The idea we can combat conspiracy theorists with facts is an illusion. We view the audiences of conspiracy influencers like Alex Jones as naïve and in need of educating: if only they could see the facts, they’d see the error of their ways. But the world of conspiracy, far from abandoning facts and reason, has claimed them stylistically as their own. Challenging the facts is not enough. We need a whole new mythology surrounding truth and truth-seeking. Writes Sun-ha Hong.

After every storm comes a limbo. The panic around the fake news and the end of facts has passed from a ubiquitous din to a familiar, if discomforting, elephant squatting in the room, occasionally reminding us: how exactly does mis/disinformation work? What makes so many of us so susceptible to it? Does all the fact-checking even help?  While there are many different forms of information pollution – the contamination of our media environment with low-quality or misleading information – the nature of this pollution is not a simple divide between good information and bad, and it is not effectively solved by stuffing people with more and more media literacy. Historians have reminded us that forms of ‘fake news’ have ever been a part of large-scale media systems, and that panics around mis/disinformation even date back to Antiquity: the very practice of history, after all, is often traced back to Thucydides, who sought to establish consistent standards for verifying information in his record of the Peloponnesian War.