Factoid and crowdsourced truth: The reversal of truth into significance
Digital reversals are everywhere
Read more: The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution (just published, available on Amazon). The entire book is written in tweets—1,295 of them.
Post-truth is defined by people’s attitudes, not by some ideal abstractions. As the media cater to audiences, people determine what’s significant in a given situation, and the subjective choices of many trump objective truth. Significance is subjectivity married to collectivity.
Subjectivity wasn’t the only media effect eroding absolute truth. Another was validating significance through mass consumption, as in public choice theory. By reading stories of their interest, readers participated in shaping the news agenda as an induced reality.
Mass media indeed created a reality that is neither material (perceivable through the senses) nor ideal (cognizable by reasoning), but induced by reporting. Among the first to notice it was Norman Mailer, who coined the term factoid in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe.*
According to Mailer, factoids are facts that exist nowhere but in media coverage. They are not lies; Marilyn was actually forced to comport with how mass culture depicted her. This, of course, aligns with Baudrillard’s simulacrum—a copy that exists before the original.
“Reported because important,” the alleged virtue of good journalism, reversed into “important because reported.” Factoids were validated not by reality but by mass distribution. This warped reality to meet mass expectations. Significance became a byproduct of mass distribution.
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The collective formation of significance came into full force on social media. The emancipation of authorship allowed everyone to share feedback directly, bypassing news editors. Digital media have completely detached truth from reality and attached it to the user.
In the Viral Editor, the validation of significance by distribution (as in old media) evolved into the verification of truth through viral distribution. Significance—collective subjectivity—replaced objective truth. Digital truth is collectively maintained, just like oral truth.
Since digital reality presents the world through the views of others, everyone’s truth is defined by the truths of others—amplified by algorithms for greater engagement. Social media have inaugurated crowdsourced truths as a side effect of their design.
Everyone on social media seeks validation from others but is also bombarded by countless requests for affirmation from them. Mutual validation drives interactions, mirroring tribal dynamics—albeit on a much larger scale, as digital tribes expand with no physical limits.
People still select and deliver important content to one another, but content no longer represents statements with truth-values that can be tested against absolute truth. Instead, content becomes a vehicle for expressing emotional attitudes. I share, therefore I am important.
In catering to the human struggle for recognition, social media encourage users to sacrifice “objective” content for affirmation. The content of our exchange becomes just a medium for agonistic status contests—a carrier for seeking affirmation from others.
The chances of affirmation rise if we comply with the truths of others. Digital is purely social. Instead of relying on the laws of the physical Universe, one must now conform to the values of the social Multiverse—or the part of it a person wants or needs to belong to.
Tribal solidarity is back as an ethical regulator. However, tribal solidarity implies a hierarchy built through agonism. Status is affirmed not only by caring but also by domination and bullying. As everyone can push for better affirmation, truth is negotiated again.
The automated means of reaction, such as likes and reposts, on social media do not require logical deliberation or justification. Under such a design, the point is to express the right attitude, not to convey true information. Truth is a referendum by likes.
Confirmation bias is embedded in the design: we trust what we “liked.” The truth that has already been verified by viral distribution is too good to be fact-checked. With no reality to refer to, collective digital truth is self-referential.
That’s why numbers matter: the more something is “liked,” the truer it feels to those who liked it. Likes bind people to what they liked, much like an investor’s stake makes him or her more invested in a project’s success. Success feels even greater when others join.
Collective subjectivity conditions people to join the bandwagon not just for emotional security but for epistemological verification. That’s why President Trump refers, as proof, to something confirmed by TV ratings or to what “everyone knows.”
Emancipated authorship reversed the encyclopedia into Wikipedia. It retrieved tribal ways of preserving knowledge, when bards recited each other’s stories and the crowd cheered the version of reality it liked. Digital truth is Wikitruth: made by influencers, cheered by the crowd.
The Viral Inquisitor oversees compliance with tribal truths. Wrong information is tolerated if it supports the right attitude, and right information is ignored if it supports the wrong attitude. In digital orality, seemingly objective knowledge is inevitably “contextualized.”
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Funny, some media, performing a rite of objectivity, frame inconvenient news as “no evidence found that…” Old-school journos couldn’t imagine using “no evidence” as a rebuttal. “No evidence” journalism treats its own blind spots as proofs—typical for digital truth’s selectivity.
Social media have completed the epistemological reversal of objective truth into virally defined social significance. One can mourn the loss of absolute truth and the culture built around it, but society must adapt to the reality of crowdsourced, negotiated truth.
The idea of a unified supreme knowledge, once a source of truth—and also of hegemony and oppression—naturally dissolves as humans resettle into the digital. The universal gives way to the multiversal. It doesn’t safeguard against oppression, though—only changes its mechanics.
Absolute truth isn’t gone—it’s just confined to sanctuaries or retains auxiliary value, while relative truth dominates elsewhere. Digital truth isn’t lies—it’s a valid epistemological principle for digital conditions, based on significance, collective subjectivity, and variability.
Digital truth, though collective and subjective, can still be rationalized. Unlike absolute truth, it’s more like a spectrum—like in a forecast: “70% chance of rain.” What many believe may be “digitally” true for now, but it’s wise to stay cautious—facts may change later.
To adequately navigate the digital environment, the brain must be trained to handle an epistemological framework that appears to claim a fixed, unchanging truth but is actually flexible, context-dependent, and represents “true-false” proportions and variables.
Dealing with this hybrid, fluid, and proportioned truth is a task for true digital media literacy, which, in fact, should be anti-environmental and therefore counter-digital.
Read more: The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution (just published—get it on Amazon).
* Before Norman Mailer coined the term “factoid” in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe, there was “pseudo-event,” introduced by Daniel J. Boorstin in his 1962 book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.” Pseudo-events are events that exist only “for the immediate purpose of being reported”—such as cutting a ribbon or the president pardoning a turkey.
See also books by Andrey Mir:
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
‘Truth is a referendum by likes’
Is this factoid going to necessitate a reconsideration of the structuring of our present definition of social tolerance ?
When you write that future digital media literacy will need to be anti-environmental I assume that you are not referring to physical but philosophical ecologies. Or have I misinterpreted ?
I appreciate reading your work. I read one of your books. Thank you for what you are doing to widen the understanding of media ecology.