Post-truth is a deliberate distortion of truth. In other words, post-truth is the manipulation of beliefs and emotions to influence public opinion in terms of human attitudes. Post-truth, then, is not a lie in the classical sense, but a strategy that gives truth a secondary meaning. Post-truth is about triggering the right emotions in people to change their way of thinking, while hiding the facts. The area in which post-truth is most often used is politics. Many politicians use this technique to gain public support. One of the most used resources is populist speech. These speeches excite the masses because they promise impossible things. They promise politics "by the people and for the people" or simple solutions to all problems. Nowadays, we are bombarded with a lot of information. This makes it very difficult to check whether everything is true or not. This ultimately contributes to people sometimes believing fake news.
Let's look at the effects of post-truth in social the context.
First, lying in the form of post-truth means taking away man's freedom to make the right decisions. Decision making process - for example political choice during elections - takes place in conditions of deliberate disinformation. Moreover, the weapon in the fight against post-truth is not the truth. It may not be too convincing, and lead to even more disinformation.
Second, people begin to divide according to the criterion of understanding truth or lies. They live in other – often opposing – realities, the credibility of which is confirmed by information from the mass media, which create a picture of the world, consistent with the expectations of a given recipient. Hence, a side effect of post-truth may be a deepening of political divisions acting destructively around public debate.
The third effect is the progressive commercialisation of democracy. It results from the fact that social truth is subordinated to the principle of profit maximization and the laws of the market. Nowadays the phenomenon of post-truth shows that the individual, in his decisions should act selfishly, rejecting those visions of reality that hinder or prevent the realization of this interest. Perhaps true There is one, but post-truths can certainly be many. We choose this the most useful for us, which paradoxically fits into the theory of rational choice.
Another consequence of post-truth is the violation of the basic rules of social communication. communication allows the community to exist and to some extent creates it, but when society experiences lying, then communication is disturbed and thus disintegrates the community. It should be noted, however, that post-truth also creates new communities in a crumbling community of a higher order, e.g., a nation. So, although disinformation communication is essentially manipulative, it can lead to a connection of groups of people based on false images of the world. Moreover, defending this vision can be integrative.
In the past, people knew much less about the world, but what they knew it came from their direct knowledge and experience. This did not guarantee true knowledge but hindered the influence of strangers on the perception of truth.
