Join Ever since the whole world went online, we’ve faced an onslaught of news-seeming websites peddling in fiction. False claims and made-up stories spread quickly on social media, and the truth is more and more difficult to find. Can you even trust mainstream news sources? There are plenty of theories for why fake news and political paranoia proliferate in the internet age, but writer and media scholar Marcus Gilroy-Ware says they often miss the mark. His recent book, After writing and lecturing about social media, Gilroy-Ware found that many common explanations for rampant disinformation — like a lack of social media oversight or natural polarization — aren’t taking the scope of the problem into account. In our interview, he described what his research shows about a suspicious and politically alienated population.