The Lie Detectives, Sasha Issenberg
The Lie Detectives, Sasha Issenberg
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The Lie Detectives
In Search of a Playbook for Winning Elections in the Disinformation Age

Author: Sasha Issenberg

Narrator: Sean Patrick Hopkins

Unabridged: 5 hr 19 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/12/2024


Synopsis

How can political campaigns fight back against disinformation?

A decade after The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, which Politico called "Moneyball for politics," journalist Sasha Issenberg returns to the cutting edge of political innovation to reveal how campaigns are navigating the era's most pressing challenge: how to win in a world awash in lies.

The Lie Detectives is a lively and deep secret history of Democratic politics in the Trump years. Our main character, Jiore Craig, is a young but battle-hardened veteran of the misinformation wars, and she leads a memorable cast including LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, whose emergence as one of the American left's biggest donors has forced his adviser Dmitri Mehlhorn into the role of moral compass for a movement still wrestling with whether it should counter fake news by producing its own, and David Goldstein and Jehmu Greene, who are confronting "the Big Lie," in the vernacular of online conspiracy theories, with gifs, memes, and ugly graphics of their own.

The Lie Detectives presents a vivid snapshot of a political class trying to come to terms with an exploding social media landscape and using every weapon in its arsenal to counter the biggest threat it has ever faced to its way of doing business and winning power.

About The Author

Sasha Issenberg is a journalist and author of four previous books, most recently The Engagement: America's Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage. He teaches in the UCLA Department of Political Science and is a correspondent for Monocle. His work has also appeared in New York, The New York Times Magazine and George, where he was a contributing editor. His first book for Columbia Global Reports, Outpatients: The Astonishing New World of Medical Tourism, was published in 2016.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Symski

I am fully aware that a couple weeks ago I faulted a political book for not using enough anecdotal evidence and basing itself entirely in conjecture, yet here I am to accuse this book of the opposite. The entirety of the "playbook" it offers for responding to disinformation consists of: 1. Don't act......more

Goodreads review by Michael

The author dedicates this book to his daughter, with the tagline, "may you live in less interesting times." Seems apt, considering how this book highlights a nascent industry of counter-disinformation firms that have sprung up in what feels like the very recent past. Within the past eight years our......more