David Olusoga: How to win a global battle of truth

Changes that were only just becoming perceptible 10 years ago have – with exponentially accelerating speed – become manifest and obvious. To be working in history, one of the lightning-rod subjects of our current age of turmoil, is to be thrust into the front lines of the transition from mistrust to ‘grievance’ – as described in the Trust Barometer.

It is true that for years, public debate has been becoming ever more hostile. Yet the really significant change has not been the increase in online aggression or the use of toxic language – it has been the growth in the unshakeable certainty – among millions of people – in the view that ideas they disagree with, or are merely unaccustomed to, are elements of an agenda that is hostile to them and their interest.

Not long ago we were reading reports by anthropologists and social scientists that warned of the growth of scepticism and polarisation. That ship has sailed. We are in a far more troubling place. Work like mine now lands in a landscape profoundly reshaped by distrust and hostility that reframes complex and nuanced issues as clear, binary struggles.

Behind this is not just the rise of misinformation but of course enormous economic transformations. Fifty years ago this nation, the UK, was by some measures the most equal society in Europe. Depending on how it is measured, the UK is now either the most unequal or the second most unequal. 

Here, and elsewhere, social mobility – a fundamental aspect of the post-1945 social contract, critical to maintaining a sense of trust – has virtually ground to a halt. Those great historic shifts have helped forge an environment in which the middle ground has either gone or is going. 

Even the most trusted sources are witnessing a rapid – and so far seemingly irreversible – erosion in reported levels of trust. Shared, accepted fact is gone and – most shockingly for academics – the impact of evidence in debates,  the capacity of data to shift opinions, is clearly declining.

Millions are now so shuttered within an interlocking network of conspiracies and grievance that all incoming information is received and processed through a corresponding set of assumptions and pre-judgements. Grievance – in many cases – has become a near-complete worldview. One that is tribal and built on a certainty that certain people, certain institutions in certain demographics are not opponents or rivals but enemies who have gamed the system in their interests.

More rapidly than any of us could have imagined, we find ourselves in a world in which we are struggling to devise strategies by which to recover shared, empirical truth and combat misinformation. This is what Richard Edelman has called the “battle for truth”.

It is the foundational battle upon which much else rests. The media – of course – has a central role to play here. 

But this generational challenge arrives in the midst of an age of unprecedented media disruption, in which the business model of advertising and cover-price sales or subscriptions that had sustained the press since the 17th century, has been upended. Journalism has also been profoundly weakened by years of politicised attack – strategies that have their own unhappy historical precedents and against which media organisations, globally, have struggled to effectively defend themselves.

The battle for truth, the essential prerequisite struggle needed before any recovery or rebuilding of trust can take place, necessarily makes conscripts of us all. Business leaders, academics, NGOS – not just journalists.

It will require new strategies and new levels of empathy. Gen Z, for example, not only lacks trust; it is a demographic that consumes information in ways that are radically new – through lateral networks, seeking out affirmation from friends, from trusted informal sources, and from other members of ‘online tribes’.

Yet while the strategies that will be needed in the battle for truth must be empathetic and tailored to new consumption patterns, the battle itself is – in one fundamental way – a zero sum game. 

Successful human interactions – in business, politics and almost everything else – are built on the recognition of shared interest and the ability to reach compromise through negotiation. The search for the middle ground between two positions is essential – whether in diplomacy or among traders seeking to arrive at a market price. However, that cultural instinct for compromise is simply the wrong instinct in the coming, 21st-century battle against untruth.

This is because any compromise position located between truth and untruth remains an untruth. The compromise position between the truth of mathematics, and the man who asserts that 2+2 = 6, is the middle-ground that 2+2 = 5. But that compromise position is still untrue. There are truths and they are non-negotiable.

Not only are current truths non-negotiable, history warns us of the dangers of believing that yesterdays’ untruths can be left behind. As Richard and others have argued, the event that most profoundly accelerated the rise of alternative facts, grievance and this great erosion of trust was the Covid-19 pandemic. 

The unprecedented level of misinformation around vaccines, masks and lockdowns that emerged during the pandemic have profoundly rewired the relationships that millions of people have with scientific truth – never mind their attitudes towards scientific institutions. The clear, explicit and unequivocal mandates issued by governments and health agencies clashed uncomfortably with the medical uncertainties of a then-evolving virus and rapidly advancing pandemic. 

