The unbearable cost of truth

Welcome to 2025, where truth comes with a price tag and reality has subscription tiers.

As boardrooms rebrand opacity as strategic discretion and platforms peddle verification like designer handbags, we're watching truth become the ultimate arbitrage opportunity. Corporate manifestos about authenticity sit comfortably alongside calculated silence, while the market for reality fragments into echo chambers priced according to confirmation bias. The collapse of shared truth isn't just a philosophical crisis—it's a balance sheet item, as brands and consumers alike discover that values and verification have become luxury goods in an economy of convenient fictions.

The greatest sleight of hand in modern media isn't just that truth has become a commodity—it's that consumers have been convinced they're getting the premium version for free. Like a masterful street performance, the attention economy has perfected the art of making audiences look exactly where intended: At engagement metrics that sparkle, content that triggers, and algorithms that serve exactly what they crave—all while the actual skill of discerning truth disappears faster than a coin in a conjurer's palm.

The magnificent irony? Media literacy is being sold as a concept while the very infrastructure needed to achieve it is being systematically dismantled. It's rather like hosting masterclasses on swimming while quietly draining the pool. Quality journalism continues to retreat behind paywalls (necessarily so—truth, it turns out, requires actual investment), while free channels overflow with content so convincingly crafted that even its creators sometimes forget it's synthetic.

You don't need to look much past what's unfolding on X, where verification has transcended utility to become the ultimate status symbol—a paid badge of legitimacy in an ecosystem where truth is merely a premium feature. When a platform owner can rewrite the rules of discourse with the casualness of a child playing Minecraft, this isn't just the commodification of truth—it's the active politicisation of reality itself. Each tweet becomes a small battle in a larger war over what constitutes fact, with vulnerable communities often serving as collateral damage in this digital theatre of the absurd. In Asia Pacific, this performance takes on particularly spectacular dimensions. Here, where cultural complexities layer like silk and language barriers create convenient blind spots, we're watching truth become not just commodified but fundamentally transmuted. Content leaps across borders with the elegance of an Olympic gymnast, each flip and twist leaving behind another piece of context, until what lands bears only a passing resemblance to its original form.

The advent of generative AI too, has fundamentally altered the rules of information consumption. The challenge isn't distinguishing authentic content from fabrication anymore—it's navigating a reality where truth exists in perpetual beta, with each iteration more convincing than the last. As artificial intelligence floods our feeds with increasingly persuasive variations of reality, the very notion of verification becomes quaint, and almost archaic.

What makes this particularly pervasive in its tragedy is how we've engineered an information economy that actively punishes media literacy. Critical thinking? That'll cost you extra. Nuanced analysis? Sorry, that's not optimised for our platform. Verified facts? Have you considered our premium subscription? Meanwhile, content that triggers base emotions gets a free express pass to the top of every feed, because nothing sells quite like outrage served with a side of righteous indignation.

And here lies the advertising industry's perfect paradox: It remains the only force capable of democratising access to truth at scale, yet finds itself deadlocked with the very audiences it needs to reach. Advertisers require informed, discerning consumers, while consumers increasingly need advertising to unlock access to verified information. Neither side moves first, each waiting for the other to break the stalemate, while truth—the supposed commodity they're trading—quietly depreciates in value. The result? A marketplace where everyone's incentives are perfectly misaligned: Platforms monetise attention, advertisers chase proxies for value, and audiences default to whatever comes without a price tag.

For brands and media organisations, this creates an existential comedy so dark it would make Shakespeare blush. How do you build trust in an ecosystem designed to commodify it? How do you justify investing in quality content when cheaper, more engaging alternatives are just a click away? More crucially, how do you maintain meaningful connections with audiences whose very ability to discern value is being systematically undermined by the platforms you're forced to use?

