Policing the Truth
How the War on Disinformation Became a War on Dissent
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Biteback Publishing
Publishing:24th Nov '26
£18.99
This title is due to be published on 24th November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
We are told that democracy is under threat because the very idea of ‘truth’ is in crisis. Fake news spreads unchecked, social media warps our sense of reality and the misinformed public are blamed for the resulting political division. Governments and media institutions alike insist that the future of democracy depends on winning the ‘war on disinformation’.
But what if this diagnosis is wrong? In Policing the Truth, Justin Schlosberg argues that the real danger lies not in the spread of disinformation but in the growing culture of information control used to combat it. He reveals how, across liberal and populist democracies, the press and powerful institutions – such as the UK’s Counter Disinformation Unit, which holds sweeping powers of monitoring and surveillance – have increasingly aligned, determining what can be known, said and believed, while routinely dismissing legitimate dissent and scepticism as threats to truth itself.
Drawing on years of rigorous investigation and his own experiences of sustained legal threats and public attacks triggered by research featured in these pages, Schlosberg exposes a new form of McCarthyism that has taken root in Britain and beyond. As well as tracing the origins of this phenomenon, he explains why today’s battle over truth is, at its core, a struggle over who gets to determine what is true.
A timely and necessary intervention into one of the defining political and media debates of our age, Policing the Truth offers a powerful new framework for understanding democracy and free speech.
“Policing the Truth will stir then shake up those concerned about falsehoods and propaganda in today’s chaotic world. It shatters widely held assumptions with hard evidence, past and present, showing that a ‘counter-disinformation order’, a manufactured consensus and data fakery are widespread across the internet and in traditional media. If good democrats don’t heed this urgent call for vigilance, the far right, on the march everywhere, will take over. It is the most unnerving and vital book I have read this year.” – Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, journalist, broadcaster and author
“The media used to be open to all points of view, however heretical and diverse. It isn’t any more. Anyone who wants to understand the new rules of discourse and how they are policed needs to read this brave and thought-provoking book.” – Peter Oborne, author, journalist and former political commentator at the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and The Spectator
“Justin Schlosberg has shown enormous courage in exposing the unaccountable power of the media. This book is deep in its analysis and compelling in its original insights. Anyone who is serious about creating a better press landscape should urgently read this excellent study of disinformation.” – Jeremy Corbyn, MP for Islington North and former leader of the Labour Party
“Through a series of case studies, this book exposes attempts to control our thinking under the cover of ‘countering disinformation’. It is compulsively readable, deeply insightful and deserves to be translated into multiple languages.” – Professor James Curran, media academic, activist and author
ISBN: 9781837360888
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
288 pages