When the progression of that virus was not as forecast, and when the efficacy of public health measures were found flawed – the gulf between the clarity of the restrictions imposed upon people’s lives and the shifting scientific picture sparked an explosion of distrust that combusted in an atmosphere already primed with unprecedented levels of misinformation and conspiracy. The resulting crisis of trust may well prove to be the greatest legacy – perhaps – in the long run – even the greatest pathology of the pandemic.

That breakdown in trust was aggravated and deepened by all the background factors catalogued in the Trust Barometer. In an era of accelerated disparities, it was clear to all that the pandemic was not experienced equally. 

Lockdown – arguably the greatest social experiment ever conducted in peacetime – equated to forced vacations and ‘working for home’ for those with large incomes, large houses and large gardens. To the low-paid – in small apartments – it felt more akin to house arrest.

With the pandemic years behind us, the temptation in 2025 is to imagine that the falsehoods and misinformation of that era can be left unchallenged – in the interests of “moving on”. History’s lessons are never clear or unequivocal, but the past, I would argue, suggests that untruths left unchallenged do not – as we might hope – slowly fall dormant – rather, they slowly metastasise.

The Lost Cause Myth that emerged in the Southern states during America’s reconstruction era, after the Civil War – for example – did not console a defeated people, or allow wounds to heal. Those myths permitted a falsified version of history to be stamped onto the pages of school textbooks and etched into the identities of millions. 

The statues of Confederate generals that were toppled back in 2020 were merely the physical manifestations of a misguided and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to find a compromise between truth and untruth. The assault against science that emerged during the pandemic risks becoming a global, 21st-century equivalent of the Lost Cause.

My friend and fellow historian, Simon Schama, was recently urged on a TV discussion program by a politician to “move on”, “focus on the future” and forget the untruths propagated during another moment of division – the Brexit campaign. Simon rightly responded that to do so would be catastrophically dangerous, “because democracy depends upon the acceptance of truth”.

Pointing out untruths is not – as it is sometimes portrayed – to accentuate divisions – it is fundamental to any process of recovering a shared factual basis around which opinions and interpretations can revolve.

The role of historians is in part to look for parallels between ‘then’ and ‘now’, and seek to draw out warnings from past events. But it is also to attempt to recognise what is new and novel about our own age. 

One aspect of life in the 2020s – one trend that I would argue needs to be recognised as novel and addressed as a prerequisite – if we are to confront misinformation and begin the process of rebuilding trust – is the 21st century epidemic in solitude. This is another trend that predated the pandemic but that was amplified and deepened by it. And solitude is the keyword here, as distinct from loneliness.

Back in the 1950s, the roll-out of television, first in the United States then around the world, sparked social panic. The great concern was that the new technology would kill conversation, undermine family life and stultify social interaction. 

What happened instead was that watching television became a communal, family activity. The TV became the focal point of the home – and television shows themselves the subject of endless conversation. We are not seeing any similar communality in the age of social media and chatrooms.

Solitude – a sentiment that until recently respondents to surveys might have self-reported as ‘loneliness’ – is now being understood and defined as a self-imposed condition, and not one from which some are actively seeking an escape. This is especially among young men, especially in the United States and Japan – but it seems to be spreading. Social disconnectedness, the fact that information is being consumed in isolation, is clearly contributing to the erosion of trust and the spread of both misinformation and disinformation.

As the Trust Barometer suggests, trust still resides within NGOs and within businesses. It can also be found within local networks. But for sources of trust to be accessed, basic social contact is a prerequisite. So we need to be worried about the rise of solitude and social disconnection especially as some of the research on solitude suggests that not only does it undermine trust, it appears to be fostering a new form of societal nihilism – a disregard for society among people who feel a profound disconnection from it.

The battle for trust will require us to combat social disconnectedness, devise new communication strategies, through which to engage with Gen Z, and of course address the huge rise in inequality that underlies so many other disturbing changes. Lastly, it requires us to believe that this crisis can be addressed, that we have agency and the will to act. For while the past is full of moments when societies seemed to sleepwalk towards disaster, it is also replete with moments of collective action and intervention.

David Olusoga is a British-Nigeria historian, BAFA-winning broadcaster and writer. His most recent book is Black History for Every Day of the Year (Macmillan)

The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer is the firm’s 25th annual trust survey, compiled between October 25-November 16, 2024 from interviews with 33,000 respondents across 28 countries, working in business, media, government and for NGOs. For more information, visit https://www.edelman.com/trust-barometer