Are We Living in a World Too Easy to Fool?
Yesterday I had this thought that won't leave me alone: we might be living in the most propagandised era
Yesterday I had this thought that won’t leave me alone: we might be living in the most propagandised era in human history, and the worst part is how natural it all feels.
I don’t want to sound controversial or paranoid. This is just my opinion, but it’s hard not to notice how everything around us feels filtered, shaped by someone’s motives, someone’s lens.
Every single piece of information you’ve ever seen came from someone. A person with biases, beliefs, and baggage. You can’t separate the information from the person delivering it, no matter how neutral they try to sound. Even well-meaning writers filter facts through their own lens. It’s not always sinister. Sometimes it’s just inevitable. But it means every article, every video, carries someone’s worldview stitched into it.
The Speed Problem
And now we’ve built machines that spread things faster than truth ever needed to move. Truth doesn’t chase; it stands, steady and unchanged, a landmark we eventually have to return to. It is humanity that runs, chasing headlines, outrage, and clicks.
Social media algorithms don’t care about accuracy; they care about engagement: clicks, shares, rage, tears, anything that keeps you scrolling. A lie wrapped in emotion spreads faster than a fact ever could. By the time the correction arrives, the false version has already circled the world.
That is why misinformation wins so easily. The emotional, attention-grabbing version gets there first, and by the time truth stands before us again, the damage is already done.
When Seeing Isn’t Believing
Then there’s the tech itself. Deepfakes that look real. Screenshots edited so cleanly you’d never spot the difference. AI churning out text that sounds authoritative even when it’s complete nonsense. We used to say “seeing is believing,” but that doesn’t work anymore. Reality and illusion have become neighbours, and the fence between them keeps getting shorter.
We Believe What We Want to Believe
We’re partly to blame, too. Sometimes we don’t just fall for propaganda. We want to believe it. All of us have confirmation bias. We’re naturally drawn to information that fits what we already think. It feels right, it feels true, because it sounds like the voice already in our heads. And that makes us incredibly easy to influence.
We’re not just passive victims getting tricked. We actively seek out the version of reality that makes us feel correct, vindicated, on the right side of things. This explains why people believe misinformation even when evidence contradicts it. You don’t need some grand conspiracy when people will happily share things that confirm their worldview without checking if it’s actually real. We become willing participants in our own manipulation.
History Written by Winners (and Wikipedia Editors)
There’s that old saying: history is written by the winners. I wasn’t sure about it at first, but the more you look, the more it seems like the “good guys” always win in the history books. Funny, that. Makes you wonder who decided they were the good guys in the first place. Of course, it isn’t always true, but it often feels that way.
These days, though, history isn’t just written by winners. It’s written by whoever gets to the Wikipedia page first. Anyone can edit it, as long as they follow the rules. There are moderators and bots trying to keep it honest, but it’s still just people making decisions about what’s true. People with their own biases, their own blind spots, their own version of events.
And now we’ve got ChatGPT and tools like it, trained on mountains of human-written text. Every book, article, and website it learned from was created by someone with a perspective. Human trainers rated its answers, engineers tweaked how it thinks. It’s not neutral. It can’t be. It’s a reflection of all the humans who shaped it, biases included. We’ve basically taught a machine to think like us, then asked it to give us objective answers.
The Convenience Trap
Nobody reads books to research things anymore. Why would you? You can ask ChatGPT or check Wikipedia and have your answer in thirty seconds. We want information quick. We want it now. And we’ve stopped caring where it actually comes from.
The truth is, most of us don’t have the time (or honestly, the patience) to dig through original sources or verify every fact. So we trust whatever pops up first. We trust the algorithm to decide what’s important. We trust the AI because it sounds confident. We trust Wikipedia because surely someone else has already fact-checked it, right?
We’ve traded depth for speed, and we don’t even notice what we’ve lost in the exchange. This convenience is another reason why people believe misinformation. When getting the truth requires effort and getting a comforting lie takes seconds, most people choose the path of least resistance.
So How Do We Trust Anything?
How can we trust sources when everything comes filtered through human bias, amplified by algorithms built to grab our attention, and presented by tools that sound confident even when they’re making things up?
I don’t have a perfect answer. But awareness helps. Knowing that every source has an agenda makes you harder to fool. Checking perspectives you disagree with gives you a fuller picture. Asking “who benefits from me believing this?” buys you a fighting chance.
Here’s something that actually works: truth usually matches across ideologies. If both left-leaning and right-leaning outlets agree on a fact, it’s likely accurate. When different perspectives with opposing biases reach the same conclusion, you’ve probably found something solid.
Understanding why people believe misinformation is the first step to protecting yourself from it. Once you see the patterns (the emotional manipulation, the confirmation bias, the speed over accuracy), you can start to resist them.
Am I Overthinking This?
Maybe this is a genuine concern. Maybe I’m just being paranoid.
But when I look around at how easily lies travel, how quickly people believe what they want to hear, how seamlessly fake blends with real, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re standing at the edge of something dangerous. A world where truth becomes whatever sounds most convincing. Where reality is just another opinion.
And the scariest part? Most people won’t even notice it happening.
Read about “How to Stay True in a World Obsessed with Applause” here.
