Chamath Palihapitiya Quotes

Citizens have long been easily influenced by the opinions of others and sought social proof, but social media have amplified the phenomena to unprecedented heights. As digital devices permeate every aspect of our lives, it has boosted the way in which information can distort truth.

You don't need a digital David Petraeus or a President Bush avatar to distract you from the truth. You don't need to wait decades to have disinformation beamed into your head. You just need a constant stream of misleading information, half truths, and fictions to be promoted, pushed, and peddled until they are accepted as fact.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

Facts just don’t mean anything anymore. It’s who shouts the loudest and repeats it the most.

Fake news and rumors thrive online because few verify what's real and always bias towards content that reinforces their own biases.

We are drowning in partisan rhetoric that is just true enough not to be a lie; in industry-sponsored research; in social media's imitation of human connection; in legalese and corporate double-speak.

There is a danger, increasingly, that we're in a post-fact society where it seems my ignorance is as good as your facts.

Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs.

There's so many lies being told throughout the media and people just run with the lies. They're numb to it. Too many followers, not enough leaders.

Opinions are 10 a penny. In the spin-driven, PR-controlled world of the 21st century, hard facts are rare indeed.

After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.

Without the ability of issue groups to tell the truth, who knows what the public will believe.

It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything.

In this crazy political business, at least in our times, a lie unanswered becomes truth within 24 hours.

We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

What you say about the newspapers is very true ... They are indeed a curious compound of truth and untruth. I am so used to newspaper nonsense and attacks that I do not mind it in the least....

Search engines take misinformation and put it into our echo chamber. Trying to counter it is the functional equivalent of having your hair full of honey and bees and your trying to whack the bees with your hands.

“There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.

When people read 'Breitbart' every single day and convince themselves that Barack Obama is a foreign terrorist, that is not a problem of government. That is a problem of community failure, and we have to recognize that.

If you want to understand why a minority of American voters are unplugged from the fact-based news that the rest of the country depends on, just imagine being told multiple times a day that real news is a hoax.

The biggest problem is that Facebook and Google are these giant feedback loops that give people what they want to hear. And when you use them in a world where your biases are being constantly confirmed, you become susceptible to fake news, propaganda, demagoguery.

You should never trust anything reported by the media. Their first priority is to spread propaganda; their second priority is to make money. They never really care if they tell the truth or not.

There are things that go public, and everything that comes out is not the truth.

We are struggling with the global war on the truth. And if what we used to think of as the domain of the Soviets, the kind of celebration of lies and press as propaganda, that now we realize is not something that is unique to the Soviet state. It's within ourselves as well here in the West.

People see whatever the media first reports.