Steven Brill’s new book, ‘The Death of Truth,’ Warns That Internet Goliaths Are Anything But ‘Good Samaritans’ – The Village Voice

Steven Brill is no stranger to the news cycle. As co-founder of NewsGuard, which rates the reliability of news and information websites, he has a front-row seat to what he calls “A world where facts — shared truths — have lost their power to hold us together as a nation.”

In The Death of Truth: How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World — and What We Can Do About It, Brill documents the forces and people who have created and exploited our world of information chaos and political division. He dissects the way our current landscape of misinformation was set into motion in 1996, when Congress amended the nation’s Telecommunications Act, which was first passed in 1934 to accommodate the telephone, telegraph, and radio industries. 

Explaining the mood of Congress in 1996, Brill writes, “The goal of the legislation was an overhaul of telecommunications law … spurred by bipartisan recognition that the booming 20-year-old cable television industry was becoming a major force that required sweeping changes to a regulatory scheme that had been put in place 61 years earlier.”

While the telecommunications amendments were in play on the House floor, members added three paragraphs to the draft legislation, known as Section 230, which addressed the exploding Internet. As Brill explains, “the power to communicate has gone from the slingshot age to the nuclear age,” and this accelerating tech helped current Internet providers push us further into the misinformation abyss. Back in the mid-’90s, there were three providers — AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy — with 1 million members collectively drawn from the 14% of American households with dial-up access. Today, Internet users worldwide number 5.44 billion, or 67.1% of the global population, according to the International Telecommunication Union. As of 2024, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the Internet is accessible to nearly 95% of the U.S. population, more than 320 million citizens. The Pew Research Center reports that 9 out of 10 U.S. adults say they use the Internet every day; 41% of those adults say they use the Internet “almost constantly.”

Brill calls for the end of online anonymity.

The purpose of Section 230 was to provide “Good Samaritan” protections to existing Internet companies, allowing them to avoid legal liability for content posted online by users — even if harmful. As is often the case with any legislation, there can be unintended consequences. Reed Hundt, FCC chairman at the time, thought the section “was no big deal.” He later told Brill, “We never dreamed that Section 230 would be a protection mechanism for a new group of manipulators — the social media companies with their algorithms. Those companies didn’t exist then.” For perspective, Brill notes, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was 12 years old when Hundt made his original comment.

“Civil society is unraveling,” Brill writes, sounding the alarm that Internet carriers have been anything but Good Samaritans. Echoing Hundt, he posits that Silicon Valley’s decision — following the 1996 Telecommunications Act amendments — to intentionally code algorithms embedded in their social media platforms to maximize profits has resulted in endless divisive content.

Further exacerbating divisiveness and misinformation, Brill writes, was — and is — Big Tech’s intentional feeding of ad dollars to websites. On page 64 of his 317-page book, Brill notes, “I have now mentioned advertising revenue several times as being the driver of so much that we see online.” He goes on to point out a serious consequence: “Approximately 35% of the thousands of news websites in the top 95% of engagement in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Australia, and New Zealand are highly unreliable.”

Brill also blames the individuals, who he calls “bad actors,” who inflame misinformation for their own purposes. First, he cites “charlatans promoting bogus health cures and other phony products, conspiracy theorists, and just plain deranged people who promote disinformation.” Second, there are the disenfranchised, who “for some reason feel left behind, threatened, or otherwise distrustful and vulnerable enough to buy into what the bad actors are selling.”

Against this backdrop of debilitating factors, Brill provides readers with many rich instances of how the Internet’s flourishing misinformation chaos has shaped our thinking — to the point that “The decline of truth — the level of distrust in what should be accepted facts, conveyed by what were once trusted sources of information … is unprecedented.” One prominent example that he stresses: “The measles vaccine works and is safe. It does not cause autism, ADHD, or other illness.” Even so, conspiracy theories about vaccine dangers, he observes, have forced a drop in vaccinations in both the U.S. and Europe.

“Some 20% of orgs have been found to be unreliable.”

Another example is how mass shootings have become knotted up in lies online. Brill cites the October 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, which he notes “was not a ‘false flag’ operation staged by pro-gun control groups,” as claimed by a conspiracy website based in Maine. But within 24 hours, the misleading claim had notched 96,900 views on X.

A third instance involves technology, with Brill stating, “5G cell technology doesn’t cause cancer, nor did it cause COVID-19, but those twin myths — which were promoted, beginning in 2019, by Russian disinformation operations because Russia was behind on the technology and wanted to discredit it — spread so virally that technicians in the U.K. working on phone lines were attacked by angry mobs.”

