Nathan Bome - After the Fact: The Erosion of Truth and the Inevitable Rise of Donald Trump

This book is dedicated to my parents, Randy and Deanna Bomey, who taught me that it's okay to not have an opinion about everything. It's okay to say, I don't know. Thank you to them, to my brother, Dan Bomey, and to my in-laws, Lynn and Ben Blazier, for their endless support and love.

Ultimately, this book would not have been possible without my wife, Kathryn Bomey, whose unwavering encouragement, love, and strength provided all of the inspiration I needed. As it happens, Kathryn is also the best editor I've ever metand her editing as I worked on this was truly impeccable.

Since this book is predicated on the idea that it's important to continuously seek out, consider, and vet a wide range of ideas and perspectives, I tried to approach my research, interviews, and writing with an open mind. Likewise, to ensure that I was treating all sides fairly, I asked friends and colleagues from a wide range of viewpoints for input throughout the process.

Thank you especially to Jason Idalski, Dan Meisler, Caleb Cohen, Kyle Lady, and Joe Guillen for sharing outstanding insights on the draft manuscript. Thank you also to Caleb and his company, Mockingbird Productions, for designing and maintaining my website, NathanBomey.com. Jason was also very helpful with an early round of copyediting.

I am especially appreciative of all the people I interviewed for this book. This effort would not have been possible without their achievements, wisdom, and generosity.

I conducted all of my interviews on the record with the exception of two: the former Facebook executives who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation. I'd like to take this chance to thank them for sharing, as well.

To my talented colleagues and editors at USA Today, thank you for supporting me. I am grateful for the opportunity to work at an organization that is committed to meaningful journalism in a world overwhelmed with frivolous and misleading content.

Of course, for the sake of eliminating all doubt, any perspectives or mistakes in this book are solely my own.

I owe a debt of gratitude to the supportive folks at Prometheus Books, but especially to Steven L. Mitchell, who believed in the concept of this book long before the topic exploded. I also can't say thank you enough to Jeffrey Curry for his exceptional editing. And I'd also like to thank my agent, Karen Gantz, for providing excellent feedback as I shaped the book proposal and for her continued support in my endeavors.

Lastly, I am grateful for you, the reader. If you made it this far, you are likely more committed than most to the free flow of ideas and the discovery of truth regardless of your preexisting biases. I hope, however, that you didn't reflexively agree with everything here. Rather, I hope that this book generates a productive conversation about the effects of social media, journalism, politics, and technology on our perception of reality. This, ultimately, is vital to our democracy.

One day around the dawn of the twenty-first century, internet pioneer Howard Rheingold sat down at a computer to help his daughter conduct research for a middle school paper. As they faced the screen together, the San Franciscoarea technology critic considered the implications of an online universe that had already begun to disrupt the typical path to basic facts. The ability to find so much information so quickly is a miracle that people fail to recognize, having started out as a freelance writer when my tools were a typewriter and a library card and a telephone, Rheingold said.

But that miracle came with serious side effects.

Pondering a powerful lesson on digital trust, he turned to his daughter. And I said, If you get a book out of the library for your research, there was an author and an editor and a publisher and a librarian, all of whom were gatekeepers that guaranteed the authenticity of the text. You could trust the authority of what was written, Rheingold said. But, the really miraculous advantages of the web are the cause of the problem with credibility, which is that you can ask any question, anytime, anywhere, and get a million answers.

To demonstrate the risks of trusting online material without first verifying the validity of the source, Rheingold directed his daughter to MartinLutherKing.org. For many years you could search Martin Luther King and the third or fourth hit that came up was MartinLutherKing.org, Rheingold said. And it looks like it's a legitimate historic site about Martin Luther King, but the articles are about what a terrible person he was.

As they perused the site together, his daughter was puzzled. Well, how can I tell what's real and what's not? she asked.

Well, let's look for some authors, Rheingold responded. After spotting the name of one of the site's originators, we searched for the author's name, and it was pretty clear that the author was writing white nationalist stuff, he recalled.

Let's look at whose website it is, the technologist instructed his daughter.

Using an internet utility that reveals the registered owner of a website, they found the name Don Black.

That was many years ago, Rheingold added.

Google did not respond to a request for interviews for this book.

IN GOOGLE WE TRUST

In the time since Rheingold taught his daughter about how to navigate the internet for facts about Martin Luther King, Google's rise to prominence has made it the central funneling point for information seekers. Without it or its lesser-utilized rivals, Verizon's Yahoo! and Microsoft's Bing, modern Americans would find it hard to function.

Google's search engine has undeniably made our lives easier. Finding the best local pizza parlor is helpful. Fetching directions at a moment's notice is very convenient. And resolving bar bets is a cinch. But the sweeping consequences of our collective addiction to search engines have only recently come into focus. By their nature, search engines aren't designed to tell us what's true. They're designed to direct us to potential answers to questions we'd like to resolve. They're designed to deliver results tailored to what we want to know, not necessarily what we need to know.

The rise of the search engine has severely restricted incidental discovery of information and led us to place our trust in algorithms that most of us don't understand. This shift puts tremendous power in the hands of algorithm creators, who retain vast influence over what we do and do not see online.

Although general information is available, the inner workings of Google's search engine algorithms are shrouded in secrecy. But users don't seem to mind. In fact, our trust in search engines is increasing. Some 64 percent of people said

This means Google has profound influence over how we discern truth. Trust in the capability of search engines easily morphs into trust in the validity of the actual results. But while the search engine is amazingly proficient at spitting out information that matches up with the keywords entered into its toolbar, it cannot necessarily vouch for the believability of the pages it introduces to us.

Some of them are accurate, some of them are inaccurate, some of them are completely wrong, and some of them are deliberately wrong, Rheingold said. There's information, there's bad information, [and] there's disinformation. And therein lies the issue, which is if you can get vastly more information instantaneously but you don't have a guarantee of its veracity, it's up to you, the seeker of the information, to test it to figure out what the good information is.