Jon Lovett Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

In the descent from a world of factual discourse into a world of emotions and alternative realities, the first step you take, whether you're the Russian media, whether you're Breitbart, is that you manufacture lots of stuff that isn't true. The second step is that you claim that everyone is like this.

The oblique paradox of propaganda is that the lie in the throat becomes, by repetition, the truth in the heart.

I think 20th century media were about tricking people - and the beauty of the Internet is you can't lie anymore.

It's not a 24-hour news cycle, it's a 60-second news cycle now, it's instantaneous. It has never been easier to get away with telling lies. It has never been easier to get away with the glib one liner.

In politics, a lie unanswered becomes truth within 24 hours.

Even intelligent people succumb to their own propaganda.

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

If people tell an untruth long enough and loud enough, they begin to believe it themselves.

Facts are a thing of the past. Americans may find it impossible to debate politics clearly because of a lack of agreement on basic matters of fact: that was certainly the case in this yea'rs Presidential election [2016]. And no one has taken more advantage of this than Donal;d Trump ... Trump and his talking heads didn't create this world. It is the result of decadews-long stategy devised devised by a numbe of public affairs practitioners who recognized that lies were the most potent weapoin in the fight against progress,

I worry that, as a country, we’re too slow to armor ourselves against ma­nipu­la­tion — and too quick to believe anything that confirms our biases or stokes our resentments. Deepfakes are designed to sap our belief in our institutions and in one another, ultimately bleeding the morale that secures the nation.

If you create a visual that actually captures the imagination, that's not real. It will look real, and that will spread at such lightning speed that by the time it's found out, it has already done its damage. It's a very, very scary time that we're living in. I say it's an age of absurdity.

Donald Trump really understood how to float a story, how to float a rumor, how to manipulate the truth.

Today we live in a world now where it is easy to confuse truth and popularity. And you can use money to amplify whatever you believe and get people to believe what is popular is now truthful. And what is not popular may not be truthful.

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.

All these social media sites allow us to confuse truth and popularity. That has to be fixed. Because every normal citizen has a right to know what is factual versus what is amplified by good actors or bad actors.

There's no such thing as alternative facts.

Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.

We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them.

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.