Brill’s assertions continue to play out in real-time. FactCheck.org recently reported that the July 13 attempt to assassinate former president Donald Trump provided yet another occasion for bad actors to disseminate confusing information to the public about what had actually happened. Online posts that were fact-checked and debunked included “unfounded claims that a woman at the rally acted ‘suspicious,’” But the FBI has stated that the “investigation to date indicates the shooter acted alone.” Another false online post about the first Trump assassination attempt changed the name of Italian sportswriter Marco Violi to Mark Violets and then claimed that he was involved in the shooting. Violi told Reuters that he was “in Italy … and I didn’t have the slightest idea what happened.”

“This crisis is not inevitable or irreversible. There are a variety of specific, practical steps … that we can take to reverse this devastating erosion of trust,” Brill writes, including demanding that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission enforce contracts already in place requiring social media giants to audit their posts to ensure they are authentic.

Another solution Brill proposes is to amend Section 230 so that a social media company would lose its immunity from legal liability if, in processing posts, it used “an algorithm, model, or other computational process to rank, order, promote, recommend, amplify, or similarly alter the information.” Another step would be to “condition Section 230 immunity on a platform offering to integrate tools called middleware into its products,” so users would get more information about who is feeding them news.

Notably, Brill calls for the end of online anonymity. He observes that some platforms, such as Facebook, require accounts to be opened with a real name, while most others do not, making verification of facts in user posts nearly impossible, given the sheer volume of postings.

Brill also underscores the need to toughen enforcement of campaign finance laws to require full public disclosure of “pink slime” sites, purported news outlets that are actually fake partisan operations publishing poor-quality news reports that appear to be local news. He states that by the end of 2023, “the number of real news sites in the United States operated by real local daily newspapers has declined, while the number of so-called pink-slime news sites has increased to the point that there were about the same number (about 1,200) of each.” Brill’s contention was backed up by a 2019 Columbia Journalism Review report that found more than 450 pink slime websites in the U.S., which has since hit the 1,200 mark. Most of the sites operate as part of a network owned by larger conglomerates, such as Metric Media, largely with the goal of influencing politics. Such sites, says Brill, should be required to disclose their political mission, and who is financing the operation.

Brill’s last chapter is a hefty outline of what he thinks can be done to restore truthfulness to our news cycle and weed out mis/disinformation on the Internet in general.

“Some 20% of orgs have been found to be unreliable,” Brill writes, prompting him to call for teaching consumers “online hygiene” to help them identify scams. He notes, “Multiple researchers say K-12 students and the elderly need skills to weed out disinformation.” With AI’s recent emergence, Brill recommends steps that would allow only licensed companies fully committed to the strict regulation of generative AI, based on strict vetting of their software products, to operate online. This reform would mean that online sites creating, wholly or in part, “generative AI” such as text, images, music, audio, and video “would have to have a visible insignia prominently disclosing that it is using a licensed generative AI product.”

Another deep change recommended by Brill involves taming the programmatic advertising industry. He would have the “US Securities and Exchange Commission and similar regulatory agencies in other countries … require that all publicly traded companies file an annual report listing the websites on which the company spent more than a negligible amount (say $10,000) on advertising.” This is important, given the confusion created by programmatic advertising, because “We have seen that thousands of advertisers, including the world’s blue chip brands, financially support websites they would seemingly not want their brands associated with.” The end result, he notes, is that “Brands of all kinds advertise on sites promoting … varieties of hoaxes and toxic content….” A 2023 Association of National Advertisers survey revealed that “billions of dollars are supporting these kinds of websites.” That metric leads Brill to argue, “Shareholders have a right to know how their money is being spent.”

Political reform is at the center of Brill’s solutions to our “polarization and sense of government paralysis.” He encourages citizen-driven ballot initiatives to attack the problem through state constitutions. For example, he recommends that states change their method of conducting primary elections to a “top two” system, as used for some elections in California, Nebraska, and Washington, in which anyone seeking state or local office enters the same primary, regardless of their political party. In other words, voters cast ballots for who they think are the best two candidates for the job, as opposed to following party loyalty.

Finally, Brill laments that “legislators in charge choose their own voters” through gerrymandering, the manipulation of geographic boundaries to favor one political party. He envisions a system in which citizen-driven ballot referenda eliminate gerrymandering by having voting districts determined by independent nonpartisan commissions, following the lead of Michigan and Colorado. Historically, sitting legislators and political party operatives have controlled the process.

Underpinning Brill’s recommendations is a call for robust public debate leading to actions that create disincentives to Big Tech’s “intentionally coding advertising and content algorithms embedded in their social media platforms to maximize profits but end up promoting endless divisive content.”

Brill concludes, “Those who have been lured to the fringes will start to believe again in democracy, in government, and in other institutions and experts. They will be less likely to believe that the world is full of conspiracies that threaten them. They will start to believe in truth again.”  ❖

Frank Pizzoli is a journalist who has been covering politics, queer issues, healthcare, and literary celebrities for the past 25 years.