Are we losing the war?

When my first book, about conspiracy theories and fake news, was published, it was followed by a profile of me in our local paper, the Otago Daily Times.

- STEPHEN DAVIS

Good old days: Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos Jr, known as Bongbong.

In it, I quoted from a bleak study: "In any given week, 25% of social-media users will have passed on false information. And half of those will have done so knowing it was false." I declared, hubristically, that I was going to devote the next stage of my career to battling disinformation and misinformation. The headline was "The war on truth".

Just before the piece was published, we had to redo the interview after a deranged gunman, who believed ridiculous anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, attacked two Christchurch mosques.

Looking back at the interview, three years later, I am struck by my sense of optimism, the belief that if we all just understood the problem and the tools needed to combat it, we could turn the tide.

If any more evidence was needed that we should treat the problem as a critical issue, an Australian mass murderer had just provided it.

But we are still not taking it seriously. It is still a war we are losing.