How the Internet Is Loosening Our Grip on the Truth

many of us have burrowed into our own echo chambers of information. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 81 percent of respondents said that partisans not only differed about policies, but also about “basic facts.”...
if you study the dynamics of how information moves online today, pretty much everything conspires against truth... when confronted with diverse information choices, people rarely act like rational, civic-minded automatons. Instead, we are roiled by preconceptions and biases, and we usually do what feels easiest — we gorge on information that confirms our ideas, and we shun what does not.
homogeneous online networks help conspiracy theories persist and grow online.... creates an ecosystem in which the truth value of the information doesn’t matter.
Documentary proof seems to have lost its power... two people with differing points of view can look at the same picture, video or document and come away with strikingly different ideas about what it shows.