Poisoned Politics: Truth, Lies, and the Decline of Discourse — and Democracy

In the organizer's words:

Join us for an evening with acclaimed authors Renée DiResta, a professor and social media researcher at Georgetown University, and Andrew Marantz, a staff writer at The New Yorker, who will discuss the way online and offline worlds have collapsed, leading to a new-and altogether darker and more confusing-age in both politics and society.

Their conversation, moderated by Joshua Yaffa, Marantz's colleague at The New Yorker and Bard College Berlin's writer-in-residence, will touch on how the ideas, rhetoric, memes, and half-truths that sprout from online subcultures have, in many ways, come to determine the American mainstream. The particular nature of social media and how it spreads both information and misinformation has come to hold a great power in determining the relationship between citizens and their government, and how that government in turn views its own role and power. In the context of the second Trump Presidency, these questions have become all the more relevant, and urgent. Both DiResta, the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality, and Marantz, author of Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation, have deep experience researching and reporting from within the communities and personalities that have come to hold outsized sway in today's politics and culture-from right-wing message boards to the so-called "mansophere" of male-oriented podcasters.

This evening will offer both a fact-based description and diagnosis of political discourse in the current moment, as well as highlight possible scenarios for the future.

Organizers: A part of the Munich Dialogues on Democracy Speakers Series, a cooperation between The Yale Club of Germany e.V. (Munich Chapter) and the Amerikahaus - Bavarian Center for Transatlantic Relations.

Supporters: Bard College, Heinrich Böll Foundation

Price information:

Admission is free. Please register via https://eveeno.com/207905772.