Stories, Truth and the Fight for Rights in the Age of Misinformation

By Vuli Mkwananzi

I want to start with something simple. Stories are how we understand who we are, who we belong to, and who we can trust. That has always been true. What is new, and what worries me deeply, is how easily that basic human need is now being taken and turned against us.

Around the world we are watching the rise of fascism again, 

I want to start with something simple. Stories are how we understand who we are, who we belong to, and who we can trust. That has always been true. What is new, and what worries me deeply, is how easily that basic human need is now being taken and turned against us.

Around the world we are watching the rise of fascism again, not as a distant historical warning but as a present political reality. It is winning elections, filling parliaments, and reshaping what is considered acceptable to say in public, and how we think about each other and treat each other. It’s now clear that fascism doesn’t tend to arrive wearing a uniform. It arrives and thrives wearing a suit, backed by a tech fortune, a billionaire or an opaque or invisible company or think tank, promising to fix what is broken while quietly working to break the very institutions meant to hold power to account.

We’ve all felt and seen the shift happen, from what now known as ‘legacy media’ to what we have to day. A small group of enormously wealthy individuals, many of them controlling the platforms we use every single day, now hold an extraordinary amount of influence over public life, and very little accountability for how they use it. Their business interests are not neutral. When the platform that decides what you see is also owned by someone with a direct stake in a political outcome, we are no longer talking about a marketplace of ideas. We are talking about a marketplace with a thumb on the scale, a camera following your movements on the platform in intimate detail and a computer logging and storing it all in the  background.

This is where disinformation does its most effective work, not through wild conspiracy alone, but through something quieter and much more corrosive. It works by taking our individual identities and welding them to group identities, then setting those groups against each other. Linking your disdain for a group, politician or your own living situation to an individual who, quite often, has no real significant power in the equation whatsoever. Once you believe your struggles exist because of another group of people rather than because of a system, once you spend your energy turning your ireland your concentration and efforts to a person and their opinions without a thorough understanding of how they got there, our ability to stay focused on looking for collective answers becomes eroded and in the face of this, many start looking for someone to blame. Individualism gets prized over solidarity. Community gets replaced by an in-group, an identity, a tribe. And once that happens, real conversation between people who see the world differently becomes almost impossible, because we are no longer arguing about the same set of facts, we are defending our identities and the emotional experience that we have linked to our identities. No room for nuance, balance or taking the time to unpack the underlying truth or collective experience, we feel as if we are fighting to just get our point across.

That last point matters more than we often admit. Social media means we genuinely do not know what other people are seeing. Two people can scroll the same platform for the same hour and be shown entirely different realities, tailored by algorithms built to keep us engaged rather than informed. There is no shared front page anymore, no common evening bulletin we all watched together. That fragmentation means unethical companies and bad actors can publish almost anything, with none of the standards or accountability that once came with journalism. And it means that those of us trying to push back against misinformation are often fighting blind, because we do not even know what claims are circulating in someone else's feed.

We have already seen how powerful this can be. The Cambridge Analytica scandal showed the world that carefully targeted stories, built from harvested personal data and delivered to exactly the right person at exactly the right moment, are strong enough to help swing elections. That was not a one off. It was a proof of concept, and plenty of people have been building on it since. Those with the largest budgets and vested interest have the power to flood the internet and far outweigh fact checked and truthful ideas backed by evidence. Politicians and political operatives now understand that emotionally targeted stories work far better than policy detail, especially on people who feel forgotten, struggling or unheard. Which, if we are honest, describes most of us at some point in our lives.

For a long time we told ourselves it was mainly older people who were vulnerable to scams and misinformation. That comfortable idea is gone. It is all of us now. Educated, young, sceptical, none of it makes you immune, because the manipulation has become sophisticated enough to speak directly to whatever you are already anxious about. And as the cost of living keeps rising, as wages fail to keep pace, as housing and food and basic security feel further out of reach, more and more people are turning somewhere for answers. Into that gap step people offering simple stories with simple villains, and simple, false promises of control.

At the heart of all of this is something more serious than getting a story wrong. This is not mistelling. It is a deliberate strategy to gain and hold power by eroding the thing that makes any of it possible to resist together, our trust in each other and in the idea that truth is even something we can share. When public trust breaks down, and when trust between neighbours, colleagues and communities breaks down alongside it, the ground we would normally stand on to organise, to demand rights, to hold power accountable, starts to disappear beneath us.

So where does that leave us? I do not think there is one clean answer, and I am wary of anyone who claims there is. But I do think there are places to start, and I would rather open a conversation about them than pretend to have it all worked out.

We could start by rebuilding media and story literacy as a genuine public priority, not just in schools but as an ongoing skill we practise together, at every age, so that questioning a source and understanding its potential motivations and purpose becomes as normal as checking a use by date.

We could start by demanding real transparency and regulation from the platforms that shape so much of what we believe, including who owns them and what interests they are serving. Furthermore, and perhaps more effectively, we could build our own platforms and online space, or find ones that aren’t built on profiteering from our manipulation, or beholden to governments or states with unethical interests, foundations and intentions.

We could start by protecting and properly funding independent journalism, because a healthy society needs people whose job it is to check facts before they are published, not after the damage is done.

We could start locally, by investing in the kind of community spaces, arts, and Story Telling where people tell their own truths in their own words that aren’t beholden to hierarchical set of rules.

And perhaps most importantly, we could start by simply talking to each other again, in person, across the lines we have been encouraged to draw between us, and by choosing curiosity over certainty when someone believes something we find strange or wrong.

I also want to be clear about something before I finish. None of this is an argument that every opinion or idea carries equal weight, or that truth is simply a matter of finding some neutral middle ground between two sides. That kind of false balance is itself part of how this manipulation works. And within all of this, it is the powerless and the marginalised, people whose land is wanted, whose resources are wanted, whose labour or presence is something powerful interests want to control, who carry the heaviest cost. They are up against not just a bad news cycle but vast wealth, entrenched power, and decades of manipulation that have been folded quietly into the systems we live inside today. So this fight is not only about protecting our individual rights, important as that is. It is about pushing back against odds that have consistently worked to undermine democracy, that have consistently profited from a free market capitalism built to reward concentration rather than fairness, and that have consistently fought to hold power imbalances in place, because keeping that grip is the whole point and why we ended up here in the first place..

None of this is easy, and none of it will happen quickly. But I do not believe the situation we are in is beyond us. Stories built the trust that is currently being dismantled, and stories, told honestly, carefully, and together, are also how we begin to rebuild it. I would genuinely like to hear what others think the next step should be, if anyone has some examples of people or communities building alternative models (of which there are many!) because I do not believe any one of us is going to work this out alone.