There’s something fitting about Steven Brill taking the stage in Buffalo next week to talk about truth and lies online. He’s spent his career moving between journalism, business, and best-selling books, and for the past several years he’s been doing something that feels increasingly essential: trying to sort the reliable from the reckless in a digital world that seems to reward the reckless. Brill is co-CEO of NewsGuard, a company that reviews and rates the credibility of news and information websites. The scale of that job is almost hard to grasp. NewsGuard has audited roughly 36,000 websites and found only about 12,000 worthy of a passing grade. Among the sites that made the cut are The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Investigative Post, the nonprofit newsroom hosting the event. Among those that didn’t are Breitbart News, Sputnik News, and Natural News. Brill laid out the thinking behind this work in his 2024 book, “The Death of Truth: How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World – And What We Can Do.” The title is a mouthful, but the point is urgent. Bob Woodward called it “a seminal, ground-breaking, documented and honest examination of two of the central dilemmas of our time—what is truth and where to find it.” If you’ve ever felt your stomach drop after seeing a relative share something completely false, or wondered how a conspiracy theory spreads faster than the facts meant to stop it, Brill’s message probably speaks to you. He’ll deliver that message on Thursday, October 22, at 7 p.m. at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, alongside Sofia Rubinson, a senior editor at NewsGuard. Tickets are just $10, and they’re available online through Investigative Post. It’s a rare chance to hear from someone who has spent years watching the machinery of misinformation from the inside—and who still believes we can fight back.
Brill’s core insight is that the internet is the best and the worst of everything at the same time, and he says it with the weariness of someone who has seen both sides up close. When he and I were growing up, he explained, the media world was narrow. There were a handful of broadcast networks, a few national magazines, maybe a strong regional newspaper or two. That meant a lot of voices were left out. The mainstream press, for all its strengths, missed big stories and arrived late to others. It took a long time for the country to fully reckon with the Vietnam War, or with the civil rights movement, because the institutions that controlled information weren’t diverse enough to push the conversation forward. The internet changed that in a thrilling way. Anyone can be a publisher now. You don’t need a printing press or an FCC license or a billionaire owner. You just need a connection and something to say. That’s genuinely democratic. But Brill is too smart to stop at the sunny version. The worst thing about the internet, he says, is that anyone can be a publisher. The same openness that lets a talented young journalist reach a global audience also lets a health-care hoax spread like wildfire. It lets a Russian disinformation operation in St. Petersburg pretend to be an American news source. It lets someone who believes 9/11 was an inside job, or that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, find thousands of willing listeners. The internet doesn’t distinguish between a well-reported investigation and a fever dream. It treats both as content, and it dishes both out with the same neutral, unblinking efficiency.
What makes it worse, Brill argues, is the economic engine underneath social media. The biggest platforms—Facebook, Twitter, now called X, and YouTube, which belongs to Google—make their money by keeping people on their sites. The longer you scroll, the more ads you see, and the more money they make. And the platforms figured out a long time ago that the content most likely to keep you scrolling isn’t the calm, careful, fact-checked stuff. It’s the stuff that makes you angry, anxious, or afraid. The inflammatory post, the outrageous headline, the wild conspiracy that confirms what you already suspect—that’s what the algorithms push. That’s what gets engagement. So the business model isn’t just accidentally flawed. It’s designed to amplify the very material that tears at trust and polarizes the country. Brill remembers when NewsGuard approached these platforms and offered to share its ratings, so that readers could see which websites were reliable and which weren’t. He expected the companies to welcome the help. Instead, he discovered something unsettling: they didn’t see it as a solution to a bug. They saw it as an attack on a feature. The crazy stuff, the misleading stuff, the stuff that makes people furious—that wasn’t a mistake in the system. It was the system. Or at least, it was the part of the system that made the most money. Brill put it in stark terms. The most profitable social media platforms are the most guilty, not because their executives are evil, but because they have a perfectly good capitalist instinct to maximize revenue and shareholder value. The trouble is that doing so costs the rest of us something we can’t easily price: a shared sense of what’s real.
So is the situation getting better or worse? Brill’s answer is honest. When it comes to news, he thinks it’s getting worse. Every day brings more misinformation, more AI-generated sludge, more bad actors learning to game the system. There’s no magic switch that will suddenly make people stop believing lies, no single law that will fix the incentives overnight. But Brill isn’t a doomer. He thinks things can get better, especially if independent newsrooms like Investigative Post keep doing their work and find ways to survive. His hope rests on the idea that people will eventually reach a level of disgust and distrust where they insist on something better. He believes reliable sources will win out in the long run, whether through NewsGuard, or some other tool, or simply through the slow accumulation of disappointment with the garbage. There’s something almost old-fashioned about that faith. It suggests that readers aren’t just passive victims of the algorithm, that there’s still a hunger for facts, that people can learn to recognize the difference between a real newsroom and a propaganda shop. It’s not a guarantee. It’s a bet on human judgment, and on organizations willing to make the case for truth in a world that often makes truth seem boring. But after years of watching misinformation spread, Brill still believes the audience for reliability exists. That’s not naïve. That’s a reason to keep going.
Then there’s artificial intelligence, which Brill sees as both a miracle and a menace. On one hand, AI is capable of extraordinary things. It can help with medicine, business strategy, financial analysis, scientific research. It’s already so good at certain analytical tasks that it’s going to put a lot of junior analysts and consultants out of work. In law, there are AI services trained only on real court decisions, so they answer questions from vetted, reliable legal sources. That’s genuinely useful. But when you combine AI with social media, the picture darkens. Imagine walking into a library and finding a million loose pieces of paper flying around in the air. You grab one and start reading. You don’t know who wrote it. You don’t know their background. You don’t know who paid for it. You don’t know if it’s true or a clever piece of fiction. That, Brill says, is essentially the internet. AI makes it even easier to produce those flying pieces of paper at scale, to generate convincing articles out of thin air that have no connection to reality. It means misinformation can be cheaper, faster, and more personalized than ever. That’s why Brill and his NewsGuard colleagues are fighting back with their own tool. They’re demonstrating something called NewsGuard AI, which doesn’t just roam the whole internet. It combs through news and information websites that NewsGuard has already deemed credible, and it produces AI-generated stories from those sources. Every fact and claim is footnoted with a link back to the publication it came from. If you’re looking for a story, you can create a custom search or browse the story lines NewsGuard AI has already generated. It’s not a perfect answer to the chaos, but it’s a start—a way to build a smaller, more trustworthy corner of the web where readers can go when they’re tired of guessing.
At the event later this month, Brill and Rubinson will walk through all of this with an audience of people who are presumably exhausted by the digital noise and looking for some clarity. They’ll talk about what NewsGuard has found, what the platforms are doing wrong, what artificial intelligence might do next, and what ordinary readers can do to protect themselves. They’ll also show off the new product live, which is a chance to see what a more accountable kind of AI newsroom might look like. Copies of Brill’s book, “The Death of Truth,” will be available for sale from Fitz Books, so you can leave with more than just a few ideas. The event is being held at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, a fittingly thoughtful setting for a conversation about what we see and how we make sense of it. Tickets are $10, which feels like a bargain for an evening with someone who has been called “an expert in fact versus fiction” and who has spent years studying the difference. If you live in the Buffalo area and care about the state of journalism, democracy, or your own news feed, this is the kind of event you don’t want to skip. Bring your questions, bring your skepticism, maybe bring your phone so you can check some of his claims in real time. But come ready to listen, because Steven Brill has spent more time than most of us staring into the wreckage of the information age—and he still believes there’s a way out. That alone is worth the ten bucks.