The POST-TRUTH
        phenomenon is
egalitarian:
everyone can be
                 AFFECTED

Post-Truth is egalitarian, anyone can be affected, it's like an illness.

People believe in Post-Truth because reality, truth, is just too much for them to handle.

Post-Truthers build incredibly convoluted worlds
                 which somehow,
                 for some reason,
make more sense to them than the one in which you and I are leaving.

Everyone has a bias against something.

Everyone
        in some form and
to some kind of degree,
believes in a conspiracy theory.

                         – Lee McIntyre

                                                                   Source:[2.2]

Conspiracy theories and falsehood pull on an existing THREAD. You may already distrust a political party, so a conspiracy theory that pulls that thread is more likely to appeal to you. It doesn't have to be internally consistent.
It just has to put in doubt the internal consistency of the opposing view.
It raises your SUSPICIONS.

Source:[2]

Nobody is free of biases or fears, which could open the door to believing in a conspiracy theory.
Where do my fears, beliefs and values come from?
How do they affect my decisions and how I interact with people?
Do I have prejudices and believe in stereotypes? Why?
Do I feel disadvantaged? In what way?
Do I feel the need to blame somebody else? Why?
How do I choose my sources of information?
Has this changed since the COVID-19 outbreak?

The main factor that counts in determing if you are a person who might fall in believing in conspiracy theory is CRITICAL REASONING, which is not exactly corralated with intelligence. There are in fact smart people who are low on critical reasoning skills and less intelligent people who are better at critical reasoning. Studies of fake news reveal that people with lower critical reasoning skills are more likely to fall for fake news and more likely to share it. These people are not inclined to take their time and evaluate information: they have what is called a knee-jerk reaction, a trait which has been typically associated with believing and sharing fake news. Another factors are the facts that human attention is drawn to novelty and the social status that we get from sharing new informations.

There is an MIT study showing that fake news on twitter spreads six times faster than trues news.
What is that world gonna look like when one has a six-times advantage to the other one?

It's a disinformation-for-profit business model. You make money the more you are allow unregulated messages to reach anyone for the best price.

We're being bombarded with rumors.
People are blowing up actual physical cell phone towers. We see Russia and China spreading rumors and conspiracy theories. People have no idea what's true and now it's a matter of life and death. What we're seeing with COVID is just an extreme version of whats happening across our information ecosystem. Social media amplifies exponential gossip and exponential hearsay to the point that we don't know what's true no matter what issue we care about.
                                  – Tristan Harris

                                                                  Source:[6]

The flow of information is increasingly dominated by PEER-TO-PEER interaction rather than the imprimatur of the traditional press. We consume what we already like, and shy away from the unfamiliar.
It is what the algorithm is meant to do: to connect us with the things we like, or might like. They are fantastically responsive to personal taste and – to date – fantastically blind to veracity. The web is the definitive vector of POST-TRUTH precisely because it is indifferent to falsehood, honesty and the difference between the two. This is why 'fake news' has become such an issue, especially on Facebook.

Source:[1]

At YT, i was working on Youtube recommendations. It worries me that an algorithm that I worked on is actually increasing polarization in society. But from the point of view of watch time, this polarization is extremely efficient at keeping people online.

People think that the algorithm is designed to give them what they really want, only it's not. The algorithm is actually trying to find a few rabbit holes that are very powerful, and trying to find which rabbit hole is the closest to your interest.

The flat-earth conspiracy theory was recommended hundreds of millions of times by the algorithm.
It's easy to think that it's just a few stupid people who get convinced, but the algorithm is getting smarter and smarter every day. So, today, they are convincing the people that the Earth is flat, but tomorrow they will convince you of something that's false.

                           – Guillame Chaslot

We've created a system that biases towards false information. Not because we want to, but because false information makes the companies more money than the truth.

THE TRUTH IS BORING.

– Sandy Parakilas       Source:[6]

All that matters is that the stories feel true, that they resonate. In politics, the pioneer of this doctrine was the administration of George W. Bush. As the American journalist Ron Suskind reported in the New York Times Magazine in 2004, one of the President's aides told him that his journalistic methods were lamentably outdated:

                                      “The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community', which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'...
'That's not the way the world really works anymore' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create OUR OWN REALITY.
And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how thing will sort out. We're history actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The point is not to dermine the truth by a process of rational evaluation, assessment and conclusion. You choose your own reality, as it from a buffet. You also select your own falsehood, no less arbitrarily.

If digital technology is the hardware, Post-Truth has proven to be a mighty sofware. It reduces political discourse to a video game in which endless play, on multiple levels, is the sole point of the exercise.

When Trump tweeted that the 'FAKE NEWS media' was the 'enemy of the people', he was not only borrowing from the traditional lexicon of autocracy. He was urging American citizens to behave like gamers, pick up their consoles and zero in on the bad guys carrying notepads. This is all about picking teams, intensity of feeling and escalating insults.
It is the politics of PURE SPECTACLE.

When anyone with a Twitter account can claim to be a news source, it becomes infinitely harder to distinguish between fact and falsehood. Everyone and no one is an expert. Who can monitor a limitless space? Where are the Kitemarks, the watchdogs the editorial forces sufficient to this task? As news consumption migrates from print and television to the online ether, this is no longer an academic question. Surprise, pleasure, recognition and indignation are fundamental to the human experience: but they are an insufficient basis upon which to base our versions of reality.

Source:[1]