https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-snapchat-and-the-dawn-of-the-post-truth-era/
For those not into artsy film, Rashomon was a 1950 Akira Kurosawa movie whose narrative premise is showing the same criminal act—a murder in a forest—from four contradictory points of view that cast doubt on any underlying reality.

Let’s take a very real and recent criminal act as an example: the Santa Fe, Texas, school shooting. The anti-gun left sees the event as yet more evidence of the need for stronger gun-control legislation. The pro-gun right sees the exact same event as evidence of the contrary, of the utter futility of gun laws in preventing such tragedies. Same crime, same event, but they occupy completely different mental realities that are irreconcilable in practice. Pick any polarizing event on a hot-button issue and you’ll see the same divergent takes on a single event, two incommensurate sets of tribal values that live in distinct ideological worlds yet cohabit the same legacy polity. It’s this Rashomon reality that disallows even the rudiments of the rational discourse required of democracy or science, and which will spell the end of the intellectual experiment that started with a Mainz printer in the late 15th century.

So what will happen?

The post-internet generation, weaned almost since birth on touchscreens and fractious digital media, navigates this raucous world with an equanimity that we dinosaurs beholden to a dead-tree age find impossible to muster. It is a different world, one where the universally acclaimed expert or editor has been replaced by internet-enabled rumor and hearsay arbitrated only by algorithms. There are some dominant media outlets with a claim to primacy, just as every village has a particularly well-informed local gossip, but the capital-T Truth, so beloved by the French encyclopedists, will no longer exist across a broad spectrum of society.