Decades of psychological research suggest that authoritarian leaders and their admirers consistently share one thing in common: they twist the truth. 

To accomplish this, such leaders frequently follow a common playbook of attacking truth tellers and truth-telling institutions as a prelude to controlling information infrastructure and a broad-scale decimation of scientific programs. Authoritarian leaders also spread unambiguous disinformation with harmful consequences, such as the conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen, which led to a violent and deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

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In order to manipulate the truth, authoritarian leaders cultivate those who either willingly or inadvertently defend the authoritarian agenda by undermining research on disinformation and misinformation. Examples of this undermining include a predictable variation on one of the following arguments: “misinformation cannot properly be defined because facts are subjective or uncertain,” “misinformation is a distraction because the real problem is something else,” and “fighting misinformation amounts to bias and censorship.”

This is why facts matter now more than ever and claiming otherwise risks endangering public health and democracy. Too often, we excuse misinformation as a matter of opinion or free speech and subsequently face dire consequences.

An unvaccinated child with no underlying health conditions recently died in Texas from measles. Measles doesn’t care about your opinion and misinformation about vaccination can kill you. Luckily, research suggests we can reliably address misinformation—without the need for any kind of censorship. 

A common critique of systems that hold liars to account—such as the fact-checking industry—is the accusation that they are biased. In January, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he’s getting rid of Meta’s third-party fact-checking program in the U.S. because he determined that third-party moderators are “too politically biased.” Although it’s possible that any individual fact-checker may be biased, empirical research strongly refutes the idea that the fact-checking industry as a whole is biased. A 2024

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