In Antisocial Media, Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from...

"Despite all the attention paid to it, the problem of online disinformation is only getting worse. Social media may well play a role in the 2020 presidential election and other major political events. But that doesn't begin to describe what future propaganda will look like. As Samuel Woolley shows, we will soon be navigating new technologies such as human-like automated voice systems, machine learning, "deepfake" AI-edited videos and images, interactive...

Every week on the public radio show On the Media, the award-winning journalist Brooke Gladstone analyzes the media and how it shapes our perceptions of the world. Now, from her front-row perch on the day's events, Gladstone brings her genius for making insightful, unexpected connections to help us understand what she calls-and what so many of us can acknowledge having-"trouble with reality." Reality, as she shows us, was never what we thought it was-there...