Contrary to hype around big data, the explosion of available information amid eroding trust in media makes it harder, not easier, to achieve consensus on truth
It's not about foreign trolls, filter bubbles or fake news. Technology encourages us to believe we can all have first-hand access … Tweets: @jayrosen_nyu , @spj_tweets , and @ricksearle1 Tweets: Jay Rosen / @jayrosen_nyu : “The key thing is that the elites of government and the media have lost their monopoly over the provision of information, but retain their prominence in the public eye.” https://www.theguardian.com/ ... That is a concise explanation for why so much rage flows their way. @spj_tweets : “While it is true that arguments rage over dodgy facts and figures... many of the most bitter controversies of our news cycle concern the framing and weighting of different issues and how they are reported, rather than the facts of what actually happened.” https://www.theguardian.com/ ... Rick Searle / @ricksearle1 : “What we are witnessing is a collision between two conflicting ideals of truth: one that depends on trusted intermediaries (journalists and experts), and another that promises the illusion of direct access to reality itself.” https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
This argument lands at the end of a dense 2019 run of epistemics coverage: Scientific American had just framed misinformation as a 'new world disorder' driven by our eagerness to share without thinking, and The Guardian itself examined how social media's grip on the online news economy damages both democratic politics and individual well-being.
What the piece adds is the structural diagnosis underneath those stories: as Jay Rosen puts it, government and media elites have lost their monopoly over the provision of information while keeping their public prominence — which explains why so much rage flows their way. It matters because it reframes the problem away from trolls and filter bubbles and toward a collision between two rival models of truth.
First-order effects
- Disputes migrate from what happened to how issues are framed and weighted, so 'settling the facts' stops resolving controversies for the journalists and officials still treated as arbiters.
- Intermediaries like Facebook are pushed into explicit referee roles — its news-source trust surveys, questioned in earlier Atlantic coverage, become the visible mechanism for outsourcing judgment that audiences no longer grant automatically.
Second-order effects
- News organizations lose pricing and attention power to whoever controls distribution, a dependency that surfaces years later when Meta and Google block trusted outlets in Canada and experts warn the move worsens misinformation.
- Fact-checking and platform trust signals become competitive differentiators rather than background infrastructure, since the scarcity has shifted from information to verified interpretation.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the binding constraint on consensus becomes verification capacity rather than access — a bottleneck that generative AI content widens, pushing societies toward institutionalized verification layers or deeper fragmentation into rival truth communities.
- Regulation increasingly targets the intermediary layer — trust rankings, news licensing, content removal — because the alternative, restoring a monopoly on information provision, is no longer available.
The trend: Public discourse is shifting from gatekept truth toward contested epistemics, where information abundance and eroding intermediary trust — soon compounded by synthetic content — make shared reference points scarcer, not more common.