Building Back Truth in an Age of Misinformation

How can we build back truth online? Here’s how.

How can we build back truth online? In this book, researcher Leslie F. Stebbins provides solutions for repairing our existing social media platforms and building better ones that prioritize value over profit, strengthen community ties, and promote access to trustworthy information.

Stebbins provides a road map with six paths forward to understand how platforms are designed to exploit us, how we can learn to embrace agency in our interactions with digital spaces, how to build tools to reduce harmful practices, how platform companies can prioritize the public good, how we can repair journalism, and how to strengthen curation to promote trusted content and create new, healthier digital public squares.

New, experimental models that are ethically designed to build community and promote trustworthy content are having some early successes. We know that human social networks—online and off—magnify whatever they are seeded with. They are not neutral. We also know that to repair our systems we need to repair their design.

We are being joined in the fight by some of the best and brightest minds of our current generation as they flee big tech companies in search of vocations that value integrity and public values. The problem of misinformation is not insurmountable. We can fix this.

Leslie F. Stebbins is an independent researcher and the Director of Research4Ed where her clients include Harvard University, the U.S. Department of Education, Tufts University, and the Gates Foundation. She has more than thirty years of experience in higher education with a background in library and information science, instructional design, research, and teaching. Her previous books, Student Guide to Research in the Digital Age and Finding Reliable Information Online: Adventures of an Information Sleuth have been mainstays in college and university media studies and information literacy courses. Leslie lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.