When cofounding NewsGuard in 2018, Steven Brill recalls, “We thought we were right in the middle of this total shitstorm of misinformation.” But that was before the 2020 election, the COVID pandemic, January 6, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas war, and another presidential race playing out in deeply polarized America. “We were really in the calm before the storm even though we thought it was the storm,” Brill told me in an interview. “And with generative AI, it’s only going to get much worse before it gets better.”
It can feel like grim times for trying to live in a fact-based world, as bogus and conspiratorial claims flow freely across the internet and social media, a subject Brill explores in his new book, The Death of Truth. Brill, a veteran journalist and entrepreneur—he launched The American Lawyer, Brill’s Content, and Court TV—diagnoses the infodemic of our age, while also offering solutions, ranging from reforming Section 230, the law that shields internet companies from liability over content on their platforms, to suing social media companies for violating their own terms of service, to reining in programmatic advertising, in which an algorithm places automated ads based on users’ demographic data. A consequence of such advertising is major brands may inadvertently help prop up purveyors of misinformation. (One of the services offered by NewsGuard, along with providing reliability ratings for news outlets, addresses programmatic advertising.)
In a riveting Vanity Fair excerpt published this week, Brill recounted how his work at NewsGuard led to him being targeted by John Dougan—an American who, as The New York Times reported last week, spreads disinformation from Russia, where he has been given asylum—and House Republicans, led by Representative Jim Jordan. “We got an email from Chairman Jordan in essence accusing us of exactly the same thing that Dougan had accused of, which was, we were shills for the deep state,” Brill said. “The irony wasn’t lost on me. It’s a tragic comedy, but it’s not funny.”
“Their priority, basically, is to destroy the notion that there actually is truth in the world, that there actually are facts,” Brill added. “What the Death of the Truth is really about is the notion that everything has become a matter of opinion.”
In an interview, edited for length and clarity, Brill discusses his motivation for the book, how AI accelerates the misinformation crisis, and where he sees some hope for the news media.
Vanity Fair: I’d love to start with your motivation for the book. You wrote, “If we can understand how truth has been so eviscerated, we can see how to restore it.” To me, that sort of captured it.
Steven Brill: That’s exactly it. I’ve been living in this world, as you know, and what I started to think about, a year and a half ago, is that all these forces seem to combine in a perfect storm…. The combination of the algorithms of social media and [programmatic advertising], which inadvertently finances all this stuff. Together, they’ve created an ecosystem where nobody believes anything. You go online, and if you’re an average person, you just don’t know what to believe. I wanted to sort of dissect how that happened, explain the ramifications of it, but also explain what we can do about it.
Along the way, I’ve come to realize that it’s an even more serious problem than I thought, and that there are some actors like the Russians, who are much more serious about this and much more advanced about this, and much more on the way to using this as a way to really upend the global order than even I realized.
You’ve been looking critically at our information ecosystem for a long time, founding a media watchdog publication, [Brill’s Content], as well as an organization, NewsGuard. Even since 2018—that’s before the misinformation/disinformation around COVID, “Stop the Steal,” Ukraine-Russia war—it feels like things are only accelerating. But what has been your experience?
That’s absolutely right. When we started NewsGuard, in 2018, we thought we were right in the middle of this total shitstorm of misinformation, and yet it was before COVID, before “Stop the Steal,” before the vaccine misinformation, before January 6, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, before the Israel-Hamas war, and before what is now the current election. So we were really in the calm before the storm, even though we thought it was the storm. And with generative AI, it’s only going to get much worse before it gets better.
