BROADCASTS.com

b'

Between the hours of 3 AM and 5 AM Friday morning, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump went on a tweetstorm in which he was, you know, just saying that Hillary Clinton helped former Miss Universe (and a target of Trump\\u2019s misogyny) Alicia Machado become a US citizen \\u201cso she could use her in the debate.\\u201d

Is that true? Like, almost certainly not\\u2014but in this election season, truth and facts hardly seem to matter. Trump\'s attacks on Machado are just the latest data point\\xa0in\\xa0an election cycle that has seen wild speculation, rampant exaggeration, and outright lies become accepted as fact by huge swaths of the electorate on both sides of the aisle.

If we\\u2019re living in a post-factual era, how did we get here? Vincent F. Hendricks set up the Center for Information and Bubble Studies at the University of Copenhagen to study how individual and media behavior online has created a reality where virality, social spread, and repetition is all that\\u2019s required for people to believe something is true.

While \\u201cfacts\\u201d haven\\u2019t gone totally by the wayside, the way we cherry pick facts to make alternate realities has created a political system (and a culture) where we can\\u2019t have rational arguments because we can\\u2019t even agree on a baseline of truth.

Radio Motherboard spoke to Hendricks about this week\\u2019s debate and about his new book, Infostorms, which explores how our likes, upvotes, retweets, coupled with social media algorithms and brash politicians with a disregard for the truth are redefining rational society.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.