Fake News and Information Warfare: An Examination of the Political and Psychological Processes From the Digital Sphere to the Real World

Background: Key Terms In The Post-Truth Era

What is going on? One might argue that Americans in 2016 were ready to believe just about anything. Comedian Stephen Colbert had over a decade before coined the word “truthiness” to refer to “the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true” (Oxford Living Dictionaries, 2018). After the 2016 election, the late Senator John McCain expressed alarm at “the growing inability, and even unwillingness, to separate truth from lies.” (John McCain, 2017). In a post-truth world, objective truth does not matter, and what is truthful or factual is opinion-based and therefore purely in the eye of the beholder. America had become “untethered from reality,” a “fatasyland,” Kurt Andersen wrote in The Atlantic (2017, December 28). Now more than ever, Americans are confused about even “basic facts” and 64% of Americans say that fake news has caused confusion (Mitchell et al. 2016).