Truth Tribes: How We Reshape Reality

Examining how online groups develop their own ways of deciding what’s true, and why it threatens societies.

Photo by Michael Carruth on Unsplash

You pop in and out of various social media apps daily perhaps. Reddit forums, Facebook groups, TikTok and Instagram groups. In each one, you are experiencing a different reality, various forms of truth, half-truths and lies disguised as truths. Today, pixels have become as powerful as pulpits. We are creating different truths.

This is both exciting and terrifying. Truth-making is one of the most important elements of how we form sociocultural systems. How we figure out what the world means to us and how we cooperate as a species.

When we understand the importance of truth-making and how truths evolve in online communities, we can build roadmaps to navigate this never before experienced terrain. We can counter misinformation and we can find a way to ease our divisions.

All online communities build their versions of a truth and that’s not necessarily bad or wrong. It’s how we organise and connect. Each online community builds its own epistemological frameworks and models. They determine what evidence means and is accepted, who the leaders are and their powers and how they’ll produce what is deemed as knowledge. What stories and…