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Worth Reading – Fake news and trust

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

Last week, I wrote about the reasons why, even when we know something isn’t quite true, if our brains are pummeled with it enough, we will act as if it is true.

Seth Godin describes the issue pretty succinctly:

The irony is that it’s easier to trust fake news. It’s consistent, simplified, coherent, and predictable, all the things that humans look for when we’re seeking solace.

https://seths.blog/2026/01/fake-news-and-trust/

This is the instruction manual. Make everything seem dangerous and chaotic, then offer simplistic fixes and explanations that aren’t true at all, but fit a narrative you wish to manipulate people with. As Seth describes, the easy thing to do is to accept those explanations and stop thinking about it much further. We are hard-wired to do that. We’ve been educated to do that. We’ve been told simplistic lies like the world is fair, and good things happen to good people, and we believe it because the truth is much less comfortable.

The truth requires us to sit in that discomfort and admit that we can’t control everything.

We’re not good at that, so we WANT to be lied to. Social media algorithms have gotten really good at doing that.

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