Post-truth politics is the privatisation of reality

In November 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary chose 'post-truth' as its word of the year. The definition was clinical: 'relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief'. A decade on, the definition reads almost quaint. The 2024 deepfake of Sadhguru endorsing a financial scheme reached millions before correction. The doctored Rashmika Mandanna video of November 2023 spread for days before fact-checkers caught up. WhatsApp groups in small Indian towns have circulated lynching-inducing rumours, sometimes with fatal results — Dhule 2018, Karbi Anglong 2018, Palghar 2020 all began with circulated misinformation. Post-truth, properly understood, is not the death of facts; it is the privatisation of reality. Each tribe gets its own truth, served on its own feed. The public square dissolves into a thousand private rooms. Democracy, which requires citizens to argue from at least overlapping facts, finds itself without ground.

The mechanics are now well understood. Generative artificial intelligence has driven the marginal cost of fabricating a photograph, a voice clone or a thirty-second video to nearly zero. A college student in 2025 can produce a convincing forgery on a laptop; a state actor can produce one in minutes. Algorithmic amplification, designed for engagement rather than accuracy, then carries the fake further than the correction. Frances Haugen's 2021 Facebook revelations showed that platforms' own research identified the harm and chose not to fix it. The 2018 MIT Media Lab study published in Science demonstrated that false news on Twitter travels six times faster than true news. The architecture of the modern information ecosystem is built for velocity, not verification. The Cambridge Analytica revelations of 2018 demonstrated that the same architecture is monetisable for political manipulation at industrial scale, with India among the countries reportedly targeted.

India's response has been incremental and contested. The IT Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules of 2021 imposed traceability and grievance-officer obligations on platforms. The 2025 Amendment, notified in October 2025, requires labelling of synthetic media and faster takedown for deepfakes. The PIB Fact Check Unit, granted authority by amended Rule 3(1)(b)(v), can flag content as 'fake' for intermediaries — though the Bombay High Court partly stayed the provision in 2024 over free-speech concerns. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 strengthens consent and data accuracy, indirectly relevant to identity-based misinformation. The Delhi High Court's Anil Kapoor v Simply Life India judgment of September 2023 recognised personality rights as enforceable against AI-generated impersonation; the Amitabh Bachchan order of November 2022 had begun the pattern. Each step is a partial answer to a moving target — the regulator legislates while the technology evolves under the legislation.

Global lessons matter. The European Union's Digital Services Act, in force since August 2023, requires very large online platforms to undergo annual risk audits, with penalties of up to six per cent of global turnover. Singapore's Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act 2019 empowers ministers to order corrections, with parliamentary review. Australia's News Media Bargaining Code of 2021 forced platforms to compensate news outlets, partially restoring journalism as a check on misinformation. The European Union AI Act of 2024 mandates labelling of AI-generated content. India still relies largely on self-regulation through the Press Council and the News Broadcasting and Digital Standards Authority; reform proposals for a statutory media regulator with judicial oversight, as recommended by the Justice Sikri Committee in 2024, remain on the table. The right comparative framework borrows enforcement teeth without importing speech-control reflexes.

The deepest objection to any anti-misinformation legal regime is that the State is an unsafe arbiter of truth. Shreya Singhal v Union of India (24 March 2015) struck down Section 66A of the IT Act because the section was 'vague, overbroad and chilling'. The parallel with the long-contested Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code on sedition is direct: laws written to suppress falsehood drift toward suppressing dissent. Authoritarian regimes worldwide cite 'fake news' to jail journalists. A robust democracy must therefore prefer transparency, media literacy and competitive truth-telling to centralised speech control. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting can demand labels; it cannot decide what is true. The Information Commissioner's office in Britain, the FTC in the United States and the Conseil Constitutionnel in France all illustrate the same lesson: speech regulators that survive over decades are those with adversarial structures, independent budgets and demonstrable distance from the political executive.

That preference, however, requires its own infrastructure. Public broadcasting of integrity, school curricula in critical thinking, fact-checking organisations with platform-independent funding, journalism trained in source-verification, and a citizenry that knows the difference between an emotional cue and an evidentiary claim — these are the slow defences. None scales as fast as generative models, which is precisely why their patient building matters. India's 2024 launch of the Digital India Bhashini-powered Indic content moderation pilot is a small but significant step: misinformation in regional languages, long under-policed, may now be flagged automatically. The Press Information Bureau, IFCN-certified Indian fact-checkers like BoomLive, AltNews and FactChecker, and the Internet and Mobile Association of India's voluntary code of ethics for political advertising all add layers to the defence. Each layer is permeable; together they slow the spread of falsehood enough for truth to catch up.

The cultural dimension cannot be deferred. A society in which the citizen privately wants to be lied to — because the truth is inconvenient, the lie is comforting, and the tribe rewards belief over evidence — cannot be saved by any regulator. The schools, the seminaries, the workplaces, the dinner tables are where the appetite for truth is built or eroded. Stand-up comedy that ridicules propaganda, journalism that names error fearlessly, art that holds up the mirror, and friendship that argues without rupturing each contribute. The economics of attention may be hostile, but pockets of integrity persist and compound.

Hannah Arendt, writing in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), warned that 'the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists, and the distinction between true and false no longer matters'. Two-thirds of a century later, that subject is being manufactured at industrial scale, not by ideology but by algorithm. Defending shared reality may be the most under-rated democratic struggle of the twenty-first century. The republic's task is to refuse, every day, the privatisation of the public mind — to insist, with patience and humour, that some things did happen and some things did not, and that argument worth having begins there. Without that insistence, the polling booth and the parliament become ceremonies performed on a shared stage that no longer exists.