Democracy and truth

Guests: Samantha Cole, Sophia Rosenfeld

Fake news, lies, incendiary rhetoric, and spin have been blamed for much of the extreme political polarization taking place in America today. It’s often said that social media and an overabundance of unverified information on the internet has caused the voting public to be confused, if not outright misinformed. Sometimes it seems like that we are all operating within separate realities, with a different set of facts. But our guest today, University of Pennsylvania professor of history SOPHIA ROSENFELD, argues in her new book, Democracy and Truth, that in a democracy there has always been an argument about what is true. But first, we’ll hear about the latest phenomenon in mass disinformation, so-called “DeepFakes.” VICE reporter SAMANTHA COLE will tell us about how new technology of manipulating video and audio is the future of fake news, and whether or not we should be worried about it.