The 2024 Reuters Digital News Report reveals the fault lines: Across Asia Pacific, even in markets with relatively high trust like Singapore, only 14% pay for online news while 52% default to social platforms for information. Trust in traditional news has hit historic lows—Australia bottoming out at 40%, the weakest since 2020. Meanwhile, platforms like TikTok have seen meteoric rises in news consumption, capturing 39% of users in Thailand alone. The generation gap widens as younger audiences migrate to video platforms while their elders cling to traditional outlets, creating parallel information realities. We're not just seeing a crisis of access, we're watching the fragmentation of shared reality in real time.

Enter the system's perverse misfortune: This fragmentation operates with perfect circularity. Low media literacy leads to higher engagement with inflammatory content, which attracts more attention, which then funds the creation of more sophisticated manipulation techniques. It's a perpetual motion machine powered by the gradual erosion of critical thinking, with those who can't afford to opt out—the economically disadvantaged, the digitally underserved, those priced out of quality information—bearing the brunt of this widening inequality. Access to verified truth becomes a luxury, creating an information class system where the ability to discern fact from fiction correlates directly with purchasing power.

When discourse targeting these communities goes unchecked, we're no longer just talking about brand safety or platform policies. We're witnessing the real-world manifestation of information disparity, amplified by ecosystems that have perfected the dark art of turning outrage into engagement. The rhetoric isn't just funny or curious anymore—it's straight-up dangerous.

Let's be crystal clear: As Campaign UK's editor-in-chief Gideon Spencer very aptly pointed out last week, verified, professional journalism isn't just another voice in the attention marketplace—it's the last barrier between information and entropy. But quality journalism, even backed by advertising dollars, can't survive on good intentions and moral high ground alone. When brand safety metrics trump truth, and verification becomes a luxury good, we shouldn't be surprised when consumers opt for the cheaper, more entertaining alternatives—or when advertisers follow them there.

The solution transcends the pedestrian notion of another digital literacy workshop or fact-checking algorithm. We need a fundamental reimagining of what media literacy means in an age where truth isn't binary but quantum, existing in multiple states simultaneously, shaped by context, platform, and algorithmic amplification. We need to stop treating media literacy as a skill to be acquired and start understanding it as a dynamic capability that requires constant evolution.

The solve also lies in inverting our current model: Instead of using advertising budgets to chase increasingly fragmented attention, we must redirect them to subsidise access to quality information. Imagine if a fraction of global ad spend went toward making verified content freely available—not as branded content or native advertising, but as genuine investment in the infrastructure of truth. The returns might not show up in next quarter's metrics, but they compound in something far more valuable: An audience capable of discernment, engaging with content because they understand it, not because an algorithm decided they should. It's time for advertising to evolve from attention merchant to truth enabler, because in a world where reality is paywalled, the only sustainable business model is one that helps tear those walls down.

For media houses, this means innovating beyond the false dichotomy of paywalls versus clickbait. It means finding new ways to make quality journalism accessible while maintaining its sustainability. For platforms, it means acknowledging that algorithmic neutrality is as mythical as corporate virtue—which is to say, entirely fictional.

The path forward demands more than superficial solutions or algorithmic fixes. It requires a fundamental recalibration of how we value and price truth in the attention marketplace. Our current metrics of success—engagement, clicks, time spent—have become proxies for progress while obscuring the actual depreciation of value. We're optimising ourselves into irrelevance, celebrating record engagement numbers while the foundations of informed discourse crumble beneath our quarterly targets.

Perhaps what should unsettle us most isn't the state of truth today, but our growing comfort with its absence. We've stopped noticing the gaps, forgotten what we've lost, adapted to a world where conviction matters more than accuracy. In our rush to measure everything, we've become surprisingly comfortable measuring nothing at all. The numbers still climb, the graphs still rise, but what they represent has become as fluid as the reality we once thought we could capture.

The final act of this grand delusion is drawing to a close, and with it comes our moment of reckoning. The machinery of modern marketing—that elegant engine of influence, measurement, and monetisation—stands ready to seize up entirely. Without quality information flowing freely through its gears, the whole apparatus of advertising becomes an expensive monument to our own obsolescence. This isn't about making truth affordable anymore; it's about recognising that we're one fiscal quarter away from discovering that an audience without trust is no audience at all. And in that silence, no metric will matter.