The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has named post-truth as its word of the politically tumultuous year that was 2016.
Post-truth doesn’t mean that truth is no longer important to people, but it does indicate the way we understand truth has changed: ‘Objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’
Zuckerberg’s defence
Aptly only a few days before the OED’s announcement, Mark Zuckerberg was defending Facebook against charges that fake news was responsible for swinging the US election. Were algorithms disproportionately profiling some ‘news’ articles and suppressing others? There were even suggestions that Russia was hacking the algorithms to influence the result.
